Context and Precursors
The most conspicuous characteristics of Romanian cinema before 2000 have been a lack of direction and a frequent stylistic dullness. Film had a rocky start in Romania, where a largely disinterested public and an even more disinterested state, which didn’t start supporting and financing the film industry until the 1930s, resulted in a tiny infrastructure, and limited production means and technical training. After 1945, the Communist regime developed the infrastructure considerably, but the production was strongly subordinated to the enforcement of ideological orthodoxy through propaganda. Thus, it is not difficult to observe that Romanian cinema has not exactly produced any distinct school or current until the relatively recent emergence of the Romanian New Wave, though individual exceptions exist. Among them we can mention the classical realism of Liviu Ciulei, the satirical outrage of Mircea Daneliuc, the quiet, observational realism of Alexandru Tatos, the oblique narratives of Dan Piţa, and the moral modernism of Lucian Pintilie.
As much as Romanian cinema before 1989 can be said to have a style (I am not including here the steady but forgettable flow of genre films - comedies, historical/ adventure, detective, young adult, and tediously moralistic socialist-realist features), it would be defined by an increasingly heavy-handed mix of obliqueness and allusion. The allusive language was the inevitable byproduct of an intrusive and paranoid censorship that made any form of non-orthodox expression, political or otherwise, automatically suspect. Formal experimentation was considered dubious, and unmediated realism was also nearly impossible: the real was subordinated to propaganda – and therefore cosmeticized into official narratives –, or, when not fully fitting in the official template, it was assimilated to a parabolic critique of the regime. Such were the cases of, for example, Mircea Daneliuc’s Iacob (1988), Dan Pița’s Faleze de nisip [Sand Cliffs] (banned for ideological deviationism soon after its 1983 premiere), and, especially, of Lucian Pintilie’s seminal Reconstituirea [Reconstruction] (1968).
Reconstruction merits a brief discussion here, both for its stylistic and intellectual influences on the New Wave of the 2000s, and for its mythical value in the history of Romanian cinema. The film was produced during the brief cultural thaw of the late 60s, when Romanian cultural and intellectual life was permitted a limited realignment with that of Western Europe. It follows the story of two young men who, after a minor drunken brawl, are forced to reenact it for an educational film; the combined pressure of the local police and of the prosecutor degenerates into tragedy. The film’s unusually blunt treatment of authority figures (the obsequious and ignorant policemen and the dictatorial prosecutor) was consternating to the officials, who released it with no promotion, and only in a handful of theatres, but also to the public, who lined up to watch it at the few cinemas where it played in heavy rotation for about two months, after which the film was withdrawn from circulation and never seen again until after 1989.
Pintilie combines the modernist techniques of the French New Wave, particularly paratactical montages and jump cuts, with the gritty realism and documentarian approach of the British New Wave. Indeed, the film’s narrative of generational conflicts and youthful rebellion crushed by social pressures could fit alongside any number of works, from If…, to Billy Liar to The 400 Blows. On the other hand, the film’s true preoccupations are more profoundly local and intently focused on the political context of late 60s Romania. Reconstruction is notable for its unflinching depiction of the brutal intrusion of the state into the private lives of its citizens and its development of a secondary, allusive language in which to couch its frequently vitriolic critique of the erosion of compassion and human solidarity created by political and social group think.
Pintilie’s style is nevertheless rooted in realism and formal innovation with a modernist bent, and Reconstruction remains in many ways an emblematic work in the development of contemporary Romanian cinema (Pintilie has also supported the New Wave directors, especially in the early 2000s, and has collaborated with Cristi Puiu). It combines gritty realism with a sense of oblique, philosophical fatalism that subsumes the struggles of its protagonists to an impenetrable, diffuse power that’s all the more oppressive for lacking a centre. Pintilie (who cites among his influences the works of Dostoevsky and Chekhov) exhibits considerable moral outrage, especially considering the social and political context of the film, but it’s not difficult to distinguish the same rarefied sense of fatalism, nonetheless purged of political outrage, in the films of Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu (particularly Moartea domnului Lăzărescu [The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu]and 4 luni, 3 săptămîni și două zile [4 Years, 3 Months and 2 Days], respectively).
Fracture and Transition
By 1989 most Romanian films had either capitulated to a risible form of propaganda (Sergiu Nicolaescu’s 1989 historical epic Mircea all but establishes a direct connection between the medieval prince’s heroic reign and Ceaușescu’s rule) or had sunk into visual Gongorism; one of the few bright spots of the period is represented by Stere Gulea’s 1987 Moromeții – the chronicle of the decline of a peasant family in the 1940s, filmed with a sense of anthropological realism and detachment that are quite unusual in Romanian cinema.
After the depressing slog of the late 80s, the 1990s were not kind to Romanian cinema. The decade is marked by a general sense of disarray, many productions of dubious quality and the sharp decline of the production and distribution infrastructure. While independent players and private studios would soon emerge for feature films (including lucrative deals with foreign studios), loss of state financing and privatization sank the studios Sahia Film (specialized in documentaries) and Animafilm (animation) into near invisibility. More worryingly still, the patrimony of România Film – the state owned distributor – consisting of some 450 cinemas in 1989 was squandered with frightening speed, dwindling down to barely 30 theatres in little over a decade. Today 80% of Romanian communities lack a functional cinema, with mall-affiliated multiplexes virtually monopolizing the market in the larger urban centres.
Creatively, the films of the 1990s struggle with both a traumatic past, and an anarchic transition. The cinema of the decade has been correctly diagnosed by film critic Alex Leo Șerban as being too often focused on “a vision” rather than “a story”, and being in fact non-existent as a national cinema. The heavily parabolic art house style popular in the 70s and 80s breathes its last with Dan Piţa’s 1992 Hotel de lux [Luxury Hotel] (Silver Lion at Venice) and Mircea Veroiu’s 1994 Somnul insulei [The Island’s Sleep]. Both films analyze, paradoxically perhaps considering their release dates, totalitarian life through a heavily allegorical lens, and in both cases political oppression is signified spatially through their use of claustrophobic places – a luxury hotel, represented by the elephantine structure of Ceaușescu’s People’s Palace, and an isolated island nation.
Popular cinema is well represented for a while, at least in terms of public appeal. It is worth noting that several of the films of the early 90s were important box office hits, regardless of their quality –m an understandable phenomenon, considering the dearth of entertainment options and the sudden liberalization of expression. Such is the case of several dubiously plotted comedies like Mircea Mureșan’s dismal Miss Litoral [Miss Seaside](1991) and A doua cădere a Constantinopolului [The Second Fall of Constantinople](1994), whose excessive vulgarity compensated for the prudishness of the previous era. Some Communist era franchises are successfully recalibrated – such as the young adult series Liceenii [High School Life] which produces two final and profitable entries in 1991 and 1993. Directors endorsed by the Communist establishment continued to work, with increasingly diminishing returns, as is the case of Sergiu Nicolaescu, whose laughable World War 2 drama Oglinda [The Mirror](1994), and Romanian Revolution thriller Punctul zero [Point Zero; 1997] combine tabloid conspiracy theories with surprisingly cheap production values. Low quality aside, these films nevertheless mark the demise of commercial cinema in Romania. The sudden emergence of the New Wave, with its critical success and recognition at international festivals, has positioned national cinema as almost exclusively art house. The patchy and unreliable level of state support for film production, the unevenly distributed exhibiting infrastructure, and the massive competition from foreign commercial productions, as well as television, have largely encouraged this niche approach. Genre films (romance, adventure, young adult, comedy etc.), all of which were well represented before 1989, have become rare or have decamped to television, though more recently comedies (the Christmas-themed Ho-ho-ho franchise, with two entries, in 2009 and 2012, respectively) and thrillers (Cristina Ionescu’s După ea [After Her; 2007] have started to timidly reemerge, albeit with middling commercial success.
The 90s were not all dire, however. Lucian Pintilie, exiled to France since Reconstruction, returns with Balanța [The Oak] (1992), an acid, carnivalesque indictment of the Communist 80s, focusing, uncomfortably, on the complicity of individuals in the perpetuation of moral and social oppression. Prea târziu [Too Late] (1996), which examines the effects of transitional violence, is similarly vitriolic, but somewhat less tight, narratively and tonally. Pintilie would continue to make several movies over the next decade, establishing himself also as somewhat of a symbolic mentor of the New Wave. Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezervă [Niki & Flo] (2003), the story of the toxic relationship between a retired officer and his abusive brother-in-law, is scripted by Cristi Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu and represents an intriguing, though not always successful, combination of objective, observational realism typical for the New Wave and the director’s customary moral indignation.
Two auspicious debuts round up the decade: the first belongs to the French Romanian director Radu Mihăileanu, whose Trahir [Betrayal] (1993) examines the thorny problem of secret police collaborationism in Romania. The second is Nae Caranfil, one of the most original and unclassifiable directors in contemporary Romanian cinema. His 1993 film È pericoloso sporgersi [Sundays on Leave / Les Dimanches de permission] is a flighty, comedic romance set in the 1980s, split, Rashomon-style, into several point-of-view narratives. Sometimes billed as a precursor to the New Wave, Caranfil is, in many ways, an outlier in the (neo)realist landscape of contemporary Romanian cinema: he favours tight, classically constructed stories and narrative innovation, as well as a frequently burlesque theatricality. His most successful film, Filantropica [Philanthropy, Inc.](2002) – a satirical comedy set in the Bucharest underworld and in the aggressive kitsch of Romania’s nouveau riche class – draws a lot of its bite from the way it converts moral outrage into slapstick farce. Caranfil’s eclectic output includes comedies, romances, period dramas, and biopics, and his style can be best characterized as a postmodern pastiche, theatrical and self-consciously formalistic: his latest production, Closer to the Moon (2013), recasts a politically controversial event from the late 1950s (a bank robbery by several high ranking Party members) as a Technicolor romance straight out of the Doris Day/ Rock Hudson playbook, while a British and American cast rounds out the estrangement effect.
The New Wave
Promising debuts aside, the situation of the Romanian film industry continued to worsen steadily. A diminishing and badly maintained infrastructure, thanks to dubious privatization deals, a near total absence of state support and, due to the sudden surge of television and video rentals, an increasingly disinterested public, translated into fewer and fewer productions. The nadir came in 1999/2000, when no films were produced at all.
Change appeared as a conjunction of critical and artistic models. Throughout the mid-90s, a new generation of film critics emerged, led by Alex Leo Șerban and Mihai Chirilov, and later by Andrei Gorzo. Arguably, the starting point of his New Critical Wave is Alex Leo Șerban’s 1993 article “Despre un cinema care nu există” (“Notes on a Non-existent Cinema”) – a scathing attack on the state of Romanian film, that, much like Truffaut’s similarly feather ruffling “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français”, functions as both critique and satire. Șerban identifies an ossified, solipsistic style and a lack of innovation or direction as the main problems of the Romanian film industry. A program for change is articulated in the subtext of the article, through the singling out of specific films and styles: a repudiation of (melo)dramatic incidents, of oblique symbolism and grand philosophical statements, a rejection of literary adaptations, and a valuation of realism, objective observation, and conversational dialogues.
Most, if not all, of these aspirations would come true in 2001, with the release of Cristi Puiu’s seminal feature debut Marfa şi banii [Stuff and Dough], which officially kicks the Romanian New Wave into gear. The story is loose and, though some intense incidents do exist, largely blasé when it comes to drama: two young men must deliver a package of “pills” from Constanța to Bucharest; they set off in a beat-up Dacia sedan, accompanied by one of the men’s girlfriend. Most of the film takes place in the cramped, hot confines of the car, though early on, Puiu takes great pains in establishing the family background of the main protagonist, and the tense relationship with the dealer who gives him the package.
Stuff and Dough is important for its production model as much as it is for its innovative style. It was produced on a very small budget, shot entirely on location (making excellent use of hand-held shot/ reverse shots in the constricted space of the car), with direct sound (which accounts for its tinny quality), and featured a limited cast. Its unvarnished style is strongly realistic and observational – the characters’ working class background is explored through the spaces they inhabit and the frequently vulgar language they use, but never judged or even reflected upon: it simply is, and this refusal to comment separates Puiu’s film from similarly themed works by Ken Loach or the Dardenne Brothers, to which it is visually related.
Stuff and Dough is, in many ways, the emblematic Romanian New Wave film: though hardly the most accomplished (by 2005 Puiu would release the masterful Death of Mr. Lăzărescu), it nevertheless exhibits several fundamental traits that have been associated with the group: a preference for lower and working class characters navigating the confusing aftereffects of economic transition (the protagonist of Stuff and Dough is trying to expand a tiny home-run convenience store), drab settings that strenuously reject aestheticism, location shots (Puiu favours cramped, Communist era apartments, which his elastic handheld camera work is particularly suited to explore), loose plots that focus more on the naturalistic exploration of character psychology than on dramatic dénouements, conversational dialogues, and minimal non-diegetic intrusions, like soundtracks.
A more intriguing feature of New Wave films, and one that has remained relatively unexplored until recently, is their relatively weak political dimension. Though their topics are sometimes literally ripped from the headlines (as in the case of Mr. Lăzărescu, and Cristian Mungiu’s După dealuri [Beyond the Hills]) and frequently examine potent social conflicts hinging on the systemic oppression of vulnerable social categories (women, the poor, the elderly, etc.), most New Wave works stop short of being explicitly political, preferring instead to make an oblique social comment subsumed to a wider philosophical or metaphysical statement. Thus, Mr. Lăzărescu’s futile odyssey through several hospitals is ironically assimilated to Dante’s perambulations and, symbolically, to Lazarus’ story. Beyond the Hills imbues the tragic events surrounding the death of a poor, orphaned, mentally unstable woman as a result of an “exorcism” with an almost cosmic fatalism and presents it by articulating the foreboding grammar of horror films over stately, realistic compositions. Corneliu Porumboiu’s A fost sau n-a fost [12:03, East of Bucharest] (2006) assimilates a debate about the Romanian Revolution to deadpan sophistry, while Polițist, Adjectiv [Police, Adjective] (2009) settles a moral and legal dilemma with the help of a dictionary.
It is unlikely that this curious political non-engagement of the Romanian New Wave is the result of a form of neo-colonialism, as Florin Poenaru suggests in an otherwise intriguing article. The New Wave’s indubitable success at international festivals is less due to a stereotypical misperception of Romania as an exotic land of depressing apartment buildings and shabby poverty, and more to its stylistic alignment to the austere realism of the DOGME school, and to a certain type of socially engaged national cinema, represented by Iranian cinema, or the films of Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers (for more, see Radu Toderici). The more or less apolitical stance of many of the New Wave films seems instead to exist as a reaction to the excessive politicization of cinema during the Communist era. In a somewhat counterintuitive way, a politically engaged cinema is assimilated to insincere propaganda. This distancing from overt political stances separates the Romanian New Wave from neorealism, with which it shares many formal similarities. In many ways, the closest spiritual ascendant to two of its most important representatives, Mungiu and Puiu, is the metaphysical realism of Krzysztof Kieslowski, in particular of The Decalogue, which integrates human behaviour to something akin to a higher symbolic order in which individual actions acquire the value of parables.
The New Wave is primarily represented by the works of Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean and Corneliu Porumboiu whose success, particularly at Cannes (where they all received major awards) has largely shaped the international view of the school. Puiu’s acknowledged influences are both literary – he gravitates towards the absurdism of Kafka and Ionesco – and visual (Cassavetes, Wiseman and especially Rohmer). From Rohmer he borrows a strong moralist bent, not didacticism, but rather the philosophical examination of human behaviour, evident in the carefully calibrated interaction between characters and in the highly social nature of his first two films.
In dramas like Beyond the Hills (2005) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Cristian Mungiu practices a more classical type of realism (in an interview he even compares Beyond the Hills to the proverbial Stendhalian mirror): many medium and few hand-held shots, and a strong interest in the external environment of his characters. In contrast to Puiu’s preference for intimate spaces, Mungiu likes to explore exteriors – an oppressively grey city during the last years of the Communist regime, a monastery, a small provincial town in present day Romania. Both films display a fascination with the workings of rigidly structured, closed societies, and both visualize the systemic oppression of marginalized individuals (particularly women) through the sudden irruption of horror-inflected moments within the otherwise balanced and austere structure of the films. 4, 3, 2 hinges on the abject visualization (in Kristeva’s sense) of an aborted fetus, followed by a tense run to dispose of the evidence of an illegal abortion, while Beyond the Hills stages the main character’s mental breakdown using the grammar of narratives of monstrous metamorphosis, disrupted by the absence of the visual revelation of change. As in Puiu’s films, a sense of cosmic fatalism pervades – the two punch of 4, 3, 2, with its focus on the totalitarian control over women’s bodies, and Beyond the Hills which deals with forms of social, medical and religious control suggests an oppression that transcends historical contingencies and therefore regulation.
With films like Boogie (2008), Marți după Crăciun [Tuesday after Christmas] (2010) and Un etaj mai jos [One Floor Below] (2015), Radu Muntean has emerged as a storyteller of middle-class lives and domestic crises – a distinct departure from Mungiu and Puiu’s interest in poverty and social exclusion. His heroes lead comfortable, boring family lives, disrupted by minor (an encounter with old high school friends in Boogie) or major events (an affair in Tuesday after Christmas; the murder of a neighbour in One Floor Below). Muntean’s dispassionate and distant style is indebted to John Cassavettes, as is his interest in the unravelling of seemingly placid domesticity. Of special interest is Hîrtia va fi albastră [The Paper Will Be Blue; 2006], somewhat of an outlier in his work. Unfolding frequently as a series of medium and long shots in which the main characters are often indistinguishable from minor players, the film is an examination of an episode of the 1989 Romanian Revolution (several soldiers are mistakenly shot dead by their own unit), remarkable for its polyphonic representation of events. The revolution emerges not as a monolithic occurrence, but rather as a chaotic accumulation of incidents, a sort of Dantean journey, which the main character (a young deserter from a Militia unit) experiences mainly as stretches of waiting boredom punctuated by random bursts of violence, until its final, terrible outcome.
In theory, Corneliu Porumboiu’s films align perfectly with the interests of the Romanian New Wave: a preference for incident over story, drab, naturalistic settings, an austere style, manifest in long takes and so forth. In practice, however, Porumboiu emerges more as the group’s trickster: a curiously impish presence whose work doubles as a frequently satirical examination of the mechanisms of cinema. For all his apparent adherence to realism, Porumboiu is actually a theorist, investigating the status of cinematic images and symbolic representation in a sparse, geometric, deliberately flat and symmetrical style, reminiscent of Antonioni’s Red Desert or Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman. Each film doubles as a sneak treatise on a specific technique or theoretical concept: in 12:03, East of Bucharest a comical debate in a provincial TV studio about the nature of the Romanian Revolution is articulated over an examination of the possibilities of blocking and framing; in Police, Adjective, the main character’s stakeout of a group of hash-smoking teens is assimilated to excruciatingly long takes unfolding in real time; Cînd se lasă seara peste București, sau metabolism [When Evening Falls over Bucharest, or Metabolism] (2013) deals with auteurism and a director’s affair with his lead actress; Comoara [The Treasure] (2015), a deadpan comedy about greed that owes a lot to Bresson’s L’Argent, plays with parabolic and symbolic narratives.
A Second Wave?
Towards the end of the 2000s, as a new generation of filmmakers matured and film production continued to diversify, the appeal of the Romanian New Wave, understood largely (and perhaps reductively) as a dispassionate social commentary rendered in a sparse, naturalistic style, and highlighting the drabbest aspects of contemporary life, starts to recede. Călin Netzer’s Poziția copilului [Child’s Pose] (2013), an otherwise interesting tale of class tensions exposed by a traffic accident, is marred by needless didacticism and a schematic approach to its characters, emerging as a heavy-handed, unintentional pastiche of a once rich style. More interestingly, however, the more fundamental rupture with the New Wave core principles was brought by Cristi Puiu, whose sprawling, opaque Aurora (2010) appears simultaneously to exhaust the potential of the school and to break with it. Puiu (who also plays the main character) aggressively closes his movie off to interpretation: Aurora unfolds as a sequence of frequently wordless scenes that offer no explanation about the protagonist (a divorced engineer), or the violence he ends up by perpetrating. There is a stately pitilessness about the whole affair, a resignation to the darker impulses of the human soul, which pushes the quiet observational approach of the New Wave to a strangely nihilistic conclusion.
While the sparse realism of the early 2000s is still around (most notably in Radu Muntean’s work), it is no longer the only game in town. Alternatives have emerged at a fairly steady clip, since around 2006. Cătălin Mitulescu’s Cum mi-am petrecut sfîrșitul lumii [How I Spent the End of the World] (2006) is a magic-realist tale set in the final years of Ceaușescu’s rule. Adrian Sitaru’s Pescuit sportiv [Hooked] (2008) is a claustrophobic thriller about the puncturing of a complacent couple’s relationship by a sly outsider (the film shares an intentional similarity to Polanski’s Knife in the Water). The 2009 omnibus film Amintiri din Epoca de Aur [Tales from the Golden Age], produced by Cristian Mungiu (who also directs one of the entries) is a cheerful, comedic examination of communist urban legends. Several neo-noirs appear as well, all set in an underworld of small time criminals down on their luck and resources: arguably, the first is Radu Muntean’s debut feature Furia [Rage] (2002) – about a small con gone terrifyingly wrong; Mitulescu’s Loverboy (2011) is a tale of seduction and human trafficking; Bogdan Apetri’s Periferic / Outbound (2011) tracks a day in the life of a former sex worker looking to start a new life.
The most important director working in this apparent Second Wave is Radu Jude, whose family satires double as virulently critical examinations of punctured masculine privilege (Toată lumea din familia noastră [Everybody in Our Family] (2012) and consumerist greed (Cea mai fericită fată din lume [The Happiest Girl in the World] (2009). Jude’s style is farcical and dark, and his plots often hinge on comical misunderstandings that escalate into violent, disturbing slapstick. He is also more deliberately and insidiously political. His latest film in particular (Aferim! 2015), a black and white western set in 18th-century Wallachia, confronts with uncomfortable directness the xenophobia and anti-Roma racism that lurk unacknowledged in the subconscious of Romanian culture.
Outliers: Documentary and Animation
Both documentary and animation have been severely marginalized after 1989. Animation in particular exists today largely as a technical skill to be employed in advertising works, and little else. The sole exception is Anca Damian’s still unfinished trilogy about heroism, consisting so far of Crulic: Drumul spre dincolo [Crulic: the Road to Beyond] (2011) and The Magic Mountain (2015) – mixed media documentaries using a blend of traditional and rotoscoped animation as well as archival photographs.
Documentary film has been undergoing something of a resurgence since around 2000, though many films are co-produced with European funds or financed by HBO Romania (which has emerged as a leading documentary producer). Notable examples include Thomas Ciulei’s Asta e [That’s It] (2001) – an examination of the decline and isolation of the erstwhile prosperous port city of Sulina, in the Danube Delta, and Alexandru Solomon’s investigative journalism pieces Marele jaf communist [The Great Communist Robbery] (2004), about an infamous bank robbery in late 1950s Romania, Kapitalism: Rețeta noastră secretă [Kapitalism: Our Secret Recipe] (2010), about the post-communist oligarchy, and Război pe calea undelor [Cold Waves] (2007), about the Romanian section of Radio Free Europe.
By far the most interesting work belongs to Andrei Ujică, a writer and director living in Germany since 1981. His documentaries Videogramme einer Revolution [Videograme ale unei revoluții / Videograms of a Revolution](co-authored with Harun Farocki, 1992), and Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceauşescu [The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu] (2010) consist entirely of archival footage (images shot by the media or the secret police during the Romanian Revolution, and, respectively, propaganda films, news reels and specially commissioned home movies for Nicolae Ceauşescu). The images are carefully selected and spliced together, but are presented without any editorial commentary or intertitles, in a sort of televisual flow, highlighting the mediatic and mediatized nature of contemporary history.
Bibliography:
Romanian cinema remains regrettably underrepresented in English-language critical literature. Two recent monographs, Doru Pop’s Romanian New Wave Cinema: An Introduction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014) and Dominique Nasta’s Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle (New York: Wallflower Press, 2013) offer solid but otherwise unremarkable overviews of the subject.
Critical works in Romanian are of course more varied. Alex Leo Șerban’s 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc [4 Decades, 3 years and 2 Months with the Romanian Cinema] (Iaşi: Polirom: 2009) is a collection of reviews and essays that offers an excellent overview of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as a good introduction to the work of one of the most important Romanian film critics. Andrei Gorzo’s collected reviews in Bunul, răul și urâtul în cinema [The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Cinema] (Iaşi: Polirom, 2009) covers much the same ground but from a different perspective. Gorzo’s Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel: Un mod de a gândi cinemaul de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu [Things that Cannot Be Said Otherwise: A New Way of Thinking about Cinema, from André Bazin to Cristi Puiu] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2012) offers a Bazinian theory of the Romanian New Wave. Noul cinema românesc: De la tovarășul Ceaușescu la domnul Lăzărescu [The New Romanian Cinema: from Comrade Ceaușescu to Mr. Lăzărescu] (Iaşi: Polirom, 2011), edited by Cristina Corciovescu and Magda Mihăilescu, is an eclectic but valuable collection of essays largely focused on New Wave landmarks. Politicile filmului: contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan [The Politics of Cinema: Contributions to the Interpretation of Contemporary Romanian Cinema] (Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2014), edited by Andrei Gorzo and Andrei State, offers a welcome socio-political reading of contemporary Romanian cinema. Finally, Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s Incursiuni fenomenologice în noul film românesc [Phenomenological Incursions into the New Romanian Cinema] (Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2015) offers a unique philosophical examination of the subject.
References
Poenaru, Florin. “Noul Val din perspectivă colonială” [“On the Romanian New Wave, from a colonial perspective.”] In Politicile filmului / Film Politics, edited by Andrei Gorzo and Andrei State. Cluj: Tact Publishing House, 2014: 151-172.
4827 words
Citation: Ioniță, Maria. "Contemporary Romanian Cinema". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 January 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19440, accessed 22 January 2025.]
