Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen

This book argues that hesitation as an artistic and spectatorial strategy connects various screen media texts produced in post-war Romania. The chapters draw a historical connection between films made during the state socialist decades, televised broadcasts of the 1989 Romanian revolution, and films of the new Romanian cinema. The book explores how the critical attitude of new Romanian cinema demonstrates a refusal to accept limiting, binary discourses rooted in Cold War narratives. Strausz argues that hesitation becomes an attempt to overcome restrictive populist narratives of the past and present day. By employing a performative and mobile position, audiences are encouraged to consider conflicting approaches to history and social transformation.

Investigates hesitancy as a specific artistic strategy in the films of the new Romanian cinema and its antecedents Interprets the representations of history and social change in the films of the new Romanian cinema as a cultural response to the unsettling power of the images witnessed during the days of the revolution Progresses as a cultural history that isolates hesitation as the common artistic strategy of the new Romanian cinema, and explains its emergence through the social-historical context that gave birth to it Establishes connections with cinematic and televisual antecedents and thereby places the films in a wider cultural landscape

Autorentext
László Strausz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Hesitation as an interpretive strategy.- 3. Modernism under construction: films on filmmaking in the Ceauescu years.- 4. Television as a factory of history: the broadcast of the 1989 Romanian Revolution.- 5. Contesting the canon of the past: state socialism and the regime change in the new Romanian cinema.- 6. Outcasts, fugitives and migrants: mobility and social production of space.- 7. Sanatorium Romania: regulating the body in the hospital, the prison and the convent.- 8. The crisis of masculinity in post-socialist society.- 9. Epilogue: authorial films and genres, festivals and audiences.