Romanian Film Resources
The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema by ISBN: 9780851707532Date: 2000-03-28This work maps the rich, varied cinema of Eastern Europe, Russia and the former USSR. Over 200 entries cover a variety of topics spanning a century of endeavour and turbulent history from Czech animation to Soviet montage. It includes entries on actors and directors and key figures like Eisenstein.
Contemporary Romanian Cinema by ISBN: 9780231167444Date: 2013-10-29This book is the first to provide in-depth analyses of essential works ranging from the silent period to contemporary productions. In addition to relevant information on historical and cultural factors influencing contemporary Romanian cinema, this volume covers the careers of daring filmmakers who approached various genres despite fifty years of Communist censorship.
Film Genres in Hungarian and Romanian Cinema by ISBN: 9781793613431Date: 2021-04-22This book discusses how the Hungarian and Romanian film industries show signs of becoming a regional hub within the Eastern European canon, a process occasionally facilitated by the cultural overlap through the historical province of Transylvania. Andrea Virginás employs a film historical overview to merge the study of small national cinemas with film genre theory and cultural theory and posits that Hollywood-originated classical film genres have been important fields of reference for the development of these Eastern European cinemas.
Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen by ISBN: 3319552716Date: 2017-08-07This 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.
The New Romanian Cinema by ISBN: 9780748642649Date: 2019-04-12Covering more than forty films made since 2001 - including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The Paper will be Blue, Police, Adjective and Beyond the Hills - this pioneering collection of essays on New Romanian Cinema is the first to contextualise it aesthetically, theoretically and historically. Scholars from across Europe and North America are brought together, reflecting on the realism, minimalism and intermedial artifice of New Romanian cinemas, on its approaches to issues of national and gender identity, and on its unique convergence of ethics and aesthetics.
Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen by ISBN: 9781501366253Date: 2021-11-04Starting with the hypothesis that movies provide an experience that is both a pathway into the thinking mechanisms of modern humans and into our collective psyche, this study focuses on the elements that form the "Romanian cinematic mind" as part of the European cinema-thinking. While this book is based on specific case studies provided by recent productions in Romanian filmmaking, such as Proroca (2017) and Touch me Not (2018), it also contextualises the national cinema within the larger, European art of making movies.
From Communism to Capitalism: Nation and State in Romanian Cultural Production by ISBN: 1137276916Date: 2013-10-24This book offers an interdisciplinary mode of analyzing transitions from communism and planned economy to democracy and capitalism focusing on how the various social and political transformations are reflected within one hundred Romanian films produced during communism, transition, and post-transition.
The Romanian Cinema of Nationalism by ISBN: 9781476668192Date: 2018-09-30Prior to the collapse of communism, Romanian historical movies were political, encouraging nationalistic feelings and devotion to the state. The author explores a comprehensive selection of fictional films, old and new, set in the Romanian past
Romanian New Wave Cinema by ISBN: 9780786479375Date: 2014-03-30Modern Romanian filmmaking has received wide international recognition. In only a decade (2001 to 2011), a group of promising young film makers have been embraced as important members of European cinema. The country developed a new fervour for filmmaking and a dozen new movies have received international awards and recognition from some of the most important film critics in the world. This development, sometimes called ""New Wave cinema,"" is fully explored in this book.
Space in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema by ISBN: 3319759507Date: 2018-05-25This book examines the structuring of space in Romanian and Hungarian cinema, and particularly how space is used to express the deep imprint of a socialist past on a post-socialist present. It considers this legacy of the Eastern European socialist regimes by interrogating the suffocating, tyrannical and enclosing structures that are presented in film. By tracing such paradigmatic models as horizontal and vertical enclosure, this book aims to show how enclosed spatial structuring restages the post-socialist era to produce an implicit and collective form of remembrance.
"Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema" from Caught In-Between by ISBN: 1474435491Date: 2020-03-31sBased on similarities in Mikhail Bakhtin's and Carl Gustav Jung's ideas about dialogism, this chapter discusses the inclusion of sequences featuring heterogenic audio-visual media of conspicuously lower quality – the shooting of a film, TV reportage, a home video – in representative selection of films by veteran Romanian directors Mircea Daneliuc and Lucian Pintilie, as well as in films by Corneliu Porumboiu and Gabriel Achim from the New Romanian Cinema generation. The chapter then argues that the resultant intermedial carnivalesque, or trickster narrative, is facilitated by a Trickster figure, usually a director's stand-in of ambiguous cultural, ideological and ethical repute. This self-reflexive and meta-médiatique versatility of Trickster narratives, the chapter concludes, have proven time and again to be superb vehicles for cinematic encoding, which explains the fascination of Romanian film auteurs with tricksterish re-enactments and intermedial carnivalesque.
Bricabrac by ISBN: 9735005433His autobiographical volume, Bricabrac, first appeared in French (brilliantly translated from the Romanian by Marie-France Ionesco, daughter of playwright Eugène Ionesco). It is a collection of his writings brought together for historic, sentimental or simply personal reasons (in some instances not always fully understandable to the reader). Taken as a whole, it offers personal insights into his theatre and filmmaking world.
Cristi Puiu by ISBN: 0252099206Date: 2017-02-01Cristi Puiu's black comedy The Death of Mr. Lazarescu announced the arrival of the New Romanian Cinema as a force on the film world stage. As critics and festival audiences embraced the new movement, Puiu emerged as its lodestar and critical voice. Monica Filimon explores the works of an artist dedicated to truth not as an abstract concept, but as the ephemeral revelation of the fuller, ungraspable world beyond the screen. Puiu's innovative use of the handheld camera as an observer and his reliance on austere, restricted narration highlight the very limits of human understanding, guiding the viewer's intellectual and emotional sensibilities to the reality that has been left unfilmed.
European Directors and Their Films by ISBN: 9780810885264Date: 2012-08-09Features the following Essays from Romanian Directors: Andrzej Wajda's Katyn -- The new Romanian cinema: Cristian Mungiu's 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days; Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 east of Bucharest and Police, adjective; Florin "Erban's If I want to whistle, I whistle; and Andrei Ujica's The autobiography of Nicolae Ceauescu.
"Through a Glass, Darkly: Lucian Pintilie as Past and Present Role Model" from Contemporary Romanian Cinema by ISBN: 9780231536691Date: 2013-10-29This chapter closely scrutinizes the narrative structures and unique style of Lucian Pintilie, the most influential Romanian filmmaker to date. Pintilie miraculously managed to bridge the gap between the short-lived Thaw and the post-revolutionary period, re-integrating into the domestic film industry after a forced artistic exile of almost twenty years. Part of the first generation of film school graduates from the late 1950s for whom cinephilia was a common practice, Lucian Pintilie made his debut as an assistant to veteran director Victor Iliu,² was briefly employed by Romanian national television and directed two important feature films in the late 1960s.
- The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu (dir. Cristi Puiu, 2005)
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- 12:08 East Of Bucharest (dir. Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006)
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- The Way I Spent the End of the World (dir. Catalin Mitulescu, 2006)
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- The Mozart of the Pickpockets (dir. Philippe Pollet-Villard, 2006)
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- Tuesday, after Christmas (dir. Radu Muntean 2010)
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- The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu: A Portrait of the Romanian Dictator (dir. Andrei Ujica, 2011)
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- Beyond the Hills (dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2012)
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- Child's Pose (dir. Călin Peter Netzer, 2013)
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- I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (dir. Radu Jude, 2018)
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Additional Resources on Selected Major Romanian Films:
- Constructing Spaces of Dissent in Communist Romania: Ruined Bodies and Clandestine Spaces in Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" and Gabriela Adamesteanu's "A Few Days in the Hospital"
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Cazan, Roxana
Women's studies quarterly, 2011, Vol.39 (3/4), p.93-112
- European Directors and Their Films by ISBN: 9780810885264Date: 2012-08-09Features the following Essays from Romanian Directors: Andrzej Wajda's Katyn -- The new Romanian cinema: Cristian Mungiu's 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days; Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 east of Bucharest and Police, adjective; Florin "Erban's If I want to whistle, I whistle; and Andrei Ujica's The autobiography of Nicolae Ceauescu.
- FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals This link opens in a new window Searches film and television articles in the International Index to Film Periodicals (1972-current) and Treasures from the Film Archives, which contains silent film-era listings from archives.
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- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Articles and reviews from a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, circus, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television, and more. Former database title: International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA) Full Text.
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- FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals This link opens in a new window Searches film and television articles in the International Index to Film Periodicals (1972-current) and Treasures from the Film Archives, which contains silent film-era listings from archives.
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- JSTOR This link opens in a new window Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately five years ago. Disciplines include botany, business, ecology, general science, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, statistics. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books. jstore, jsotr, jrstor, jsot, Jsror, jsstor, Jstar, j-stor, jstory, jstot, Jstr, jstsor, justor, jsot, jsage, jsot, Jsror, Jsror, jsstor, J star, j-star
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- Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media Studies This link opens in a new window Annotated bibliographies for topics in the field of Cinema and Media Studies. Combines encyclopedia-style introductions with expert recommendations of the most important reference works, books, journals, and primary sources on the topic.
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- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Articles and reviews from a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, circus, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television, and more. Former database title: International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA) Full Text.
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- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to Muse e-books published from 2017-present, plus a selected number of other e-book titles. Full-Text Journals, johns hopkins university, milton s. eisenhower library, Project MIse, project mus, projectmuse, moose, project moose
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- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window Index to doctoral dissertations from 1637 to the present, with abstracts since 1980. A number of master's theses are also indexed, with abstracts since 1988. Many are available for download in pdf format. UCLA has access to all full text dissertations in the database. Non-UCLA users may use Dissertations Express to purchase digital or print copies of individual dissertations.
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- Romanian National Film Archive The Romanian National Film Archive was founded in 1957 for "the research, collection, conservation, restoration, and enhancement of [national] film heritage, as well as... the promotion of film culture in Romania." Website only available in Romanian.
Selected Romanian Films
The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu (dir. Cristi Puiu, 2005).
"One evening, Mr. Lazarescu, who lives alone, feels a bit dizzy. He finally ends up being driven away in an ambulance, which is the start of a tragicomic odyssey. Each doctor who examines him arrives at an entirely different diagnosis, and his emergency treatment is incessantly postponed. The physicians are deaf to the entreaties of the patient and his friends, and they are devoid of sympathy for the elderly Mr. Lazarescu as he again plunges into the Bucharest night."
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12:08 East Of Bucharest (dir. Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006).
"It's the 22nd of December. Sixteen years have passed since the revolution, and in a small town Christmas is about to come. Piscoci, an old retired man is preparing for another Christmas alone. Manescu, the history teacher, tries to keep up with his debts. Jderescu, the owner of a local television post, seems not to be so interested in the upcoming holidays. For him, the time to face history has come. Along with Manescu and Piscoci, he is trying to answer for himself a question which for 16 years has not had an answer: "Was it or wasn't it a revolution in their town?"
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The Way I Spent the End of the World (dir. Catalin Mitulescu, 2006).
"Eva, 17, lives with her parents and her 7 year-old brother Lalalilu. One day at school, Eva and her boyfriend accidentally break a bust of Ceausescu. They are forced to confess their crime before a disciplinary committee. Eva is expelled from school and transferred to a reformatory establishment. There she meets Andrei and decides to escape Romania with him. Lalalilu is more and more convinced that Ceausescu is the main reason for Eva's decision to leave. So, with his friends from school, he devises a plan to kill the dictator."
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"Director Andrei Ujica crafted over 1,000 hours of official state broadcasts and intimate home movies into a tour-de-force that depicts how Ceausescu created the country in his own image, regardless of the cost to its citizens."
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The Mozart of the Pickpockets (dir. Philippe Pollet-Villard, 2006)
"Richard and Philippe live hand to mouth, backing up a gang of Romanian pickpockets on the streets of Paris. Against their will, they end up taking care of a deaf Romanian kid. After failing to get rid of him, they decide to make him “work” for them. Despite the language barrier, the kid finds his own method to steal."
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Child's Pose (dir. Călin Peter Netzer, 2013)
"Luminita Gheorghiu stars as a steely, well-to-do Bucharest architect determined to keep her 30-something deadbeat son out of jail after a deadly car crash."
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