Cristi 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. Filimon examines the director's ethics of epiphany not only in relation to the collective and personal histories that have triggered it, but also in dialogue with the films, texts, and filmmakers that have shaped it.
Cristi 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. Filimon examines the director's ethics of epiphany not only in relation to the collective and personal histories that have triggered it, but also in dialogue with the films, texts, and filmmakers that have shaped it.
Over the last decade, audiences worldwide have become familiar with highly acclaimed films from the Romanian New Wave such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), and 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006). However, the hundred or so years of Romanian cinema leading to these accomplishments have been largely overlooked. This 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. An important chapter is dedicated to Lucian Pintilie, whose seminal work, Reconstruction (1969), strongly inspired Romania's 21st-century innovative output. The book's second half closely examines both the 'minimalist' trend (Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Radu Muntean) and the younger, but no less inspired, directors who have chosen to go beyond the 1989 revolution paradigm by dealing with the complexities of contemporary Romania.
Covering more than 40 films made since 2001 -- including "The Death of Mr Lǎzǎrescu," "The Paper Will Be Blue," and "Beyond the Hills" -- this pioneering collection is the first to contextualize New Romanian Cinema aesthetically, theoretically and historically. The book examines its approach to national and gender identity, and its unique convergence of ethics and aesthetics. With thorough bibliographic and filmographic references, and a comprehensive historical overview, the anthology is a systematic guide to New Romanian Cinema as a consolidated movement, highlighting its potential as a rich interdisciplinary field of study
Modern Romanian filmmaking has received wide international recognition. From 2001 to 2011, promising young filmmakers have been embraced as important members of European cinema. The country developed a new fervor for filmmaking and a dozen new movies have received international awards and recognition from some of the most important critics worldwide. This development, sometimes called "New Wave cinema," is fully explored in this book. By using a comparative approach and searching for similarities among cinematic styles and trends, the study reveals that the young Romanian directors are part of a larger, European, way of filmmaking. The discussion moves from specific themes, motifs and narratives to the philosophy of a whole generation, such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu, Tudor Giurgiu, and others.
One of the world's most erudite and entertaining film critics on the state of cinema in the post-digital-and post-9/11-age. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like Andr Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global cinema's most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Jia Zhangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.
“A stellar representative of the New Romanian Cinema, Radu Jude also belongs to a select group of politically-minded East European filmmakers who have taken as their subject the nature of the media and the circulation of images (Vertov and Eisenstein, Dušan Makavejev, the Ukrainian documentari- an Sergei Loznitsa). For that reason, Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr’s Beyond the New Romanian Cinema: Romanian Culture, History, and the Films of Radu Jude is both welcome and essential.” / J. Hoberman, author of The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism “Beyond the New Romanian Cinema: Romanian Culture, History, and the Films of Radu Jude delivers what it promises in its title, and offers more. It locates Radu Jude’s films against the backdrop of the New Romanian Cinema, a phenomenon which put Romanian cinema on the map of European and world cinema, arguing that Jude overcame a certain sterility and timidity of this movement by creating a very rich and versatile body of work, comprising films of different genres and formats. At the same time as offering a meticulous and thought-provoking analysis of Jude’s films, the authors use them to explore the strengths and limitations of the auteurist paradigm, both in Romania and more widely.” / Ewa Mazierska, Professor of Film Studies, University of Central Lancashire “This impressive study of filmmaker Radu Jude is invaluable not only for its acute critical observations, but also for its intelligent, informed commentary on Romanian cinema, culture, and society in general. I learned something impor- tant on virtually every page. Highly recommended.” / James Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles, Acting in the Cinema, and On Kubrick “Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr offer a comprehensive and refined analysis of the films of Radu Jude, a filmmaker who has emerged with one of the most uncompromising voices ranging from the farcical macabre political satire to a philosophical interrogation of representation, and who has addressed the most daring topics after the first wave of the so-called New Romanian Cinema. The monograph manages to combine a wide-angle film-historical and cultural perspective with an in-depth investigation unravelling the ways in which Jude’s cinema is ‘updating’ the legacy of European modernism in order to engage with pressing issues of Romanian culture and history.” / Ágnes Pethő, Professor of Film Studies, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
This 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. While closely scrutinizing the interplay of location and image, Space in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema offers a new approach to the cinema of the region, which unites the filmic productions under a defined, post-socialist Eastern European spatial umbrella. By simultaneously portraying the gloom of a socialist past, while also conveying a sense of longing for a pre-capitalist era, these films convey how sense of unity and also ambivalence is a defining hallmark of Eastern European cinema.
This volume examines the challenges cinemas in small European countries have faced since 1989. It explores how notions of scale and »small cinemas« relate to questions of territory, transnational media flows, and globalization. Employing a variety of approaches from industry analysis to Deleuze & Guattari's concept of the »minor«, contributions address the relationship of small cinemas to Hollywood, the role of history and memory, and the politics of place in post-Socialist cinemas.
This book celebrates the bicentenary of Schleiermacher’s famous Berlin conference "On the Different Methods of Translating" (1813). It is the product of an international Call for Papers that welcomed scholars from many international universities, inviting them to discuss and illuminate the theoretical and practical reception of a text that is not only arguably canonical for the history and theory of translation, but which has moreover never ceased to be present both in theoretical and applied Translation Studies and remains a mandatory part of translator training. A further reason for initiating this project was the fact that the German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, though often cited in Translation Studies up to the present day, was never studied in terms of his real impact on different domains of translation, literature and culture.
