UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM – GRADUATE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
Politics of Memory: The Communist
Past in Romanian New Wave Cinema
Elena-Alina Rapotan
[August 2010]
Master of Arts (Research) in Cultural Analysis – Final Thesis
Elena Alina Rapotan – Student number: 5903769
Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Marie Baronian
Second Reader: Dr. Esther Peeren
Table of Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Chapter I – Situating the New Wave ................................................................................................................................................ 6
1. Historical Background................................................................................................................................................................ 6
2. Italian Neorealism and the Romanian New Wave ............................................................................................................... 12
Chapter 2 - The Politics of Memory ............................................................................................................................................... 18
1. The context ................................................................................................................................................................................ 18
2. History and Memory ................................................................................................................................................................ 19
3. Thou Shalt Remember ............................................................................................................................................................. 26
4. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................................. 35
Chapter 3 – Reading the Films ........................................................................................................................................................ 37
1. Introducing the films ................................................................................................................................................................ 37
2. Centres of authority .................................................................................................................................................................. 41
3. Urban space ............................................................................................................................................................................... 66
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 75
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 77
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Introduction
How is collective memory constructed when dealt with in different media? How do collective
memory practices change when the topic of memory travels from one medium to another, such
as from official state documents and public memorials, to documentaries, films or literature?
What is the “politics” of memory in all of these contexts? When remembrance of a traumatic
past is at stake, as in the case of countries with former criminal dictatorial regimes, what is the
relation between ethics and memory, and how does the availability of mass technologies bear on
it? These are the questions that frame my reading of the Romanian New Wave from the
perspective of the memory of the communist past. Within this broader framework, the purpose of
my thesis is to give an account of how memory of the Romanian communist past is addressed in
the New Wave films, and to emphasize the specificity of this engagement with the topic relative
to other contexts and media in which the issue is tackled with. Thus, my thesis attempts to give a
response to the aforementioned research questions.
Memory of the communist past is a richly debated and contentious issue in contemporary
Romania. At the political level, the topic was recently appropriated by politicians with the aim to
gain electoral support from an audience sensitive to invocations of a traumatizing past.
Moreover, memory and memorialisation are central to the report of The Presidential Commission
for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship (2006), a document used by the
current Romanian head of state to officially condemn, in the name of the Romanian liberal
democratic state, the crimes and illegitimacy of the former regime. The document was published
one month before Romania’s integration in the European Union (January 2007), marking the
country’s symbolic break with the past and its geopolitical re-alignment. The memory of the past
also sparks controversies among intellectuals and it is often discussed in the media (in various
talk-shows). This context points to the actuality and relevance of the topic of memory for
Romanian current affairs, but also in the wider post-totalitarian European context, as I will
further explain in the second chapter of the thesis.
Against this background, my project engages with a different kind of memory discourse,
one in which memory is explored through cinema, in the films of the Romanian New Wave.
Specifically, my thesis is that the films pertaining to the New Wave in Romanian cinema
articulate a memory discourse on the dialectical relation between the communist past and the
post-communist present. The films I propose for analysis are The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005)
by Cristi Puiu, 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) by Corneliu Porumboiu, How I Spent the End of
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the World (2006) by Cătălin Mitulescu, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (or 432) (2007) by Cristian
Mungiu, and Police, Adjective (2009) by Corneliu Porumboiu.
Even though throughout the thesis I use the denomination New Wave, it is important to
notice that both some film critics and directors themselves resist it. However, in referring to the
films as pertaining to this body of works, I do not mean to suggest that they are the artistic
products of a cohesive movement with a declared aesthetic manifesto. The film-makers that have
been associated with the New Wave have not entitled their works as such. The designation “New
Wave” is much more the creation of films critics, widely disseminated in the Romanian and
international media. Rather, I use the term to refer to film productions released within a specific
period, from 2005 to 2009, and which share similarities in terms of aesthetic practices and
subject matter.
When formulating the thesis that the films articulate a memory discourse on the
dialectical relation between the communist past and the present, I do not wish to impose a
theoretical framework on the films, whose role would be reduced in that case to illustrating it.
On the contrary, I derive the thesis and thus the theoretical angle of my analysis from the films.
Surely, my reading was influenced by my position as a critic coming from the socio-cultural and
historical context in which the films were released. In other words, the films would not
necessarily speak in the same way to viewers coming from other cultural backgrounds. This is
why in delineating the argument of my thesis I do not mean to restrict the interpretation of the
films to the topic of memory, but merely to suggest that the encounter between my objects and
the concepts I propose for their analysis would bring about valuable insights. It is these insights
that I wish to reveal in my thesis by staging the dialogue between my objects and the theories I
employ.
I alluded to one of these insights when I mentioned that the memory discourse of these
films is different from the ones circulating in the media in general or at the political level. The
difference resides in the former being articulated on the everyday life. For instance the
presidential report deals with the topic of memory in terms of the ethical obligation to remember
the victims of the former regime, to condemn their oppressors and to devise strategies of public
memorialisation. In contrast, in the New Wave films memory is embedded in urban space, in the
relation of the characters to this space and to each other. This is why in my analysis I will focus
on the representation of sources of authority that shape human relations in the films, and on
urban space. These elements point to memory as articulated on dialectical relation between the
present and the past. They are traces of the communist past in the present which provide an
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interpretation of the past from the present standpoint and an illumination of the present through
an exploration of the past.
What is essential about analysing the films’ memory discourse articulated on the
everyday life is the fact that it provides a deeper understanding of how these films challenge
mainstream discourses on the memory of communism. This understanding is made possible by
the New Wave films because in their approach memory is not solely a contentious topic of
debate that is sometimes appropriated for political purposes, as was the case in the 2009
presidential elections in Romania. In being visually constructed on the everyday life as
embedded in urban space, social practices or human relations, memory is caught within a visual
language, realism, which is at once masterfully used in these films, and criticized (as I will
illustrate in the analysis of Police, Adjective). It is this double subversion (of established memory
discourses and of the realism of its own visual language) that explains the politics of memory in
the Romanian New Wave, which is also to say that this memory discourse also subverts itself to
a certain degree.
In order to develop and substantiate these ideas, the structure of my argument will be the
following: the first chapter provides a brief history of the Romanian communist regime and a
description of the political, cultural and intellectual climates under the regime. The chapter will
also briefly compare the Romanian New Wave with preceding films and with Italian Neorealism
by which film critics argue it was influenced. The aim of the chapter is to put the Romanian New
Wave into historical perspective, and to suggest how this perspective can explain the themes it
addresses and its aesthetic specificity. The second chapter engages with various theories on
memory and its relation to history and ethics in order to situate my thesis and my objects within
relevant theoretical frameworks. Finally, the last chapter offers an analysis of the films wherein
the issue of memory of the Romanian communist past is at stake.
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Chapter I – Situating the New Wave
The novelty of the Romanian New Wave, both in terms of its aesthetic specificity and subject
matter, might be best illustrated by comparing it with preceding Romanian films and by situating
it historically. Regarding the latter aspect, I am considering both the specific context and time
period when the films were released, and the communist past, to which they all refer in various
ways. While I will give an account of the socio-political milieu from which the New Wave
originates in the next chapter, in connection with the politics of memory in post-communist
Romania, here I will focus on describing the political, intellectual and artistic climates under the
Romanian communist regime. I will also specifically address the status of film production under
the former regime, meaning that I will describe the dominant subject matter in films, and the way
films were used to promote the regime’s ideology. In discussing this, I mean to give a possible
historical explanation for the New Wave directors’ aesthetic vision and the themes they deal with
on screen. Specifically, the realism of the New Wave and its rendition of contemporary social
realities come as expressions of artistic freedom in opposition to past ideological constraints.
1. Historical Background
The Romanian communist dictatorship lasted for 42 years, from December 1947, when King
Michael of Romania was forced by the Communist Party to abdicate under the threat of civil war
(Deletant, Romania 57), until the bloody revolution in 1989. Most of the period under Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej, the Secretary General of the Romanian Workers Party from February 1948 until
his death in 1965, was characterized by a Stalinist-like rule. Vladimir Tismăneanu points to the
goals of Stalinization in various realms: regarding economy, it entailed the transformation of a
market-based economy into a centrally planned and state-owned one through the nationalization
of the means of production (107). Moreover, Stalinization sought the development of heavy
industry and the expropriation of landowners in order to establish collective farms (Tismăneanu
108-9). Thus, in June 1948 the nationalization of industrial enterprises, banks, mines and
transportation took place, in conjunction with the total expropriation of landowners by March
1949 (Deletant, Romania 60). As many peasants opposed collectivization – the organization of
expropriated land in state farms or collectives – some 80,000 were imprisoned, while 30,000 of
them were publicly brought to trial (Deletant, Romania 61).
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In the socio-cultural sphere, Stalinism attempted to annihilate civil society, instilled fear
among individuals through the propagation of terror, and rigidly supervised all intellectual,
creative and educational activity. In Tismăneanu’s words, “[r]andom terror was directed against
all social strata, against all kinds of political enemies, from the members of the traditional parties
to those of the Communist Party, up to the highest level. The legal system was redesigned to
deprive the individual of any sense of protection or potential support” (109). Intellectual
production was closely monitored in order to ensure ideological conformity. For instance, the
media were entirely controlled by the state, and opposition parties were liquidated together with
their supporting press, while the activities of journalists, writers and artists were subject to close
surveillance by the Agitprop (agitation and propaganda) branch of the Central Committee of the
party (Deletant, Romania 61). With regard to education, foreign or religious schools were closed
down and professors of history and philosophy were purged and replaced with Stalinist
indoctrinators. Additionally, the Ministry of Education banned certain text-books and replaced
them with ones containing Marxist-Leninist ideas. Furthermore, the study of the Russian
language, the history of the Soviet Communist Party and the geography of the Soviet Union
became compulsory, while the study of religion was banned (Deletant, Romania 61).
The death of Stalin in 1953 did not bring much change in Romanian politics. But for a
short-term amnesty for political prisoners in 1955 and a slight relaxation of cultural policies, the
economy remained centralized and the process of collectivization went on until proclaimed
complete in 1962 (Deletant, Romania 88; Tismăneanu 109). Moreover, Romanian intellectuals
did not form a coherent opposition against the regime at that time as happened in Poland and
Hungary, but preferred to content themselves with the small liberties offered by the regime after
Stalin’s death (Tismăneanu 150). These freedoms were not actually prompted by the party’s
goodwill, or by revisionist, anti-Stalinist views within the party, but out of fear of the danger
posed by the 1956 Hungarian revolution to Romanian communist rule – especially given the
large Hungarian minority in Transylvania, the Western province of Romania. This is why after
1958 a new wave of terror ensued, directed specifically at intellectuals (Tismăneanu 152).
Another reason for this new period of terror may have been the withdrawal of Red Army troops
from Romanian soil in May 1958, which caused Gheorghiu-Dej to take supplementary measures
for internal “security”.
During Khrushchev’s rule, Romania gradually started to assume an autonomous position
within the Soviet bloc, detaching itself from Moscow, a move which reached its climax in
Ceauşescu’s national-communist regime. Ceauşescu legitimized his autonomous policies by
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arguing that he was promoting the national interest (Deletant, Romania 111). In fact, following
his quite courageous condemnation of and refusal to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of
Czechoslovakia in August 1968, he became aware of the utility of the establishment of a
personality cult, and of appeals to national symbols and sensitivities for social control (Deletant,
Romania 114). The fact that this decision caused some prominent writers to join the Romanian
Communist Party is indicative of the popularity he gained thereupon. In this chapter I will focus
on Ceauşescu’s rule, chiefly because the films mainly refer to the period of time under his
command. Secondly, I am interested in the development of artistic and intellectual production
during his rule and in the degree to which the New Wave directors’ choice of themes may be
considered a response to the limitations and censorship artists and intellectuals were subjected to
during this period.
The exaltation of national interests and values under Ceauşescu is a characteristic of his
regime that deserves scrutiny. Ceauşescu equated the party, and subsequently himself as its
absolute ruler, with the nation. The party, on behalf of the nation, was leading Romania to the
fulfilment of its historical – socialist – destiny. In Deletant’s words, “[b]y arguing that the party
represented the entire nation, Ceauşescu could claim legitimacy for the party and for himself as
the defenders of national interest. The corollary of this was that any criticism of the Party or its
leader from Romanians, whether inside or outside the country, could be branded as treachery to
the nation, a charge that was to be levelled in the early 1970s against dissenting voices, in
particular Paul Goma [Romanian writer and dissident]” (Ceauşescu 174, clarification added).
Moreover, Ceauşescu resisted internal opposition calling for change by bringing up the external
threat of the Soviet Union, appealing in this way to the anti-Russian sentiments of Romanians
(Deletant, Ceauşescu 174). As a result of the emphasis placed by Ceauşescu on the role of the
nation in his report to the Ninth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party (July 1965),
cultural developments took place which attempted to uncover the national “character” of
Romanian culture (specificul naţional) (Deletant, Ceauşescu 174). This trend culminated in the
establishment of a new ideology, called protochronism, which promoted “a nationalist view of
the Romanian past and a denial of external influences in Romanian culture” (Deletant,
Ceauşescu 186).
I shall expand on this ideology shortly, but first I will emphasize the significant role that
Ceauşescu assigned to literature and writers in promoting the cause of socialism. Already in the
above-mentioned report Ceauşescu urged literary critics to “require a literature that was
committed, revolutionary and founded on the principles of Socialist Humanism” (qtd. in
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Deletant, Ceauşescu 181). What the party expected from writers is also evident in a statement
published in the magazine Gazeta literară in 1968: “Marxism cannot accept the so-called
independence or autonomy of art vis-à-vis society. It is the duty of literature to exercise a
considerable influence on the intellectual, social and moral life of the individual” (qtd. in
Deletant, Ceauşescu 180).
Although Ceauşescu seemed to loosen the grip of Socialist Realist aesthetic tenets in
1965, in 1971 he re-instated them through the so-called July theses, having been “inspired” in
this by a visit to China and North Korea (Deletant, Ceauşescu 184). On top of these aesthetic
dictates he added a nationalistic touch, as he favoured attempts to prove Romania’s superiority
over the West in terms of scientific and cultural output. The latter tendency came to be labelled
protochronism (“first in time”), a term coined in 1974 by the Romanian literary critic Edgar
Papu. According to Katherine Verdery, a leading scholar on Romania, protochronism aimed at
identifying developments in Romanian culture that anticipated ideas and discoveries in Western
countries (167). This ideology and its supporters took issue with Romanians’ deep-seated
inferiority complex regarding the marginality of their culture relative to the West (Verdery 177).
This latter statement, even though to a Romanian it might seem somewhat plausible, is
problematic, because it is too general, and because it is not supported by a clear
historical/anthropological explanation.
At this point, it is worth mentioning that ever since the beginning of the twentieth
century, Romanian intellectuals had been preoccupied with defining the nation and establishing
whether Romania’s place in terms of cultural and political allegiance was closer to the West or to
the East. Verdery distinguishes three positions in the debate over these issues: “westernizers”,
“indigenists”, and “pro-orientals” (47). The first category advocated closeness to Western
civilization, often by emphasizing Romania’s Latin “descent”. The indigenists, whether more
inclined to the West or the East, insisted that the qualities particular to Romanians must be
protected from external corrupting influences, while the pro-orientals emphasized the Christian
Orthodox religious tradition and the influence of Byzantium (47). It is clear that Ceauşescu’s
identification with the Nation, through the Party, as well as his recourse to national sentiments
were an efficient means of social control because they resonated with these older debates.
The issue of intellectuals, their dissent or compliance with the regime, as well as the
censorship they had to face under communism, is highly relevant for the discussion of the
novelty of the Romanian New Wave. As I will explain, both the directors’ choice of subject
matter and their aesthetic preferences are best understood in light of the claustrophobic
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intellectual climate of the former regime. The Romanian “case” is quite famous among former
communist countries in Eastern Europe for the lack of a coherent dissident movement. As
Dennis Deletant mentions, some possible explanations for this attitude could be (1) opportunism,
since compliance could provide intellectuals with material gains; or (2) the Romanian tradition
of dissimulation under Ottoman rule, as well as deep-seated practices such as bribery, nepotism
or corruption (Ceauşescu 166). To put it differently, many intellectuals found a way to get by
under the regime without risking their lives, jobs and minimal material security.
The scholar Michael Shafir actually argues that the compliant attitude of Romanian
creative intellectuals can mainly be attributed to Ceauşescu’s nationalist discourse. In his words,
“[i]ntellectuals were now allowed to give vent to hitherto suppressed nationalistic feelings,
aimed at Romania’s ‘traditional enemies’, the Soviet Union and Hungary, thereby channelling
possible dissent and demands for reform from the domestic to the external sphere” (148). Even
though Shafir concedes that there were some intellectuals that resisted this categorization, one of
them being the writer Paul Goma, it is an over-statement to claim that the majority of the
creative intelligentsia was quiescent because attached to nationalist ideas. For one, Shafir does
not even name a few intellectuals from this supposed majority, and does not make a distinction
between those who acted out of personal conviction and those who were merely opportunists.
Katherine Verdery argues that the debates centred on the Nation during Ceauşescu’s rule,
of which protochronism is symptomatic, constituted a means by which intellectuals sought
advantages and drew boundaries among themselves (303). That is to say, the discourse on the
Nation was not just a useful mechanism for control used by the party in its relation to the
creative intelligentsia, but it was also the discourse intellectuals used in order to compete for
resources from the state. As Verdery remarks, “bargaining for resources from the centre was
basic to politics in command systems. For cultural producers seeking the resources to sustain
their activity, much of this bargaining consisted of claims about ‘cultural representativeness’”
(303). Verdery puts this tendency into historical perspective as she fascinatingly traces it back
through centuries of Romanian history in order to show how discourse on the idea of the Nation
was closely linked to intellectuals’ claims to cultural representativeness. The fact that Ceauşescu
and the party preferred this discourse provided some intellectuals with the currency used in
“negotiations” with the party for resources.
Nevertheless, this argument is not entirely convincing because it presupposes that
intellectuals were quick in negotiating with the system, using the discourse on the Nation in
order to access resources (be they financial or symbolic, such as cultural representativeness).
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While this was true for some, there were also intellectuals that refused the dialogue with the
system on these terms altogether. A good example is the so-called “Păltiniș School” of the
philosopher Constantin Noica, which, although marginal both within the field of philosophy and
relative to mainstream public discourse, did manage to propose an alternative vision, which is
important given the highly centralized ideological field in Romania. One of the ideas put forth by
this group was the necessity and urgency of “resisting through culture”. As Verdery remarks,
Noica’s followers emphasized “culture’s saving (soteriological) value, its capacity to prevent
Romania’s extinction” (259).
This vision implied an engagement with the major texts of the Western philosophical
tradition, in as professional and expert a manner as possible, in order to create a “breathable”
space apart from the dialectical materialism that dominated academia. Beside this, it allowed the
writers associated with the group to go on with their work – producing “culture” – in a country
where censorship and party ideology attempted to pervade all intellectual life 1. Although this
would be too expansive a discussion to develop here, it is questionable if the group’s activity can
be labelled as “dissident” because it did not straightforwardly challenge the system or push for
change.
However, when making judgements about the attitude of intellectuals, one should also
take into consideration the particularly oppressive character of Ceauşescu’s regime. Vladimir
Tismăneanu gives a comprehensive description of the country under the dictator’s rule:
Ceauşescu’s Romania was a closed society, characterized by repression in all areas
of human existence: property restrictions, hard labour and low wages, lack of
freedom of movement, bureaucratic hurdles against emigration, violations of
national minorities’ rights, contempt for religious beliefs and persecution of
religious practices, dramatic economic austerity, consistent cultural censorship, a
crackdown on all dissenting views, and an all-embracing cult surrounding the
president and his family that took its toll on the population’s morale. (216)
Thus, the “Păltiniș School” should not be underst ood as a “school of thought” with certain ideological
commitments, but rather as a philosophical academy or seminar, a venue for debate, exchanging of ideas and writing
on the various subjects of interest to the participants (the philosopher Constantin Noica, the central figure of the
school, held seminaries on Hegelian, Platonic and Kantian philosophy). Therefore, there are almost no books that
can be said to pertain to it, except for journals and letters written by the participants in the school about their
experience in Păltiniș (a small ski resort in the Carpathian Mountains), such as Gabriel Liiceanu’s Paltiniș Diary
(CEU Press, Budapest and New York, 2000). It is also important to mention that Noica was sentenced by the
communist authorities to forced residence from 1949 to 1958 and was a political prisoner for 6 years (1958-1964).
1
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In these conditions it was difficult for people to coagulate into a coherent dissident movement,
although perhaps it was precisely this constrictive climate that should have prompted a powerful
opposition. Ceauşescu’s regime also lacked any kind of workers-led dissidence movement,
except for the miners’ strike in 1977 and the anti-communist riot in Braşov in 1987 (Deletant
243-9). In contrast, in Poland the Solidarity trade union allied itself with the intellectuals against
the regime.
To return briefly to the group formed around the philosopher Noica, one of its prominent
members, the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, advocated through his books a return to intellectual
honesty and openness. In Verdery’s words, in Letters he tried “to offer a different form of
communication, one of sincerity and openness in which ‘truths’ are told and feelings clearly
expressed, in place of the duplicity and ambiguity so characteristic of communications in
Romania” (293). The theme of truthfulness under the communist regime and after, to which I
will return shortly, is of utmost importance for understanding the Romanian New Wave.
As I have already noted, in 1977 Ceauşescu re-introduced the dogmas of socialist realism
with which creative intellectuals were required to comply. As Tismăneanu argues, reality was
what the party wanted it to be, and not what the artists perceived (225). He then goes on to quote
Ceauşescu saying that “[w]e need art, we need to have the movie industry and theatres depict the
essence and the model of the man we have to shape! Even if we must sometimes spruce up a
hero, it is good to have him become a paragon, so that young people will understand and know
that that is how they should be!” (225). The fact that artists had to deliberately distort their
representation of reality if they wanted to be able to work under the former regime, could
partially explain why the New Wave directors opted for realist/minimalist aesthetics in their
films.
2. Italian Neorealism and the Romanian New Wave
Italian Neorealism was a movement of directors (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Luchino
Visconti), cinenematographers (Otello Martelli, Carlo Montuori), writers (Cesare Zavattini) and
actors (Anna Magnani) united by an anti-fascist, leftist political stance, which produced a body
of films from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s (Shiel 2-3). The films generally considered most
representative of Neorealism are Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946) and
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Germany Year Zero (1948); de Sica’s Shoe-Shine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D
(1952), and Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948) (Shiel 3).
According to the Italian studies scholar Peter Bondanella, it is difficult to formulate a
comprehensive definition of what the phenomenon of Italian Neorealism was (31). Customarily,
the general characteristics of Italian neorealism are considered to be “realistic treatment, popular
setting, social content, historical actuality, and political commitment”, but this stresses the social
realism of the films as the products of the society and culture they originate from (Bondanella
31). Moreover, Bondanella argues that “neorealists in principle ‘respected’ the ontological
wholeness of the reality they filmed just as the rhythm of their narrated screen time often
‘respected’ the actual duration of time within the story; neorealist aesthetics thus opposed the
manipulation of reality in the cutting room” (32). These traits closely associated neo-realism
with the tradition of realism in film and cinema by pointing to the use of nonprofessional actors
or the documentary-like style aesthetics (Bondanella 32). However, they also restricted its
understanding by not taking into account that, beside social realism, the neo-realist directors
were also interested in exploring a new cinematic language by means of which to address
contemporaneous social problems (Bondanella 34).
In the case of the Romanian New Wave, these films generally share similar traits to the
Italian neo-realist ones. Thus, they engage with contemporary social problems and reflect on the
pernicious effects of the communist regime on present realities, the latter being a prominent topic
in public debate. For instance, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) by Cristi Puiu offers insights
on the corruption and lack of accountability in Romanian hospitals, and the effect of this
systemic problem on a poor social category, namely pensioners. Similarly, 4 months, 3 weeks,
and 2 days (2007) by Cristian Mungiu addresses from the present context the influence of
totalitarian policies on communal relations under communism. A trait that is common to all the
analysed films is also the portrayal of interiors and the run-down socialist neighbourhoods.
These are indicative of the socio-economic conditions of the working and lower middle classes
in post-communist Romania. In terms of aesthetic specificities, the films generally share a
documentary-like style, and a rendition of duration that resembles “real life”. However, as I will
point out in the analysis of the films, Police, Adjective (2009) by Corneliu Porumboiu also
reflects on the cinematic language of realism in itself and performs a critique of it thereupon.
To return to the characteristics of neo-realism, the French film critic André Bazin points
to the “extraordinary feeling of truth” that it conveys (24). Similarly, the Romanian film critic
Alex Leo Şerban argues that what binds the Romanian New Wave films together is the “desire to
taste from a long-forbidden truth”, a preference for topics dealing with events of present interest,
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and their realism (101). He then adds that the film-makers share a concern for retrieving stories
that could not have been told under communism and reject the features that characterized film
production during the former regime, namely, the preference for “aesopic, pretentious and
heavy” cinema (the “parable-film” as he calls it), and for the screening of literary works (101).
Therefore, it becomes clearer why the new directors refuse to make films which conform to the
above-mentioned ultimate purposes of art or which portray the idealized human typologies (i.e.
the “new” man) that Ceauşescu advocated in his speech of 1977.
Şerban refers to the New Wave films as “guerrilla films” bearing a voice of dissent in
relation to the system and the expectations of a Romanian audience accustomed to a different
kind of cinema (102). By “system” I believe he means both the current Romanian social and
political realities, of which the new cinema performs a powerful critique, and the Romanian film
establishment, which is institutionally represented by the National Council of Cinematography
(NCC). This institution, deemed by the critic “corrupt, ailing and plagued by nepotism”, tends to
fund film productions that have no commercial or critical success, while it offers no support to
the critically acclaimed New Wave (103-4). Besides this, he criticizes the fact that the jury for
screenplay competitions organized by the NCC consists mainly of writers and literary critics
(103), which I believe points to his dissatisfaction with the monopoly of literature in artistic
production. I mentioned earlier the role Ceauşescu attributed to literature, but also the other arts,
in advancing the cause of socialism and exploiting national sentiments. Literature was a thriving
field under communism, also because of some writers’ conformity to the party’s ideological
demands, which might explain the opposition to it “colonizing” other fields of artistic
production, such as film.
The Romanian film critic Andrei Căliman similarly emphasizes that literature had a great
influence on Romanian film from its very beginning (195), but specifically documents this
encounter under communism. Thus, he writes that “the temptation of literature” was evident in
many films throughout the sixties (196), then talks about “a phenomenon of adaptations for film”
in the seventies, when this kind of film amounted to almost a third of the whole production
(206), and finally mentions that the “main concern of the ‘army’ of scriptwriters in the eighties
was, as one could read between the lines, the adaptation for screen of classical or contemporary
literary works” (312).
Besides providing a possible historical reason for the suspicion of too close an alliance
between literature and film, particularly in the Romanian context, Alex Leo Şerban might also be
concerned with not losing sight of the potentialities of cinema as a medium. In writing about the
14
achievements of great directors such as Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, Carl Theodor Dreyer and
Orson Welles, he praises their ability to “reconfigure our way of seeing the world, to re-draw the
limits of reality and to infuse the frames with the poetry of the real without which film would be
just filmed literature” (141, emphasis added; my translation).
Şerban also compares the Romanian New Wave to Italian Neorealism, insisting that
Neorealism is a designation more suited to the directors’ aesthetic vision than minimalism (142).
The reason for stating this is that, according to Șerban, the same ethical concern that caused
Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica or Luchino Visconti to film common people and their lives,
uncovering in this way the truth, also inspires the new generation of Romanian directors (142).
This explanation however is too vague because it restricts the understanding of the neo-realist
directors’ work to an unclear “ethical concern”, and because it uses uncritically a vague notion of
truth. In fact, references to truth are numerous in Romanian criticism’s analysis of the new
cinema, without actually explaining what truth or questioning whether realist films can actually
render it on screen. 1 In a similar vein, the film critic A. Scott writes that “[t]here is almost no
didacticism or point-making in these films, none of whose characters are easily sorted into good
guys or bad guys. Instead, there is an almost palpable impulse to tell the truth, to present choices,
conflicts and accidents without exaggeration or omission. This is a form of realism, of course,
but its motivation seems to be as much ethical as aesthetic, less a matter of verisimilitude than of
honesty” (4-5, emphasis added). Şerban adds that “we have been brutally and totally deprived of
access to truth” and there is a “moral pressure to take the pulse of the surrounding realities and to
engage ethically on the side of reality” in the artistic milieu (142-3). In these latter quotes, truth
may be taken to mean information that was not accessible under communism, or that was grossly
distorted or manipulated by the regime. However, even if this information is available nowadays,
it is not necessarily the case that it is not manipulated and distorted in other ways.
To clarify the influence of Italian Neorealism on the Romanian New Wave it is relevant
to parallel a similar influence on the Czech New Wave from the late 1950s. The Czech film and
philosophy scholar Lubica Učník offers an illustration of this influence in writing that “young
film-makers at the film academy in Prague rejected as lies film schematism and the socialist
realism of previous years to assert their right to authenticity, originality, and a meaningful artistic
standpoint. The most important criteria became truthfulness, the desire to show human emotions,
and conflicts rather than class-defined narratives and schematic sketches” (55). The case of the
Romanian New Wave bears resemblance with the Czechoslovakian one in its critique of the
1
I will provide a more detailed critique of this concept of truth and its connection to realism in the third chapter,
where I analyse the films.
15
ideological constraints imposed by the party on intellectuals’ work, and in advocating a break
with these cultural policies through a truthful 1 rendition of communist and post-communist
realities. Even if both Şerban and Učník give vague accounts about the influence of neo-realism
on the Romanian and the Czech New Waves respectively, centred around a rather unclear ethical
dimension of the of the neo-realists’ work, their discourses are noteworthy because they explain
the novelty of these New Waves by connecting and contrasting them to a previous film
production that was highly censured and which respected similar strict ideological dictates
imposed by the state on the artists. In other words, the films’ choice of subject matter and their
aesthetic practice are explained by reference to a constrictive past artistic and intellectual climate
that limited considerably the film-makers’ freedom to work. One of the aspects of this climate
was the imposition of the socialist realist tenets with which creative intellectuals had to comply,
as I mentioned earlier. This historical connection informs my thesis as it suggests that the films
speak back to the communist past from a present point, while the past influences their choice of
themes, the way the engage with the themes, and their aesthetic specificity. Moreover, I would
also argue that the Romanian New Wave goes against the use of film as political weapon and
indoctrination in the past, as I will soon clarify, and instead explores the possibility of film to be
politically progressive by critiquing social realities and established discourses. For example,
12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) exposes the excess of debates on the memory of the communist
past and Police, adjective (2009) questions the realist visual language.
To develop briefly on the use of film as political weapon in the past, I will refer to Andrei
Căliman who insists on the ideological constraints film-makers had to face under the former
regime and their subsequent impact on Romanian cinema. In doing this, he points to the
“collective characters” that films in the fifties were portraying, such as collective farms, factories
and construction sites, and to their “engagement” with the creation of “the new man” (211).
Moreover, he goes on to describe the endeavours of the characters in these films, particularly
those made in the fifties, as fights for the advancement of socialism, for imposing the Leninist
requirements of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the rejection of “class enemies” and the old
social order (147). Clearly, this belligerent discourse transforms film into a political weapon. As
Căliman argues, “‘[f]ilm as weapon’ was not at all a metaphor, it was the crude reality: by means
of the stories told on screen, of the way conflicts were resolved, through the very nature of
‘positive heroes’, Romanian films of this period were primarily propaganda instruments” (147).
1
The same difficulties regarding the concept of “truth” and “truthfulness” which I discussed earlier apply here as
well.
16
By contrast, the Romanian New Wave may be understood as a political weapon, but not
in the sense of serving state propaganda, but as “Guerilla films”, as Şerban called them, which
perform an exquisite social critique. This critique is best understood when it is explained by
means of the dialectical relation between the communist past and the present, on which the films
articulate a memory discourse. Since I set myself to substantiate this thesis, in the next chapter I
will give an account of relevant discussions in memory studies and I will explain how the films
are situated within these discussions.
17
Chapter 2 - The Politics of Memory
1. The context
The memory of the communist past has been a much debated and contested issue in Romania for
the last two decades. It gained special prominence in public debate following the report of the
Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship (2006), the
first investigation of its kind in Romania, used by president Traian Băsescu to officially
condemn, in the name of the post-1989 Romanian state, the crimes and illegitimacy of the former
regime. At the time when the president presented the report to parliament and thereafter deemed
the communist regime “illegitimate and criminal”, he was met with protests from the leader of
the ultra-nationalist party in Romania, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and the members of his party
(BBC 2006). One reason for the latter’s clamorous opposition might be the fact that he is
referred to in the report as the “poet of the communist regime” (BBC 2006).
The issue of the memory of the former regime is also infused with many other political
connotations and even used by politicians in electoral discourse, as happened in the presidential
runoff that took place in December 2009. While Traian Băsescu, the current head of state, drew
on the political capital obtained from being the first Romanian president to officially condemn
the communist dictatorship, the supporters of his competitor attempted to gain electoral support
by accusing Mr Băsescu of having been himself a member of the Communist Party in the past.
Both candidates’ discourses point to an audience sensitive to issues related to the memory of the
former regime.
Moreover, a controversy was created recently when Marius Oprea, the former president
of the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, was dismissed and Vladimir
Tismăneanu, a prominent political scientist and the head of the aforementioned Presidential
Commission, was appointed in his place. The Institute was created in December 2005 by
governmental mandate, which means that the prime minister names the director of the institute
(Observatorul Cultural 2010). Following a governmental decree issued on February 23rd 2010,
the institute merged with the National Institute for the Memory of Romanian Exile into The
18
Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of Romanian Exile 1
(IICCMRE).
There have been numerous cabinet changes since 2005 and this has prompted some
voices within civil society to condemn the recent “change of the guards” in the IICCMRE as
merely a political decision that disregarded the scientific merits of the former director and his
team (Observatorul Cultural 2010). However, Mr. Tismăneanu argued in an interview that the
“stake of the debate was and will be the interpretative vision on Romanian communism as part of
the global communist phenomenon” (Evenimentul Zilei 2010). That is to say, the controversy
has less to do with political decisions than with the difference in methodological approaches
between the former and the actual board of researchers running the institute.
In contrast with these dominant academic and political debates concerning memory, I
will argue that the New Wave cinema adopts a detached, critical and somewhat ironic view
toward mainstream discourses on the communist past. In subverting these, the films pluralize the
understanding of and discourse on memory. This is one of the reasons why, in the next section, I
will discuss various theoretical aspects from memory studies, as they provide a background
against which to analyse the specific contribution of these films, and their novelty.
This very brief account of the debates concerning the memory of communism in
Romania is meant only to emphasize the fact that even 20 years after the 1989 revolution, the
communist past remains a controversial issue in current public debate. 2 While this context is
primarily concerned with memory, it clearly involves a constant appeal to the historical records
of the past. Therefore, in this chapter I shall discuss the distinction but also the interplay between
memory and history and the way it influences my analysis of the films. Apart from this issue, I
shall address the relation between the ethical dimensions implicit in the call for remembering a
past dictatorial and criminal regime, and transitional justice.
2. History and Memory
For the French historian Pierre Nora, history has separated from “real” memory, as he calls it,
with the advent of modern societies characterized by rapid change (2). In archaic or traditional
1
www.crimelecomunismului.ro
I shall not take sides in these debates because my purpose is merely to frame my analysis of the films within the
broader Romanian political context regarding the memory of the communist past.
2
19
societies, this memory was naturally preserved and handed down from one generation to another
through the work of families, churches or elderly people endowed with this responsibility. In
their case, memory was kept alive through oral communication, or with the beginning of writing,
by both oral and written means. By contrast, for fear of forgetting as a result of swift changes,
modern societies organize their past in the form of history (Nora 2).
According to Nora, history attaches itself to events and temporal sequences, has a
“universal vocation”, and in being an intellectual endeavour, it calls for a critical perspective on
facts (3, 18). Conversely, memory is more volatile and multiple because dependant on the input
of different groups and individuals; it is haunted by forgetting and it fastens onto concrete things
such as spaces, images, or objects (Nora 3, 18). The latter characteristic marks the ways in which
modern memory becomes “archival”: “It relies entirely on the specificity of the trace, the
materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the image [...]. The
less memory is experienced from within, the greater is the need for external props and tangible
reminders of that which no longer exists except qua memory [...]” (Nora 8). This drive to anchor
memory is prompted equally by the need to preserve the past, as mentioned above, but also by
anxiety about both the present and the future (Nora 8).
To briefly connect these ideas to the Romanian context, the urge to conserve the past
stems from the need to come to terms with a long totalitarian experience and to address the
crimes of the former regime. It also comes from a desire to act against one of the most pernicious
traits of totalitarianism, namely the distortion and manipulation of memory, by taking an ethical
stance in favour of the clarification and public recognition of the historical record of the former
regime. 1 In addition, the desire to investigate and preserve the past was linked to concerns
regarding Romania’s future integration in the European Union. A good illustration of this is the
publication of the report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Romanian
Communist Dictatorship a month before Romania’s accession to the EU (on January 1st, 2007),
marking, among other things, a symbolic shift in the country’s political and international
position. Both this report and, as I will show later, the Romanian New Wave constitute ways in
which memory is anchored as a result of the growing concern with the past.
Similarly to Nora, the German scholar Andreas Huyssen characterizes the need to
preserve the past as a contemporary obsession with memory driven by a fear of forgetting
(Urban Palimpsests 18). He argues that this is due to our concerns for a disturbing past, but also
to the difficulty of foreseeing alternatives for the future (Urban Palimpsests 2). This is why
1
I will discuss more thoroughly the relation between history and memory later in the section.
20
memory has to be understood by means of a dialogue between past and the future. In Huyssen’s
words, “[t]he turn toward memory is subliminally energized by the desire to anchor ourselves in
a world characterized by an increasing instability of time and the fracturing of lived space”
(Urban Palimpsests 18). In Twilight Memories, he also states that it is the “information
revolution” and the technological advancements that have changed our perception of the relation
between past, present and future and, therefore, caused a widespread concern with memory in the
hope of finding a point of reference in the past that would allow us to escape from this new
temporal structure (Introduction 7).
Given this concern about forgetting, Huyssen argues that we attempt to oppose amnesia
by various “strategies of public and private memorialisation” and through “musealization”
(Urban Palimpsests 18, 23). Thus, the museum has transformed from its traditional status as
“cultural authority” in the sense that “it has been sucked into the maelstrom of modernization:
museum shows are managed and advertised as major spectacles with calculable benefits for
sponsors, organizers and city budgets, and the claim to fame of any major metropolis will depend
considerably on the attractiveness of its museal sites” (Twilight Memories, Escape from Amnesia
21). However, this conversion of museums into mass media as Huyssen depicts them can also be
productive (Escape from Amnesia 21). This seems to be so especially if museums bring into
memory historical traumas which have to be acknowledged and dealt with in order to make some
sense of the future. In Germany’s case it has been argued that museums have become a disputed
symbol of German national identity (Maier 123). Nevertheless, there is no such inflation of
museums or memorials in Romania, which is what the recommendations in the above-mentioned
presidential report aim to change.
It is perhaps in this very tendency of modern societies to embed memory in external,
concrete things that memory comes very close to history. Among the institutions meant to
preserve memory Nora mentions museums, libraries, or documentation centres (9). However, it
is difficult to separate memory from history in the case of these examples because in acting as
institutions of memory, they also rely on historical facts. It is clear that Nora refers to modern
memory here, as opposed to the “true”, more spontaneous memory of traditional societies.
Nevertheless, as I have mentioned above, he also states that modern societies organize their past
by means of historical records. Therefore, it seems history and modern memory are not so clearly
distinct, but more likely, that memory is constantly being haunted by history and vice versa. In
other words, in the modern age remembrance does not seem possible without history, whereas, in
archaic ones memory was the history of the communities’ past.
21
The report on the basis of which the president condemned the communist regime
constitutes an adequate point of reference for the discussion on the interplay between memory
and history. On the one hand, it both relies on and produces historical data with the aim of
forming a scientific grounding for the condemnation of communism. On the other hand, in being
the first document of its kind in Romania, it is endowed with a symbolic aura that makes it stand
out more like a repository of collective memory.
Although it may be too early to give it such a designation only four years from its
publication, it may be argued that the report becomes a lieu de mémoire. Pierre Nora, who coined
the concept, writes that lieux de mémoire “are created by the interaction between memory and
history resulting in a mutual overdetermination” (14). The lieux came into being because there
are no longer milieux de mémoire, where living memory was part of daily experience (Nora 1).
Since memory is no longer the natural, spontaneous process it was in traditional societies, it must
be preserved in other ways and this is how the lieux are formed. They can be material (archives,
documents), symbolic (observing moments of silence, celebrations) or functional (textbooks),
and these three traits always go together in the creation of lieux de mémoire (Nora 14). While
their aim is to counteract forgetting, to mark a certain order of things, they are equally capable of
evading fixed meanings and therefore of absorbing new interpretations (Nora 15).
Moreover, according to Nora, the lieux de mémoire are characterized by the fact that they
escape the chronological temporality of history (19-20). While they clearly have a historical
referent, they also constitute a breach in the historical time due to the symbolism with which they
are endowed. Regarding the presidential report, it may be interpreted as a lieu because it disrupts
the simple historical continuity communism–post-communism. It stands out of the historical
narrative, although clearly informed and determined by it, because it may be interpreted as a
symbolic act of transitional justice. Its symbolism becomes, I would say, more important than its
content. Moreover, it questions the very particle “post” in post-communism, and thus the very
chronological narrative of history, because its existence testifies to the ghost of communism in
post-communism. Additionally, in being a document of transitional justice, the report establishes
a new meaning for post-communism, namely, as an engagement with the past for the purpose of
doing justice to the victims of the totalitarian regime, and not merely as the historical period of
time following the 1989 revolution.
Although I agree that contemporary societies remember, to a significant degree, by
means of lieux de mémoire, I believe that the polarity lieux-milieux coined by Nora does not
provide a comprehensive picture of how memory is preserved. For instance, this theoretical
22
framework does not explain the influence of media in transmitting, altering or altogether forging
memories in present-day societies. As Andreas Huyssen writes,
[w]e cannot discuss personal, generational or public memory separate from the enormous
influence of the new media as carriers of all forms of memory. Thus, it is no longer
possible, for instance, to think of the Holocaust or of any other historical trauma as a
serious ethical and political issue apart from the multiple ways it is now linked to
commodification and spectacularization in films, museums, docudramas, Internet sites,
photography books, comics, fiction, even fairy tales (Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella)
and pop songs (Present Pasts 29).
Huyssen goes as far as to argue that many of the memories produced by mass-media are
“imagined”, as opposed to lived memories grounded in personal experience (Present Pasts 27).
Even though some of these mass-marketed memories may become in themselves lieux de
mémoire, a good case in point being perhaps Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, not all of them
could be designated like this.
Huyssen’s account of memory seems to draw on a technological determinism that
necessarily influences people’s perception of the world. While to some extent this might be the
case, it can hardly explain the obsession with memory, and more specifically, the ethical
dimensions associated with it. In the case of Romania, the recurrent public debates or
controversies regarding the memory of the communist regime are mostly the result of belated
analysis of the past, as well as of the engagement with the topic by reputed public intellectuals.
In other words, while this analysis is necessary in order to come to terms with the past and make
sense of the future, it also constitutes a sort of agenda setting determined by these intellectuals.
Furthermore, although I share Huyssen’s opinion about the sometimes damaging
influence of media on memory, I am more optimistic about the possibilities opened by them in
preserving memory. For example, if a certain generation does not have lived memories about a
historical period, as is the case with post-1989 generations in Romania, then the media may be
useful in offering them various perspectives on past events. Admittedly, some of these “imagined
memories”, as Huyssen calls them, may be prejudiced or distorted in order for them to be more
marketable or more spectacular. However, I would say that the media cannot always anticipate
the impact of the memories they create on people. That is, at least some of the viewers are able to
form a critical perspective on the information received.
23
Apart from this, in every social context there are different factors that contribute to the
way people shape their image of past events. This pluralism may weaken the impact of media on
the perception of these events. To return to the example of the post-1989 generations in
Romania, they have a wealth of sources from which to construct an image of a communist past
that they did not experience: family stories, history books, public debates, or films. In fact, the
New Wave in Romanian cinema is a very interesting example of such a source because it both
confirms and subverts mainstream memory-discourses about the communist regime. Besides
this, these films also offer an invaluable anthropological study of the way the policies of the
communist past changed social relations under and after communism.
For the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, history is different from collective
memory in at least two important ways. Firstly, unlike history, memory is characterized by
natural continuity because it preserves from the past only the fragments that remain vividly
engraved in the conscience of the group that produces it (70). That is to say, it does not try to
recuperate the entire past and forge causal relations between events, but only preserves what is
presently relevant to the social group from which it arises. Moreover, memory is grounded in
lived history, and not in the history we learn (Halbwachs 43).
By contrast, history has the didactic tendency to make the past systematic, to place events
in categories and historical periods (Halbwachs 71). These periods are simultaneously analysed
separately, as independent wholes, and in an artificial sequence within the historical narrative.
Moreover, history tends to have a universal vocation because the historian aims to give an
objective and impartial perspective on events, which is unlike the differentiated perspective on
past events of various social groups. Conversely, one speaks of numerous collective memories
because they arise from different social groups (Halbwachs 74).
It is important to outline at this point Halbwachs’ theory on the dependence of memory
on the social context to which people belong. According to him, “our memories remain
collective, and are brought to memory by others, even when dealing with events in which only
we were involved, and objects that only we saw. In fact we are never alone” (2, my translation).
Later on he goes on to explain this theory by arguing that individual memory would not be able
to function without the help of words and ideas which the individual appropriates from his social
milieu (36).
Barbara Misztal critiques Halbwachs’ understanding of collective memory for failing to
give a clear account of the dialectical relation between personal and socially determined memory
24
(Theories 54). Of course, Halbwachs would argue there is no such thing as memory independent
from social context, but Misztal contends that it is precisely this exaggerated social determinism
that prevented Halbwachs from explaining the way individual memory interacts with the
collective one in order to preserve the past (Theories 55). Additionally, his assumption that there
is a unified, established collective group identity that produces collective memories is also
problematic. In Misztal’s view, a harmful effect of this assertion is that
it underestimates the importance of groups’ living memories, because instead of seeing
these memories in dialogue, interdependence and conflict with the tradition of the main
collectivity, he views them integrated in the tradition of the most powerful group. Thus,
his conceptualization of the relations between past and present is rather one-dimensional
and assumes the stability of the vision of the past in a group memory (Theories 55).
As I understand it, the fact that Halbwachs conceptualizes group identities as stable leads to the
assumption that the past is a stable entity as well. This fails to explain the way in which present
realities might change representations of the past, or how the past may inform the present social
context.
Besides this, Halbwachs’ account of stable group identities does not help explain the
ways in which, in a reversed situation, memory is used in shaping group identities. As Misztal
explains, with the fragmentation of identities in contemporary societies, memory is increasingly
employed in providing the identity of the group, or serves as the foundation for identities that
would not otherwise be considered justified (The Sacralization 74).
Moreover, it seems that Halbwachs’ understanding of collective memory is quite similar
to Nora’s account of the spontaneous memory of traditional societies. Surely, the former does
not say that groups’ memory coincides with their history. However, he describes collective
memory as what vividly remains engraved in the group conscience, which implies that
remembrance is a spontaneous, natural process that does not rely on historical material. This
seems unlikely in modern societies where collective memories are influenced by media and
historical data.
It is worth comparing Halbwachs’ distinction between memory and history to Nora’s.
That the former separates them more clearly seems due to the fact that he describes history in a
very positivist way as he refers to its claims to objectivity, neutrality and universality.
Nevertheless, since writing history is based on a selection of facts made by historians and
presented in a narrative form, it ceases to be the allegedly value-free, objective kind of
25
endeavour, even though it may hold onto this ideal. To put it differently, there may be multiple
histories just as they are multiple collective memories. This is why it could be argued that history
is unreliable because it includes a degree of subjectivity.
3. Thou Shalt Remember
Having discussed the interplay between history and memory, I will now turn to the ethical
dimension of memory. The latter is embedded in the presidential report, as it assumes a memory
discourse that insists on the ethical necessity of remembering for doing justice to the victims of
the former regime, and for avoiding in the future the mistakes of the past. Moreover, as I
explained in the previous chapter, some film critics have argued that the New Wave films take an
ethical position against the communist regime and the artistic production it encouraged, and also
against present political realities. Beside this, the relation between ethics and memory bears on
the possibilities open by these films as mass media. This is why, in analysing the memory
discourse of the films, one must consider the relation between ethics and memory.
The philosophy scholar Avishai Margalit proposes a theoretical framework for analysing
whether there is such a thing as an ethics of memory. Specifically, he uses the concepts of ethics
and morality of memory to develop his argument, and he explains why the two are different by
relying on another polarity, namely, the one between thick and thin human relations. By thick
relations he understands the kind of rapport that people have with their families, friends, lovers
or countrymen by virtue of shared memories or a shared national past (7). In comparison, thin
relations are grounded in people’s nature as human beings and are established between remote
persons (Margalit 7). According to Margalit, ethics should guide our thick relations, whereas
morality should direct our thin ones (8).
Margalit connects ethics and memory through the concept of caring. Thus, he forms a
“triangle of relations” between concepts which highlights one of the central claims of his inquiry,
namely, that caring is central to an ethics of memory (27). In his words, “one side of the triangle
connects memory and caring, the second connects caring and ethics, and only then we are ready
to connect memory with ethics” (27). To put it differently, if one forgets a person s/he used to
care about, then s/he stopped carrying about that person (28). This is indicative of the fact that
memory is integral to the very notion of caring. However, he does not regard caring as central to
26
morality and argues that humanity needs morality precisely because we do not care about every
member of the humankind (32).
Margalit’s answer to his main research question, namely, whether there is an ethics of
memory, is not very conclusive. As he puts it, “[s]o, ought we to remember ethically? My
answer is yes – if we are, and want to be, involved in thick relations” (105-6). Thus, it is not
imperative to remember ethically, unless one wants to establish and maintain thick relations
(Margalit 105). However, following Richard Bernstein’s critique of Margalit’s book, this
argument provides an excuse for not remembering (because I choose not to), rather than giving a
satisfactory answer to such a complex issue as whether or not there are past events or people that
we ought to remember (Bernstein 174). In Bernstein’s words, “[a]n ethics of memory ought to
provide some criteria – no matter how vague – about what we ought to remember and how we
ought to remember past persons and deeds (173).
First of all, Margalit’s claim that we must remember only if involved in thick relations is
too restrictive. That would imply that one is capable of an ethics of memory only as long as one
cares about someone, and one is really capable of caring only about the people with whom one is
involved in thick relations. Or, one may be genuinely able to be empathetic about other people’s
suffering, to care about them, without ever having met them. For instance, one might end up
caring for Holocaust or Gulag survivors after having read their testimonies about their traumatic
experience. Admittedly, one cannot care equally about everyone since this would empty of
meaning the very notion of care. Nevertheless, I would say there are degrees of caring. Even
though I may care first and foremost about my family, to some degree I may truly care about the
victims of genocide around the world as well.
Moreover, arguing that an ethics of memory only becomes compulsory once one
establishes thick relations with other people is rather problematic. One reason for this is the fact
that one may not have had the chance to form this kind of relations with, for instance, the
numerous victims of genocides. To take a case in point, in present-day Western societies there
are not so many people engaged in thick relations with the victims of twentieth-century
totalitarian abuse anymore. In this case, does that mean that those victims should be confined to
oblivion? Rather, we should consider whether or not we have some collective ethical
responsibility to remember them. In fact, it can be noticed that in most Western countries this
responsibility is being assumed in various ways, such as through building museums and
monuments commemorating the victims of the Holocaust or through the study of totalitarian
27
regimes in schools and universities. More importantly, the historian Tony Judt argues that the
Holocaust has played a central part in the identity and memory of Western Europeans (820).
Actually, memory studies scholar Alison Landsberg coined the concept prosthetic
memory in order to explain how technologies of mass culture such as cinema make it possible for
diverse audiences to gain memories of historical events they have not witnessed. Thus, according
to Landsberg, by ensuring the wide circulation of images and narratives about the past, these
technologies have made possible a new form of memory, because with their help viewers in
“experiential sites” (Landsberg 2), such as cinema theatres, are connected to a history they have
not lived but which nevertheless influences their subjectivity and political views (Landsberg 2).
These widely-available mass-mediated memories make it possible for people across different
cultures to share memories, without maintaining that common memories belong to people with
common geographic or national origins, as it was the case in the nineteenth century when
memory contributed to nation building (Landsberg 7-9). Moreover, the main difference between
prosthetic memory and other kinds of memory is the former’s reliance on commodification,
because it is the commodification under advanced capitalism that makes possible the circulation
of memories (Landsberg 18).
Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory is quite similar to Huyssen’s concept of
imagined memories, even though contrary to the former, the latter is used to designate a negative
influence of media on memory, as I discussed earlier. Moreover, the concept undermines
Halbwachs argument about the dependence of memory on the social group from which
memories arise, and also complicates the distinction memory-history because past events that
were only to be known and discovered by exploring world history can actually be experienced in
cinema theatres with the aid of film technology, thus developing prosthetic memories.
Landsberg’s concept is particularly interesting for understanding the role of the Romanian New
Wave, both in Romania and abroad. As they are widely distributed, these films make it possible
both for young Romanians who did not live through communism, and for a foreign audience to
form memories about the communist past. Since they are acquired within cinema theatres, these
memories are experienced in a bodily way and are incorporated in the viewers’ personal
experience, even though they have not been lived (Landsberg 28). This characteristic of
prosthetic memories undermines Margalit’s claim according to which one is able to care only
about people which one has thick relations with.
To return to Bernstein’s critique of Margalit, he makes an interesting point in addressing
the relation between an ethical and a political responsibility to preserve the memory of traumatic
28
historical events. Bernstein mentions Hannah Arendt’s argument regarding the obligation we
have to remember the lost revolutionary spirit of the modern age (manifested in the American
Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution for example) (176). He
then states that if one were to follow Margalit’s view, Arendt refers only to a political obligation
and not an ethical one (176). But finally, Bernstein rightly asks whether one can strictly separate
these responsibilities. In his words, “can we always neatly distinguish political and ethical
obligations – even as ideal types – when we are dealing with collective or cultural memory? Just
as Margalit claims there is an internal relation between memory and caring, so I want to claim
that there is an internal relation between ethics and politics when we are dealing with issues of
collective memory. A “community of memory” is a political community (although not all
political communities are communities of memory)” (176). As I see it, this argument indicates
that when dealing with collective memory, ethics is political, just as politics should be ethical.
That is, memory should not be manipulated for political purposes, just as ethics should be a
matter of collective responsibility when deciding what and how to remember from the past. The
problem of course is that, in practice, it may be very difficult, if not impossible, to reach a
collective consensus since memory itself can be a highly contested issue among various groups.
It may be argued that the report on the basis of which the president condemned the
communist regime underpins an ethics of memory because it suggests ways in which to deal
collectively with the past. As it reads:
Today, the condemnation of communism is more than ever before a moral, intellectual,
political and social obligation. The Romanian democratic and pluralist state can and must
do this. Knowledge of these dark and mournful pages of twentieth-century Romanian
history is equally indispensable for the new generations who have the right to know the
world in which their parents lived. The future of Romania depends on acknowledging the
past and thereby on condemning the communist regime as an enemy of humanity. If we do
not do this today, here and now, the burden of complicity, even through silence, with the
totalitarian Evil will haunt us forever. This is not a matter of collective culpability. What
matters is for us to learn from this atrocious past, to understand how this experiment was
possible, and to part ways with it with grief and compassion for the victims (19-20).
Even though this paragraph does not explicitly refer to memory, it does call for
condemning the former regime as “enemy of humanity”, which sets a framework within which to
remember the communist past. It asserts that in the case of younger generations who have not
experienced the totalitarian system, it is essential for them to become aware of its atrocities.
Since they are not in the position to remember them, because they lack memories from the
29
period, the young can only learn about the past from sources such as history books, films,
documentaries or family members. Although knowledge of the past in their case is referred to as
a crucial right, one can argue that the imperative tone of the paragraph turns this right into an
ethical duty.
Additionally, the condemnation constitutes a symbolic act of transitional justice that sets
the principles of the democratic and pluralist state in stark contrast with the communist system
and, in doing so, endows the former with moral legitimacy. For Margalit, transitional justice,
which refers to “how to deal fairly in a newly born or regained democracy that has an
undemocratic recent past”, is intimately connected to the issue of the ethics of memory (13). But
what exactly does it imply enacting this kind of justice? The scholar Nigel Biggar argues that it
is commonly believed that justice is the punishment of perpetrators, whereas he would argue that
it deals primarily with the “vindication of the victims, both direct and indirect” (7). By
vindication he understands (I) publicly acknowledging the victims’ injury and thereby restoring
them their dignity; (II) offering the victims material and psychological help, as well as trying to
repair the damage caused to them; (III) seeking to discover the truth about the crimes and their
perpetrators (8).
It is primarily this vindication that the presidential report and the ensuing condemnation
of communism aim to achieve by means of the recommendations made by the researchers to the
Romanian president on the basis of their analysis. The beginning of the section where these are
made is entitled “So as to remember, condemn and never repeat again” (637). Apart from the
official condemnation of the crimes of communism; they also call for memorialisation through,
among other measures, establishing a day of commemoration for the victims of communism,
building a monument to these victims in Bucharest and a Museum of the Romanian Communist
Dictatorship, etc. This is indicative of the fact that the historical work carried out by the
commission is not merely meant to provide a scientific basis for denouncing the former regime
as criminal and illegitimate, but also to advance propositions regarding the institutionalization of
the memory of the communist past.
Institutionalised memory becomes, in this context, a matter of moral duty, because it is
regarded as a measure both to remember the plight of the victims and to prevent the totalitarian
past from recurring. However, it is not clear why the ways to remember the past proposed by the
commission are necessarily the most ethical ones. Likewise, it is not really straightforward who
constitutes the “we” mentioned in the paragraph quoted above, that should remember the
communist regime in these proposed ways. Is it the Romanian nation, all the countries in Central
30
and Eastern Europe that went through a communist dictatorship or maybe also Western Europe,
which shares a history of totalitarianism with its eastward neighbours? Or perhaps “we” means
the whole of humanity, since the report deems the communist regime(s) “enemy (ies) of
humanity”.
One reason for writing considering the “we” rather ambiguous is that the report mentions
elsewhere that denying the crimes of communism is as unacceptable as denying those
perpetrated by fascism, which indicates that the audience of the report is not confined only to
Romanians (642). As the report states, “left extremism must be rejected with the same
resoluteness as right extremism” (642). In this context, the denial of crimes is tantamount to
forgetting them because denial undermines the legitimacy of public remembrance.
Moreover, the report recommends juridical and legislative measures which include the
punishment by law of attempts to acclaim the Romanian communist regime and its leaders, as
well as of the public display of communist symbols, except for the antitotalitarian educational
context, and the dissemination of communist propaganda (642). These measures can be
connected with the theories on memory discussed above, particularly to Nora’s idea according to
which modern societies tend to embed memory in external concrete things (such as recordings,
images, artefacts). These are then preserved and studied in museums, libraries or documentation
centres (Nora 9). Therefore, the measures banish the marks of totalitarianism from the public
sphere and relegate them to spaces dedicated to the preservation of memory, that is, spaces
where memory becomes institutionalized. In addition, they play a part in the attempt to oppose
amnesia regarding a disturbing past which Huyssen was referring to. Thus, the outlawing of
communist symbols is meant to prevent a regeneration of the ideologies which spawned them
(and a repeat of the mistakes which led to traumas in the past) and to allow their use only from a
critical perspective in museums, in the classroom or in academic debates. However, these
measures, albeit ethically motivated, also constitute an attempt to control the public expression
of memory to fit the historical record.
The emphasis placed on regarding former communist regimes on the same par with right
wing extremist ones points to a deep widespread concern of former communist countries to raise
awareness of their own totalitarian history. In an academic article published in 2009, which again
suggests the ongoing relevance of the debate, Siobhan Kattago writes that “[r]ifts between old
and new Europe are visible with the renewed efforts by the East European countries and the
Baltic States for official recognition of Communist crimes at the European Union level and
hesitancy of the part of old Europe for such official recognition” (376). Surely, the opposition
31
Old Europe-New Europe is simplistic and disregards the different histories of the countries
included under these categories. However, what Kattago argues is that Western Europe, the
former Communist countries and Russia have different dominant narratives regarding World
War II and its aftermath. While in the West National Socialism and its crimes constitute the
utmost evil, in the post-communist narrative Communism plays this role because of its “duration
and intensity” (382). In fact, in the West memory discourses intensified as a result of increasing
debate on the Holocaust, which again attests to its centrality for Western Europe (Huyssen,
Present Pasts 22). For Russia, Nazism was the central evil and the Red Army liberated Eastern
Europe (Kattago 382).
With regard to the liberating mission of Russia in Central and Eastern Europe, a recent
example may be enlightening. An article published in May 2009, in the British newspaper The
Telegraph, stated that the Russian president Dimitri Medvedev commissioned a bill that would
punish the countries in the post-Soviet sphere which claim that the Red Army did not liberate
them, aiming thus at imposing an undebatable memory discourse regarding its communist past. 1
The legislation is said to be directed especially at the Baltic states which claim that the Soviet
Union occupied rather than liberated them. The fact that the Russian state has never officilly
acknowledged the crimes of Communism and, subsequently, its share of responsibility for these
crimes, remains a serious point of contention in the memory discourse about the past in the postcommunist space.
This example illustrates the attempt to impose a particular community’s memory
(Russia’s) on other communities (the former Soviet countires). However, this imposition comes
from the political official level, which does not mean that all Russians share the memory
according to which the Russian army liberated Eastern Europe, a memory that the institutuions
of the state dissaminate. What is significant about president Medvedev’s measure is that it shows
the degree to which memory is not simply determined by social context and group adherence, as
Halbwachs argued, but is also shaped by political interference, that is, by attempts to control or
censure it.
Moreover, the concern of the former communist countries with equally condemning both
Communism and National Socialism at the European Union level might also be interpreted as a
need to preserve a sense of regional difference within the EU. Tony Judt argues that today
“Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket” (803). He then goes on to
1
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5350777/Russia-threatens-to-bar-Europeans-who-denyRed-Army-liberated-them.html
32
explain that, for instance, Poland and Romania had to officially acknowledge their share of
responsibility in the destruction of the European Jews before entering the EU (803). This was
undoubtedly a necessary political endeavour and, at the same time, an indication of the centrality
of the Holocaust in the collective memory of Western Europe. It is perhaps against this
background that the former communist countries call for the widespread recognition of the
Communism as equally criminal to National Socialism at the European official level. This
actually happened with the Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism passed by
the European Parliament in April 2009, although Kattago argues that the document “carefully
maintains the uniqueness of the Holocaust” (385). 1 Nevertheless, in being haunted primarily by
their Communist past, the countries of the former Communist bloc have downplayed their own
involvement in the suffering of the European Jews.
Similar to the case of the Russian officials attempting to impose a certain memory on
former Soviet states, the previous example illustrates again the interplay between politics and
memory. In the specific geopolitical space of the European Union, as in the post-Soviet sphere,
memory of the Holocaust, and of the role of the Red Army respectively, are supposed to be
universalized memories. This goes against Nora’s and Halbwachs’ theories according to which
memory, as opposed to history, is plural. The appropriation and imposition of memory by
politics illustrates the ways in which memory is made to look as universal as history supposedly
is.
To return briefly to the different narratives of Western and Eastern Europe regarding the
World War II, Kattago further argues that while both National Socialism and Stalinism are
regarded as totalitarian, the crimes of Communism are placed in a different category than those
of Nazism (382). This view may be based on the assumption that the ideologies of the two
totalitarian systems were different: while Nazism clearly had a policy of extermination of certain
groups based on racial criteria, Marxism had a noble political purpose that failed when put into
practice. However, I would say that there is nothing noble in the demonization of a social class,
namely the bourgeoisie, in the Marxist-Leninist discourse. Nor does the purpose of the ideology
exonerate its means or its actual consequences.
The scholars Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin argue that the uniqueness of the
Holocaust consists of its “particular fusion of collective humiliation and mass destruction” (66).
They state that Stalin meant to annihilate the class enemy and Mao to humiliate it, while the
1
I am aware that the discussion regarding the extent to which the crimes of Nazism can be compared to the ones of
Communism is contentious and deserves analysis which exceeds the purposes of this thesis.
33
Nazis wanted both to humiliate and exterminate their race enemy (66). However, it is rather
deceptive, to say the least, to claim that Stalin or Stalinist regimes across Central and Eastern
Europe attempted “merely” to exterminate the class enemy. To give just one example, the
liquidation of the “kulaks” (wealthy peasants) in the Soviet Union was accompanied by heavy
propaganda against it which attempted to portray it as a class outside of the human race (very
similar to the propaganda used by Nazis against Jews).
As I already suggested earlier in the chapter, the plea for remembrance both in Western
and Central and Eastern Europe could be interpreted in light of the numerous ways in which the
communist regimes and the Nazis attempted to control memory. Tzvetan Todorov gives three
examples of strategies to prevent people’s access to information and to erase the traces of
memory: (1) eliminating the evidence of the crimes they perpetrated; (2) intimidating people
who had been held in the camps or the gulag so they would not speak about what was happening
there; (3) the use of euphemisms so as to distort reality and, complementary to this, propaganda
(114-16). In the case of the second strategy, the former communist regimes also relied greatly on
the secret police in order to enforce obedience by disseminating fear among people. Todorov
goes on to argue that “[i]n this context it is easy to understand why memory has acquired an aura
of prestige among the enemies of totalitarianism, why even the humblest act of recollection has
been assimilated to antitotalitarian resistance” (118).
However, by equating all remembrance with antitotalitarian resistance one legitimizes
any kind of discourse that manipulates the memory of the totalitarian past in order to gain
support from audiences sensitive to this issue. As Todorov states:
But when we hear such appeals against forgetting and for the ‘duty of memory’, we should
realize that we are not being asked to undertake any recovery of memory – through the
establishment of facts or through their interpretation [...]. What we are being invited to
undertake is the defense of a particular selection of facts that allow its protagonists to
maintain their status as heroes, victims, or teachers of moral lessons, against any other
selection that might give them less gratifying roles (175).
This is not to say that the presidential commission uses the call for memorialisation in the
final report as a means to fashion a self-gratifying image for itself. While the report is widely
acknowledged by historians as having clear and undisputed historical and scientific merits, I
believe it also allows the current president, who used it to officially denounce the Romanian
communist regime in Parliament, to portray himself as the ultimate opponent of the former
regime. This was particularly evident during the presidential elections in December 2009, when
34
Mr Băsescu used this condemnation in order to gain political capital and to obtain a competitive
edge over his competitor, who was a member of a political party heir to the former Communist
Party.
One could say that in being an official document, the report constitutes a top-down
imposition of a certain interpretation of the communist past. However, the historical research
carried out by the commission is based on facts and testimonies that attest to the criminal
character of the Romanian communist system. Even though this selection of facts belongs to the
members of a commission appointed by the president, its findings remain historically verifiable.
On the one hand, it constitutes the first official document that analyses the Romanian communist
dictatorship and based on it the president condemned the communist regime, which can be
regarded as a necessary, albeit symbolic, act of transitional justice. On the other hand, a
particular anti-communist discourse sustained by the lead authors of the report became dominant.
This is to say, it seems like this group of authors monopolized the anti-communist discourse.
This situation was recently contested when Vladimir Tismăneanu’s nomination for the
presidency of IICCMRE sparked controversy over the “interpretative vision” on Romanian
communism. The mere notion of one such vision replacing another is highly problematic, since it
undermines the very plurality of perspectives from which the past could be analysed and which
should be present in a democratic state.
4. Conclusion
I chose to discuss the interplay between memory and history in this chapter because the New
Wave films I will analyse refer directly or indirectly to historical periods or events representative
for the former regime and the post-communist transition. However, in being contemporary
cultural products that reflect on the past, they shape memory of the historical period they engage
with. More importantly, they recall Andreas Huyssen’s idea according to which memory is
understood by means of the dialectical relation between past and present, which is one aspect I
chose to discuss in relation to the films. As I noted earlier, these films reveal the ghost of
communism in post-communism, and in dealing with this historical period in the present context,
they shape memory of the past and challenge dominant memory discourses, as it will become
evident in my analysis of the films. Moreover, they disrupt the chronological historical narrative
that artificially separates communism and post-communism in two historical periods, and reveal
35
the ways in which the past is being constantly discussed and interpreted from the present
standpoint, whereas present realities are necessarily influenced by the past.
Furthermore, the films as mass-media are able to provide wide audiences with prosthetic
memories (Landsberg) of the communist regime, which is essential in the case of people who
have not directly lived the events recounted by the films. Information about the communist past
is not solely available for them from historical resources and from the distance of an intellectual
pursuit – reading and understanding historical facts – but also experientially, in cinema theatres.
Not only does this complicate the distinction between history and memory, but it also makes
possible for people of different ages, classes or ethnicities to share memories which they did not
live. This also implies that the audience can become empathetic about the suffering endured
under communism without having lived through it. In turn, it may be able to care for the victims
of the Romanian communist dictatorship and to remember them collectively.
36
Chapter 3 – Reading the Films
In order to inquire whether the films articulate a memory discourse on the dialectical relation
between the communist past and the present I chose to focus on two elements in the films:
sources of authority and urban space. My choice was suggested by the films because these two
aspects stood out as points of connection between the films telling stories from communism and
the ones engaging with the post-communist transition. In other words, they constitute traces of
the past, ghosts from communism haunting the present. In analysing sources of authority, I will
focus on Jacque Rancière’s concepts of police regime, politics and disagreement. Regarding
urban space, my analysis will be guided, among others, by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of social
space and Andreas Huyssen’s concept of urban palimpsests. As I will show in the analysis, these
theories suggest a strong connection between urban space and authority.
1. Introducing the films
The corpus of films I have chosen for analysis is diverse, in that not all of them directly engage
with the Romanian communist regime and its aftermath, nor do they all strictly fit the neorealist
aesthetics. Thus, the story of 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (or 432, 2007) by Cristian Mungiu
takes place in 1987, two years before the revolution, and brings to the fore Ceauşescu’s 1966
decree banning abortions and the way this totalitarian policy shaped human relations. Two
friends, Găbiţa (Laura Vasiliu), who is 4 months 3 weeks and 2 days pregnant, and Otilia
(Anamaria Marinca), her roommate, go through a horrific experience when they contact the
unscrupulous abortionist Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) for a meeting in a downtown hotel.
The events in How I Spent the End of the World (2006) by Cătălin Mitulescu are on the
threshold of two historical periods, as the film gives an account of the last year of the former
regime, the revolution (the end of the world) and its aftermath through the eyes of the characters.
Eva Matei (Dorotheea Petre) and her boyfriend Vomică (Ionuţ Becheru) knock down the bust of
Ceauşescu in their high school, which causes Eva to be expelled and sent to a professional school
on the outskirts of the city as she refuses to denounce herself in front of her class mates and the
school authorities. Her boyfriend escapes punishment as he pleads guilty because his father
works for the secret police (the Securitate). Later on, Eva plans to flee the country and reach
Italy through Serbia by swimming across the Danube together with her friend Andrei (Cristian
37
Văraru). Although she eventually decides to give up the plan and return home, her temporary
absence greatly affects her 7-year-old brother Lalalilu (Timotei Duma), who decides he wants to
die. As Eva comes back, Lalalilu and his friends devise a plan to kill Ceauşescu because the
dictator is the one who caused his sister to run away from home.
The film may be considered a collage of the memories and commonplaces of life under
communism, as well as of the hopes and sufferings that punctuated it. The realism of public
buildings, domestic interiors and dialogues is interrupted by poetic shots depicting the nostalgia
for childhood years, albeit spent under a dictatorship, or the characters’ dreams of freedom. For
instance, as Andrei manages to emigrate, he sends Eva a package of goods that includes chewing
gum, chocolate (Toblerone) and a jeans jacket for her brother. Lalalilu and his friends go out in
the garden and start making chewing gum balloons. The one made by Lalalilu grows so big that
it eventually flies into the air, among tree branches, against the resplendent blue sky. Another
example would be the scene at the end of the film when the little boy and his friends drive an old
car for approximately two meters until they reach the post-box on their street where Lalalilu
mails a letter to his sister, who after the revolution has left the country to work on a huge cruise
ship called Prinsendam Rotterdam. This “journey”, filmed in slow motion and witnessed by all
the neighbours on the street, looks like a great childhood adventure on which the three little boys
embarked.
This film is also different from the others in terms of the representation of urban space.
While in all the other films gray and shabby socialist blocks of flats are the usual cityscape,
much of the action in How I Spent the End of the World takes place in what looks like a rundown suburb of Bucharest, an almost countryside-like area, where people live in one-storey
houses. The only shot where the viewer gets a glimpse of the socialist uniform dwellings is when
Vomică, Eva’s boyfriend, shows her an apartment her father had bought in the city. Following
the incident with Ceauşescu’s bust that led to Eva’s dismissal from high school, she broke up
with Vomică because of his failure to stand by her side. When they eventually get back together
and go to see the upper-floor apartment, they look out the window to see blocks of flats.
Although these buildings are usually filmed to give the impression of an oppressive urban space,
indicative of the post-communist penury, here the filming seems slightly more hopeful. This
might be due to the context in which the filming takes place: the couple get together – Eva later
tells her mother she wants to get married – and Eva confesses she likes the apartment because it
is on the upper floor. The characters are filmed from behind while watching the view of the
blocks of flats and the twilight sky, the shot appearing to be a harbinger of freedom.
38
12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) by Corneliu Porumboiu is the last film in the corpus that
deals specifically with the issue of communism and its legacy. The Romanian title of the film, A
fost sau n-a fost? translates as “Was it or Wasn’t it There?”. The question constitutes the main
subject of discussion for a local talk-show that attempts to elucidate the mystery of whether there
was a revolution in that small town. The men invited to the show are Emanoil Pişcoci (Mircea
Andreescu), a retired old man who is well known in his neighbourhood for playing Santa Claus
during primary school Christmas celebrations, and Tiberiu Mănescu (Ion Sapdaru), a secondary
school history teacher who drinks heavily. The moderator is Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban), a
former textile engineer turned television producer who speaks and behaves coarsely but attempts
to be a gentleman on screen, quoting nonsensically from Plato and Heraclitus at the beginning of
the talk-show. The deadpan humour of the characters and the discussions makes up a powerful
satire of contemporary myths of national heroism and victimhood. The very question discussed
during the talk-show is indicative of a certain fear of being deemed a coward for not getting
actively involved in the events of 1989. The attempt of Mr. Mănescu to argue that he went
together with some colleagues to the central square of the city before 12:08 pm, the hour when
Ceauşescu fled Bucharest following the revolution, and hence to demonstrate that there was a
revolution in their town, may also be interpreted as an attempt to save the revolutionary honour
of the town, and perhaps also that of the local intellectuals they represented.
In Police, Adjective (2009) by Corneliu Porumboiu the policeman Cristi (Dragoş Bucur)
is assigned to pursue a teenager for the illegal possession of soft drugs (i.e. hashish) and for
offering them to friends. The viewer sees Cristi carrying out his duties conscientiously, such as
waiting for hours in order to see what his suspects undertake, writing detailed reports on his
activity, or waiting for some of his colleagues to provide him with the data he needs for his
investigation. I emphasized the word “waiting” because much of the film is about this. On the
one hand, it conveys an extraordinary realist impression because it happens in real time, helping
the viewer to experience Cristi’s routine, and on the other hand it realistically and somewhat
comically portrays the Kafkaesque Romanian bureaucracy. This latter aspect is one reason why I
chose to include the film in my analysis. As will also be evident in my interpretation of The
Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) by Cristi Puiu, the representation of public sector workers, be
they policemen or doctors, is one point of connection between the communist past and the
present, since cronyism, unaccountability and lack of transparency are the main institutional ills
that survived the fall of the former regime.
39
Even though Police, Adjective strikes the viewer as realist because of its real-time
unfolding of the action, the authenticity of the situations and dialogues, and on-location filming,
Alex Leo Şerban argues that actually it also performs a critique of the realist style. In his words,
[w]hen he (n.r. the director) takes a really long shot, something tells me that his
intention is not to fill in those shots with realism (a crude realism as opposed to the
pre-fabricated “realism” of conventional films...), but to empty them of their realist
content in order to build something else. He does not want to show us the
transparency of those things (the way in which we can access, through them, as
viewers an essence + transcendence: the experience of duration in the same place);
he wants to durably make them opaque in order to make visible, in their place, an
abstraction. (Dilema Veche July 2009, emphasis added)
In order to better understand what Alex Leo Şerban means by “abstraction”, it should be
mentioned that throughout the film there is a constant engagement with the issue of language.
For example, Cristi’s wife Anca (Irina Săulescu), a teacher, corrects the reports he writes and
singles out a mistake: a word he wrote as two words (nici un) instead of one (niciun). Cristi asks
her why there is this change, to which his wife replies that according to new grammatical rules,
the word is a negative pronominal adjective instead of a conjunction plus an indefinite article.
Although he takes his wife’s word for it, Cristi still looks confused with regard to the rationale
behind making up these rules. The conversation between the two makes the viewer question the
conventions that underlie the use of language and what motivates its employment. Specifically,
the viewer might ask what exactly a negative pronominal adjective is. The meaning of the term
is established within the system of language used and the rules that govern it, but taken
separately the notion is purely abstract.
Taking into consideration the title of the film and this reference to grammar, it could be
argued that the film also makes a point about cinematic language. This seems plausible
especially because the climax of what, at the beginning, might be considered a detective film,
takes place in the office of Cristi’s superior Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) during a dictionaryreading session. As Cristi refuses to arrest the young student for drug dealing because it is too
big a punishment for too unserious a deed, and because his conscience would not allow him to
do this, his superior makes him read out loud from the Romanian Explicative Dictionary the
definitions of “conscience”, “law” and “policeman”. I shall focus on the dialogue between Cristi
and Anghelache later on, but for now it should be added that Cristi is eventually persuaded to
arrest his suspect and proceeds to plan a police set-up.
40
As he explains the plan to his colleagues, he also draws it on a blackboard where the
characters involved in the set-up are marked with x and the camera that records the event with A.
Instead of actually being filmed as it happens, the set-up becomes a filmed abstract drawing. This
can be interpreted as a questioning or a critique of the genre of realist films by the director
through the employment of this style in such a way that it becomes possible to intuit the
conventions behind the idea that the camera can realistically and objectively record events. In all
those long waiting moments that Cristi goes through in the film, one might actually observe that
the on-screen time of waiting is not merely the same as the time of waiting in real life. Instead, it
is an abstraction, in the sense that the actual time of waiting in real life is its referent, which
transforms the one-screen time of waiting into a sign for its real time correspondent.
Finally, in The Death of Mr Lăzărescu (2005), Mr Lăzărescu, the main character, faces
the ignorance of doctors and nurses from various hospitals in Bucharest. For almost the entire
film the poor, retired old man is being dragged in an ambulance from one hospital to another
either because none of the hospitals have enough room to treat him or because the medical
personnel is simply indifferent to his health problems. This situation points to a systemic
problem with the Romanian medical system which might be in part explained through the
institutional ills inherited from communism.
2. Centres of authority
The French Philosopher Jacque Rancière distinguishes between the police system and politics, a
theoretical framework I shall discuss in relation to the proposed corpus of films. Thus, he
explains what he understands by police system in the following way: “Politics is generally seen
as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the
organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this
distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I
propose to call it the police” (Disagreement 28). The logic of the police system assigns people
different places and tasks, and attributes to them ways of speaking and doing: “The police is thus
first an order of bodies that defines the allocations of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of
saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an
order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not,
that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise” (Disagreement 29).
41
He goes on to explain that the police is not merely the force assigned by the state with the
role to protect and enforce the law and to ensure the security of the citizens, nor is it simply the
state that, somehow separate from society, imposes a grid on it dividing it according to the
different activities and functions proper to different social groups (Disagreement 28-9). Instead,
“[t]he distribution of places and roles that defines a police regime stems as much from the
assumed spontaneity of social relations as from the rigidity of state functions” (Disagreement
29). Thus, when people internalize to such an extent the socio-political identity attributed to
them by/within the police regime that they define their social interactions and behaviour in
agreement with it, then the distribution of roles that they confirm and perpetuate in doing this
may also be termed the police regime.
In contrast, by politics Rancière understands an activity that disrupts the configuration of
the social created by the police regime. In his words, politics is
an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the
tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a
presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration – that of the
part who have no part. This break is manifest in a series of actions that reconfigure
the space where parties, parts or lack of parts have been defined. Political activity is
whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s
destination. (Disagreement 29-30, emphasis added).
That is to say, the domination of the police regime is undermined when the part of those who
have no part resists the partition of bodies, ways of speaking, space, time and activities organized
by the police regime (i.e. the tangible configuration). As he elsewhere explains, “[p]olitics exists
when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have
no part” (Disagreement 11).
Rancière builds up his argument regarding what constitutes the part of those who have no
part by referring to the partition of the community in ancient Athens. Thus, wealth was proper to
the oligoï, excellence to the aristoï, whereas the people, the demos, were endowed with freedom
(Disagreement 6). However, freedom is also what the demos share with all the other categories,
and therefore the demos, the mass of people, have no specific quality to make them stand out in
any particular way according to this distribution. As Rancière writes, “[t]he people are nothing
more than the undifferentiated mass of those who have no positive qualification – no wealth, no
virtue – but who are nonetheless acknowledged to enjoy the same freedom as those who do. The
42
people who make up the people are in fact free like the rest” (Disagreement 8). Thus, the demos
is part of the community by virtue of being assigned a “proper lot”, freedom, but at the same
time, it does not really have its own part, since in freedom partake all the other social groups. To
put it differently, it represents the part of those who have no part. However, since freedom is
what all three social groups have in common, and at the same time the “(im)proper property” of
the demos, the demos identifies with the whole of the community (Disagreement 8-9).
As the people (i.e. the demos) are endowed with freedom, they appropriate as their own a
common attribute, shared by the entire community. In doing this, they bring into the community
what Rancière calls a “fundamental wrong”, which is also what shapes the community as a
political community (Disagreement 9). To be more specific, people take the common property of
freedom as their own by virtue of the wrong done to them by the other parts of the community
(i.e. the aristoï, the oligoï) which appropriate qualities such as excellence (of status) and wealth
and thereby leave no proper quality for the demos. As the latter identifies with the community in
the name of what it has in common with it, namely freedom, it also introduces a fundamental
conflict in it: the conflict over the distribution of proper qualities to parties within the
community. In other words, it is this wrong brought into the community by the demos that makes
possible the staging of the community as a political one. One could also say that the rationality
of the political community is conflict over the distribution of what is (in) common. To quote
Rancière,
it is through the existence of this part of those who have no part, of this nothing that
is all, that the community exists as a political community – that is, as divided by a
fundamental dispute, by a dispute to do with the counting of the community’s parts
even more than of their “rights”. The people are not one class among others. They
are the class of the wrong that harms the community and establishes it as a
community of the just and the unjust. (Disagreement 9)
As the quotation already alludes to, justice and injustice have to do with the way that what is in
common within the community is distributed among different parts. To put it differently, justice
is not about the equal partition of shares or about devising means to preserve this equality. More
likely, it is “the choice of the very measuring rod by which each party takes only what is its due”
(Disagreement 5). Moreover, “justice as the basis of community [...] only begins when what is at
issue is what citizens have in common and when the main concern is with the way the forms of
exercising and of controlling the exercising of this common capacity are divided up”
(Disagreement 5). Given the fact that it is the fundamental wrong brought into the community by
43
the demos that constitutes the community as a political community, it seems logical to say that
justice as the basis of a political community, as its fundament, is about challenging the very
measuring instrument used to distribute what is in common, because that distribution engendered
the wrong.
Politics also begets what Rancière terms a reconfiguration of the distribution of the
sensible (Aesthetics 25). In his words,
[p]olitics occurs when those who ‘have no’ time take the time necessary to front up
as inhabitants of a common space and demonstrate that their mouths really do emit
speech capable of making pronouncements on the common which cannot be
reduced to voices signalling pain. This distribution and redistribution of places and
identities, this apportioning and reapportioning of spaces and times, of the visible
and the invisible, and of noise and speech constitutes what I call the distribution of
the sensible (Aesthetics 24-5, emphasis added).
First of all, when he writes about those who have no time, Rancière is probably referring to the
subject of his doctoral dissertation, La Nuit des prolétaires (1981). There, he showed that central
to the emancipation of nineteenth-century workers was “an aesthetic revolution” for which the
issue of the partition of time was key (From Politics 14). Specifically, workers undid the
perception according to which they were supposed to work during the day and sleep at night by
doing something different during the nights (From Politics 14). That is to say, they reconfigured
the distribution of time that was “proper” to them and which did not allow them to have time for
anything else beside work and sleep. Moreover, they disrupted the established understanding of
what activities workers should undertake by “reading and writing not popular and militant, but
‘high’ literature” (The Aesthetic Revolution 2). This amounts to saying that those workers
appropriated a kind of activity that was allotted to a different social group, and in doing this, they
broke out of the social place they were assigned to occupy by the police regime.
It is important to clarify at this point how Rancière employs the notion of aesthetics and
in which way the workers’ practice I just referred to was an aesthetic revolution. He uses
aesthetics in a sense close to the “Kantian idea of ‘a priori forms of sensibility’: it is not a matter
of art and taste; it is first of all, a matter of time and space” (From Politics 13). Elsewhere he
explains that he owes this understanding of aesthetics as a form of experience, and more
precisely as an experience of disconnection, to Kant and Schiller: “[t]his has been conceptualized
by Kant and Schiller in terms of disconnection: there is something that escapes the normal
44
conditions of sensory experience. That is what was at stake in emancipation: getting out of the
ordinary ways of sensory experience” (Art is Going Elsewhere 71). In other words, aesthetics
makes possible an experience that enables people to disconnect from the time and space that
define our position within the police regime, and to reshuffle, so to say, this distribution of the
sensible.
I quoted Rancière above saying that politics happens when those who have no time make
themselves heard as speakers entitled to make pronouncements regarding what is (in) common.
Here he alludes to Aristotle’s argument that human beings are political because they are capable
of speech, whereas animals only have a voice that signals pain and pleasure (Aesthetics 24). He
also raises this issue in Disagreement, by bringing into discussion the fable of Menenius
Agrippa, where it is recounted that consul Menenius made the mistake of recognizing the plebs
as beings capable of speech, of recognizing their voice as speech instead of mere noise (21-5).
Thereby the council acknowledged that the patricians and the plebs could engage in debate, that
they are equals by virtue of having speech in common. The problem that arises from this story,
and that Rancière emphasizes, is figuring out who is deemed able to speak, and who is silenced
for merely producing noise (Aesthetics 24).
For Rancière, politics also has to do with processes of subjectification, with how the
subject is formed. As he puts it, “[p]olitics is a matter of subjects or, rather, modes of
subjectification. By subjectification I mean the production through a series of actions of a body
and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience,
whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience” (Disagreement
35). This political subjectification begets a subject that was not foreseen within the police
regime, and as it becomes visible, it interrupts the domination of the police logic that assigns preestablished identities to people. Rancière further clarifies that “[a]ny subjectification is a
disidentification, removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of the subject space
where anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where
a connection is made between having a part and having no part” (Disagreement 34). Thus,
political subjectification does not produce new fixed identities or social categories; it opens up a
space where the boundaries imposed by the police regime are constantly undermined. What the
subjects created through this mode of subjectification have in common is that, in breaking the
distribution of bodies and identities engendered by the police logic, they have become “instances
of experience of a dispute” (Disagreement 36). Thus, politics creates dissensus, which exposes
45
the consensus that the police regime attempts to preserve through its distribution of bodies,
places and time and through the fixed identities it maintains.
In view of these theories, in the two films where the action is situated under the
communist regime, namely 432 and How I Spent the End of the World, the police regime is
represented primarily by the system of totalitarian rule. Its discretionary authority regulated
every aspect of human existence, as I discussed in the first chapter. In 432, the most obvious
example of totalitarian policy meant to limit the activity of the body and to assign people specific
roles was the Decree banning abortions which was passed by Ceauşescu in 1966. Corollary to
this decree was the unavailability of any contraceptives. One of the purposes of this policy was
to increase the population. The situations in which Găbiţa and Otilia find themselves are made
possible by this law. Notwithstanding Găbiţa’s own will, it is the illegality of abortions that
causes the two friends to look for someone who would be willing to undertake this procedure
unlawfully.
As Otilia is more pragmatic and more knowledgeable about all the underground practices
that eased people’s way under communism, she is the one that plans everything before the
procedure. The way this process develops in the film speaks volumes about the social hierarchies
formed under communism, and about the obsequious nature of communal relations. For instance,
Găbiţa has to book a hotel room, where the medical procedure should take place. Although
presumably she had made a reservation by telephone, when Otilia goes to the hotel in order to
pay for the room, the receptionist tells her that reservations can only be made in person. During
the dialogue, the receptionist behaves in a patronizing way, displaying an indifferent attitude as
if in answering Otilia’s questions she is doing a great personal favour rather than her professional
duty. Beside this, the period of time it takes Otilia to clarify what seems like a banal problem,
namely a reservation for a room, appears almost endless, as the following dialogue proves:
Otilia: I booked a room under the name Draguţ.
Receptionist: You made a reservation? When?
O: Today, this evening in fact.
R: No, when did you make it?
O: Last Tuesday.
R: There’s nothing in the book.
O: A friend booked it, I’m sure it was Tuesday.
R: You know whom she spoke to?
O: No, but they took her name and address.
46
R: What was the name again?
O: Drăguţ.
R: No, there’s no Drăguţ here.
Maybe my colleague will recognize you.
O: But I told you I didn’t make the reservation. My friend called and a man answered.
R: She telephoned?
O: Yes.
R: So she didn’t come herself...
O: I’m not sure...
R: That way...Anyone could call...Was the booking confirmed? Yesterday?
O (a bit restless): Why should it be confirmed?
R: Don’t make that tone with me. Reservations must be confirmed 24 hours in advance.
O: The man didn’t tell her anything.
R: I doubt that.
By asking all these questions and postponing the moment when the situation would be
clarified, the receptionist is showing Otilia who has the upper hand. The dialogue establishes a
hierarchy between the two, by emphasizing Otilia’s dependence on the good will of the
receptionist, who, in a final display of authority, refuses to give her any room by claiming that
the hotel had received a big delegation earlier that day. Moreover, the receptionist constantly and
comically tries to prove to Otilia – the customer – that she is wrong, that she is to blame for not
having been able to secure a room. This is a recurrent feature that characterizes interactions
between characters in the films and various employees, who by virtue of the authority conferred
by their job, petty as it may be, always attempt to make those characters feel guilty. The
exploitation of guilt secures them domination, as is evident when Mr. Bebe, the abortionist,
blames Gabiţa for her pregnancy by saying “It wasn’t me the one who had fun”. Similarly, in
present-day Romania Mr. Lăzărescu is constantly blamed by doctors and nurses for his poor
health as he goes from hospital to hospital in order to receive medical care.
Moreover, the dialogue illustrates how, as Rancière argued, the logic of the police regime
becomes manifest in spontaneous relations between people, and not simply in the activity of the
state apparatus. The receptionist has internalized to such an extent the police distribution of the
social that she behaves in a controlling and suspicious way towards Otilia, thereby perpetuating
the police logic. The lady Otilia encounters at the second hotel behaves in a similar way, in that
47
she becomes willing to give her a room only when Otilia puts a pack of Kent cigarettes on the
reception desk and leaves it there, under her own identity card, for the receptionist to notice.
Mr. Bebe, the awful abortionist the two friends contact in order for him to help them, is a
most despicable character. He takes advantage of Găbiţa’s vulnerable situation and asks both
young women to sleep with him as a form of payment for his services. Even though they promise
him more money, he brutally retorts that he would not risk going to prison – the punishment for
performing abortions – for money. Mr Bebe successfully behaves according to the logic of the
police regime, because he is in agreement with establishing the women’s body as a site of
discretionary control. He is aware that Găbiţa’s pregnancy is advanced, that she does not have
much choice, and therefore he manipulates the young women’s fear and need for help in
pressuring them to agree with his requirements. One might argue that in breaking the law
prohibiting the termination of pregnancy, Mr. Bebe acts against the constraints imposed by the
state apparatus on women’s bodies. However, as I mentioned above, he behaves according to the
same logic of the police because he subjects the two women to his own police regime, so to say.
The night Găbiţa and Otilia go through this terrifying experience, Otilia also has to attend
the birthday party of her boyfriend’s mother. There, she is made to sit at the dinner table together
with her boyfriend’s family and their friends. The long, fixed shot makes the gathering look
crowded and suffocating, especially from Otilia’s point of view. The conversation at the table
constitutes a microcosm of human relations in a heavily surveilled and controlled society, where
in the most intimate settings, like a family dinner, the subjects discussed range from the banal to
the absurd. While the guests talk about meatballs and mashed potatoes, the viewer gets the
impression, in part because of the expression of powerlessness on Otilia’s face, that the primary
topic of conversation is, in fact, the unspoken-of communist regime.
This scene is also a brilliant rendition of the various pre-conceived ideas and unwritten
laws of survival that governed communist society. Thus, the viewer finds out that the parents of
Adi (Alex Potocean), who is Otilia’s boyfriend, are currently managing to find better food
because they have connections and that girls should be smart enough to marry while they attend
university, because otherwise they will go to the countryside and marry either the village’s
professor or the priest. This latter piece of “wisdom” alludes to the fact that after graduation,
young professionals were usually sent to work in the countryside as part of Ceauşescu’s plan to
level the differences between cities and villages. The ones that were spared this transfer were
usually the ones that had connections within the party’s nomenclature.
48
As Otilia answers the other guests’ questions, the viewer finds out that her parents are
factory workers. As a response to this, one guest says immediately that most of the times “simple
people have more common sense”. The presupposition behind the guest’s word of “consolation”
for Otilia is that factory workers are simple people by comparison to the entourage at the table,
made up primarily of doctors. Additionally, the guest assumes that Otilia should be secretly
ashamed of her parents, and he thereby displays his own sense of superiority relative to them.
This points to the importance of social status under the former regime, when a radical attempt to
level down differences between people paradoxically led to the accentuated significance of
social hierarchies.
The dinner table scene also reveals the ways in which the logic of the police regime
pervaded human interactions. The guests give verdicts regarding the time when women should
marry, they place people in categories and make judgements about what generally defines them.
One of them even tells Otilia that young ladies should not smoke in front of their boyfriends’
parents. Probably most of these ideas also circulate in democratic milieus, but in the historical
context of the film they gain greater significance because they show to what extent people can be
influenced by and re-enforce social control. Not only are the totalitarian policies of the regime
constrictive, but also the human relations they engender.
Taking into consideration that the receptionists, Mr. Bebe and the dinner guests may
constitute different nuclei of power that function according to the logic of the police regime, it
could be argued that this regime is internally divided. Therefore, the distinction between the
police regime and politics may not be that clear cut because the various sources of power within
the former may contest each other. For instance, Mr. Bebe breaks a totalitarian law and some of
the dinner guests make some subtly critical remarks about the regime, such as the one
concerning the availability of better food when one has better connections. The latter comment
alludes to the extreme poverty that people endured in the last years of Ceauşescu’s rule. Thus,
there seems to be dissent from different parts pertaining to the police regime. In spite of this
“fragmentation” of the police regime, Mr. Bebe, the receptionist and the whole network that
disseminates fear and attempts to subjugate Găbiţa and Otilia work together to secure a most
constrictive environment for the two friends.
Given the oppressive environment the two young women live in, it is worth inquiring
whether any political activity, in Rancière’s sense, occurs in the film. Otilia’s decision to stand
by her friend’s side until the end, even though this solidarity entailed an agreement with Mr.
Bebe’s awful demands, opens up possibilities for thinking and behaving differently from the
49
other characters. To put it differently, Otilia’s solidarity may be considered a political act
because it makes possible a subject that does not fit the social grid imposed by the police regime.
In being motivated by something different than self-interest, Otilia interrupts the totalitarian
police regime that instilled suspicion, fear and resentment in human relations. As many people
were working as informers for the secret police under communism, much of the trust between
people was eroded, because one could never know for sure who was reliable and who was not. In
contrast, Otilia disrupts the police regime and the logic according to which it produced subjects
by going through some terrible events in order to help her friend.
Eva, one of the main characters from How I Spent the End of the World, performs a
similar kind of break with the logic of the police regime. When she and her boyfriend Vomică
break Ceauşescu’s bust she is required by the director of the high school and the party activist
affiliated with the institution to confess her “guilt” in order to be forgiven. As she refuses to
denounce herself, she is expelled and sent to a low-ranked professional school, a common form
of punishment for students who undertook any kind of “subversive” activity, no matter how
petty. Ceauşescu’s bust had actually been broken accidentally by her boyfriend. However, he
was the son of the party activist working within their high school, so he easily escaped
punishment. When Eva is brought in front of the high school’s council in order for her to
acknowledge her guilt, she refuses to speak and to answer any of the questions she is asked. In
being silent, she breaks with the police logic that assigned her a particular kind of speech,
namely, the one that presupposes guilt for her so-called misdeed and humility in front of the
communist authorities. She thus inaugurates a new way of speaking with the authorities, through
silence. Even though she is forced to occupy a given place in society, that is, in a professional
school for pariahs and low-qualified students, her decision to go there is the result of political
resistance.
In one scene of the film Eva’s father, dressed in a similar way to Ceauşescu, imitates the
way the dictator speaks in a sort of parody witnessed by Eva and her brother Lalalilu. This may
be regarded as an act of dissent, since the father appropriates Ceauşescu’s way of speaking in
order to turn it against him. However, in merely doing this in front of an audience that consists of
his children, he also proves that he cannot go further than mocking the dictator privately in his
activity of dissent. In fact, such parodies delivered in very close family circles were not singular.
By contrast, I would argue that 7-year-old Lalalilu engages in an activity with a much
greater political significance, in Rancière understanding. The boy also appropriates the antiCeauşescu discourse when he reaches the conclusion that Eva wanted to flee the country because
50
Ceauşescu upset her. His sister’s initial attempt to escape the regime made him so sad that he
quite seriously planned to kill himself. However, as she gives up her plan and returns home, he
devises a plan, together with his friends, to assassinate the dictator. He believes he could do this
when Ceauşescu visits his school. As he is part of a group of children that will sing for the ruler,
he reckons he would be quite close to Ceauşescu so that he could accomplish his plan. Clearly,
much of Lalalilu’s strategy is the product of his rich imagination and of childhood dreams of
adventures. However, he speaks badly of the dictator many times in the film, for which he is
scolded by Eva and his mother because he is not supposed to speak his mind about this subject.
No one is, in fact. According to the logic of the police regime, children should not concern
themselves with politics; they are assigned other activities (e.g. playing), and other ways of
speaking. By engaging in his own way with the surrounding political realities, Lalalilu’s plan
constitutes a political activity, albeit symbolic, because nobody expects him to go through with
it. Even though his plan is a product of his imagination, it poses a threat to the police regime
because the child’s imagination cannot be regulated and categorized.
Towards the end of the film, when the revolution will have occurred, a new order of
things becomes visible. Vomică’s father, the party activist, attempts to leave his house in the
suburbs of Bucharest to move into his newly bought apartment in the city (the same apartment
Vomică showed to Eva). However, as he loads his luggage in the car, he faces the wrath of his
street neighbours, who now have the chance to take revenge for the fact that the party activist
kept them under surveillance. Vomică defends him, but eventually the neighbours set his car on
fire. Gradually, the category party activist will become stigmatized.
12:08 East of Bucharest is the only film in the analysed corpus that, among other things,
directly engages with the memory of communism and the revolution. The talk-show moderated
by Virgil Jderescu looks like a caricature of the many TV shows that dealt and still deal with this
topic, especially around Christmas, the date when the revolution took place. The film employs
deadpan humour in order to illustrate a change of public discourse, from the authority of the
communist rule and discourse, to the authority conveyed by the anti-communist one in presentday Romania.
The fact that an obscure local TV channel broadcasts a talk-show produced by an
amateur attempting to elucidate if there was a revolution in that small town is already markedly
absurd. There is no point in inquiring about this issue except in order to gain prestige as a result
of engagement with a “heavy” topic such as the revolution, and to brand the respective talk-show
as one that deals with “top-notch” intellectual matters. Mr. Jderescu’s discourse at the beginning
51
of the programme, motivating the choice of the topic, is immensely comical as it illustrates the
moderator’s yearning for an intellectual veneer. Before the TV show, the viewer can actually
spot the moderator in his apartment searching for a dictionary of mythology and it will become
clearer why he needed it in the following quote from the film:
Mr. Jderescu (speaking to the audience): Perhaps many of you ask yourselves
why we are making this TV show, on this topic, after such a long time. Well, I
believe that according to the great myth of Plato’s cave, people mistook the sun
for a simple fire...I believe that my duty as a journalist is that if we got out of this
cave, not to have entered (sic) a larger cave where we mistake the sun for a straw
fire. I think there is no present without a past and neither is there a future without
a present. This is why if the past is clearer, than so will be the present and the
future. In contrast though, Heraclitus said that us people cannot dive twice into the
waters of the same river. Nevertheless, let us try, dear guests, and dive back in
time 16 years ago for the sake of truth and a better future.
Spiced up with Mr. Jderescu’s self-important manner of speaking, the discourse about the
significance of the past for the present and the future bears a ridiculous and comical resemblance
with the one employed in the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the
Romanian Communist Dictatorship, even though the document was issued after the film was
released. On the one hand, the topic of the talk-show and the way it is explored are indicative of
the proliferation of memory discourses of the communist past and of the revolution in postcommunist Romania. On the other hand, the film also points to the uses and abuses of the topic
for various purposes. Mr. Jderescu appropriates a widespread memory discourse and, together
with his guests, makes a mockery out of it. However, their mockery is not meant to expose some
sort of excess of this discourse. On the contrary, they take themselves very seriously, which
makes the whole situation all the more comical. Nevertheless, what the film does, with its
minimalist style and its crude way of rendering their discussion, is to lay open both the
characters’ abuses of the topic, and a more general inflation of memory discourses.
Moreover, it deconstructs a certain myth of collective victimhood and heroism under
communism and during the revolution respectively. For example, Mr. Pişcoci, one of the talkshow guests, says that he went out to the central square of the town after he found out that
Ceauşescu’s regime ended because he did not want his wife to believe he was a coward. Besides
this, Mr. Mănescu claims that there was a revolution in their town because he and his fellow
professors went out to the central square before Ceauşescu left Bucharest. There, the self-entitled
52
revolutionaries were presumably beaten by police officers. In other words, Mr. Mănescu wants
to be included in that community of suffering, of revolutionary heroes, that brought about the fall
of communism. However, in trying to make the revolution a matter of collective national
heroism, he downplays the role of those who actually died or were injured under the former
regime or in 1989. In fact, the whole talk-show does that, as is evident when a woman enters into
a live conversation with Mr. Jderescu towards the end of the programme. She tells them that her
eldest son died in the revolution in Bucharest, and Mr. Jderescu’s response to this speaks
volumes about the ridiculousness of the TV show: “We are sorry to hear about that madam, but
we wanted to find out if there was a revolution in our town”. The lady goes on to explain that she
did not call them in order to criticize them for anything, but simply to tell them that it is snowing
outside and that they should enjoy the snow because the next day it will be muddy again.
In view of Rancière’s distinction between the police regime and politics, in present-day
Romania as represented in the film, anti-communism frames a certain police regime. In this
order of things, certain ways of speaking are prohibited to some people, as in the case of former
party members or activists who are being condemned for using an anti-communist discourse. A
good illustration of this point is precisely the argument used by the current president of
Romania’s opponents in the 2009 elections, which stated that as a former party member himself,
the president does not have the moral authority to portray himself as a staunch anti-communist.
Another example might be the Lustration Law 1 passed by the Romanian Parliament in April
2010, stating that it is prohibited for former high-ranking communist party members to hold
public office for a definite period of time. To put it differently, the law actually bans this whole
social segment of the nomenclature from public service.
However, Rancière’s concept of police regime does not seem entirely fit for giving an
account of this situation, because there is also a question of transitional justice involved in the
post-communist Romanian socio-political context, as I showed in the previous chapter. It seems
that the totalitarian police regime (and here I use the word in Rancière’s understanding and not
synonymous with political system) would lose its specificity if one argued that nowadays (i.e. in
the new liberal-democratic state) the distribution of ways of speaking and being I just described
is produced by a similar police regime. By this I mean that there is an important difference of
degree between the two, both qualitatively and quantitatively. To explain why this is so, it is
1
“Lustration” or “lustrace” are terms widely known in post-totalitarian and post-dictatorial countries coming from
the Latin word for “ritual purification”. It basically describes any laws temporarily banning the people who had run
the old regime or/and those who have collaborated with them from holding important governmental posts in the new
democratic regimes; in former communist countries the term “decommunization” is also used to designate similar
measures.
53
important to return to Rancière’s understanding of police regime as a logic that assigns to
individuals identities, roles and ways of speaking or acting. In this latter aspect both liberal
democratic and totalitarian police regimes do this, but the difference is that in the former the
extent to which one can challenge the assigned roles and ways of speaking (i.e. performing
politics in Rancière’s understanding) is much higher. For example, in a totalitarian police regime
like the Romanian socialist state, a university professor would not be able to defend bourgeois
liberalism without severe repercussions both professionally (being banned from academia) and in
many cases physically (being imprisoned). Needless to say, a professor advocating the
advantages of communist systems in a capitalist liberal democratic police regime would not face
the same challenges.
Interestingly, Rancière’s theory fails to note that the possibility to engage in politics may
actually be dependent on the type of police apparatus present in a police regime. Thus, in
totalitarian police regimes the apparatus of surveillance, control and repression is not kept within
clear and binding limits, nor is it publicly accountable or susceptible to open criticism. The
opposite is regularly the case within liberal democratic police regimes where this apparatus is
bounded by constitutional limits, susceptible to being changed or scaled down through
democratic procedures, and under continuous scrutiny from the judiciary, as well as from public
opinion and the press 1. Also, in totalitarian police regimes the amount of surveillance and
repression is much higher than in liberal democratic ones, pervading all aspects of social and
economic life 2.
However, as these aspects are illustrated very well by the films themselves, it can be said
that these films speak back to Rancière’s thinking and inform it. To explain, I argued above that
his theory does not take into account the role played by the police apparatus in making it possible
for individuals to engage in “politics”, thereby obscuring an essential qualitative difference
between totalitarian police regimes and liberal democratic ones. If one takes into account the
restrictive conditions for intellectual production in communist Romania, one realizes that the
1
For example, the Washington Post has recently published an extensive and critical journalistic investigation into
the erratic expansion of the American security complex after the terrorist attacks on 9/11
(http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america). Nevertheless, one can argue that even if limits are imposed
in liberal democratic police regimes, these have been broken many times, such as the abuses committed under the
former Bush administration at the Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib detention centres. These abuses however, apart from
their being subject to intense and open criticism from citizens, politicians and the media, are exceptions to the rules
normally governing these regimes. In contrast, unlimited power wielded by the police apparatus is the rule in
totalitarian police regimes.
2
These differences might help explain why, for example, the civil or the gay rights movements have managed to
challenge assigned roles and discourses in numerous liberal democratic police regimes. By contrast, it is ironic that
when a totalitarian police regime begins to be more open to reform and changes of discourses, it soon starts to
disintegrate and resemble its opposite, like the case of the (former) Soviet Union.
54
films could simply not have been produced in a totalitarian police regime. Therefore, their mere
existence is also a testimony to the above-mentioned difference between the two kinds of police
regimes.
To return to an allusion I made at the beginning of this chapter, in Police, Adjective, also
directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, there is quite a straightforward connection between the issue of
language and speech and the issue of social control. This is best illustrated by the scene in which
Cristi’s superior, Anghelache, asks him to read out loud from the dictionary the definitions of the
words “conscience”, “police” and “law”. Cristi is made to do this because he refuses to plan a
set-up in order to arrest a young student who smokes soft drugs. He motivates this refusal by
saying that arresting him would burden his conscience. The following dialogue is explanatory:
Anghelache: Tell me what “conscience” means for you.
Cristi: It’s so I won’t be sorry.
A: Define the word “conscience” (emphasis added).
C: That’s what I’m trying to say.
It’s something that would make me feel bad.
A: Is that all?
C: In fact, it’s something that stops me from doing something bad.
A: So it’s something you don’t know what it is.
C: I do know, but you’re putting me on the spot and...
A: Alright, I’ll let you off the spot. Please think it through and tell me what “conscience”
is for you (at this point the superior asks Cristi’s colleague to write on the table Cristi’s
answer) (emphasis added).
C: Conscience is something...within me...that stops me from doing something bad...
A: What do you mean bad?
C: That I’d afterwards regret.
At this point Anghelache asks his secretary for the Romanian Explicative Dictionary and then
tells Cristi to look up the above-mentioned words in it. After Cristi finishes reading out the
definitions of “law” and “conscience”, Anghelache tells him that the moral law in his head that
prevents him from doing the set-up because otherwise he would have pangs of remorse actually
goes against the law of the state that he, as a policeman, should respect and enforce. He then asks
him if breaking this law of the state would not burden his conscience. Cristi replies that it would
not because he believes the law concerning the consumption of soft drugs will change soon.
Anghelache remarks that Cristi is a “grave case” and explains to him that if everyone behaved
55
according to the moral law in their head, this would lead to chaos. Furthermore, he accuses Cristi
of having forgotten “what he is”, namely, a policeman, and as a final form of “help” he asks
Cristi to read the definition of “police”.
This detailed rendition of the discussion between the two makes visible a police regime,
in Rancière’s terms, that is not restricted merely to the police apparatus that Cristi and
Anghelache are part of. This regime works through dictionaries, state laws and a certain
professional hierarchy, such as the one between Cristi and his superior, which dictates ways of
behaving and which assigns fixed identities – Cristi is by (dictionary) definition a policeman.
However, Anghelache and Cristi do not seem to disagree simply on the meaning of some words.
They disagree on what constitutes language worthy of being heard and spoken.
This seems to be a situation of disagreement as understood by Rancière. In his words,
“[w]e should take disagreement to mean a determined kind of speech situation: one in which one
of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying.
Disagreement is not the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white
but does not understand that the other is saying the same thing in the name of whiteness”
(Disagreement x). He further explains on the following page that “[d]isagreement occurs
wherever contention over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of speech
situation” (xi). In other words, the rationality of the speech situation is disagreement about what
speaking itself is, about what counts as speech. Disagreement has to do with what comes as a
sign, and not with signification. Moreover, by extension, disagreement also means contention
over who is considered to be producing understandable speech within the political community
and who should be silenced because s/he is a source of noise.
As I already alluded to earlier in the chapter, Rancière’s concept of politics refers to those
activities that reveal the way in which the police regime distributes ways of speaking and being
among people. What is considered understandable speech is not an undisputed matter, as
Anghelache tries to demonstrate to Cristi by appealing to the dictionary. In fact, it is a
contentious issue because it is indicative of the conflict within the political community over how
to distribute what it is in common. In Rancière’s words, “[p]olitics exists because the logos is
never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech:
the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what
is just, whereas some other emission is merely perceived as a noise signalling pleasure or pain,
consent or revolt” (Disagreement 23). To put it differently, politics makes visible the distribution
created by the police regime according to which some people are regarded as capable of
56
speaking about what is just and what is unjust, whereas others are not because their speech does
not count as speech, but as noise.
Anghelache actually tells Cristi before starting the session of dictionary reading that
“they don’t speak the same language”. Indeed, the superior asks for a definition of the word
“conscience”, as written in the dictionary, because the language framed by the dictionary is the
established system of signs that governs the way in which people may understand themselves.
Moreover, it is also an instrument for producing social consensus about what counts as speakable
language. This idea is similar to Judith Butler’s account regarding the way that subjects are
produced: “To become a subject means to be subjected to a set of implicit and explicit norms that
govern the kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject” (133). In Rancière’s
terminology, the police regime produces subjects by ensuring consensus with regard to what
speaking is.
The last definition that Cristi reads is the one for “police”. As Cristi reads it out loud, the
viewer is shown the page of the dictionary. Two meanings are decipherable on the page:
Police, (adjective): 1. Novel (or film) that illustrates criminal facts that are more
or less mysterious, whose secret is ultimately revealed through the ingenuity of a
policeman or a detective. 2. (About states or political regimes): that rely on the
police and on gendarmes and which exercise control through repressive methods.
These definitions shed some light on the choice of the film’s title. One interpretation,
following the second sense of police (adjective), may be that the film offers a glimpse of a
society policed, among many other methods, by means of the boundaries that define what
constitutes understandable language and speech. Moreover, it is a society where the traces of the
former communist regime are still visible. Among these the viewer might observe the urban
space; the desolated police offices reminiscent of the communist penury; and the various social
hierarchies evident in the interactions between Cristi and his colleagues. For instance, throughout
the film Cristi has to ask his colleagues for help with various documents he needs in his
investigation. Most of them provide him with the documents, even if Cristi almost has to beg and
to wait quite a while until they are willing to help him. However a certain co-worker, Costi,
blames his failure to collect some information that Cristi needed on lack of time. In a different
context, this would be a pertinent excuse, but as the dialogue between the two unfolds, the
viewer finds out that Costi is actually disturbed by the fact that Cristi asked him for his urgent
help, as the following dialogue illustrates:
57
Cristi: Hello Costi! Did you get those details for me?
Costi (looking busy while working on something): I haven’t had the time.
Cristi: I told you it was urgent.
Costi: Do you think that I work for you?
Cristi: That’s not the point.
Costi: That is the point. You come here with deadlines, orders...even send Vali
around...Give me a break.
Cristi: You’re exaggerating.
Costi: I’m not exaggerating at all.
Cristi: How often have I given you deadlines?
Costi: If you keep me talking, I won’t do anything for you today!
In making Cristi uncertain about whether he will help him or not, Costi is trying to establish a
hierarchy between him and his colleague. He wants to have the upper hand, to assume the status
of a person who cannot be disturbed with all sorts of requests all the time. Similar to the way the
first receptionist in 432 refuses to help Otilia and postpones the moment when she will clarify
the problem of the reservation, Costi portrays himself as a source of authority, as a person with
whom one should behave properly by acknowledging this authority, if one needs help. The same
sort of interaction is also to be found in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, as I will exemplify later.
The second interpretation regards the title as a deceiving label informing the viewer about
the genre of the film s/he will be watching, namely, a detective film. However, the logic of this
genre could not easily explain why some shots in the film include the filmed dictionary pages or
the filmed reports that Cristi writes for his superiors. I would argue that those shots attempt to
reveal the materiality of linguistic signs, to lay words bare in their abstractness. The film
interrupts the logic of the police regime that produces subjects through consensus about what
constitutes speech and speakable language by showing what words and letters look like. The film
is not a detective film in the first sense of police (adjective), even though it could be mistaken for
one since it does contain a policeman who strives to solve a case. However, this case does not
involve much mystery and the policeman is no Sherlock Holmes. Beside this, the climax of this
faux detective film is the scene when Cristi reads out loud definitions from the dictionary to his
superior, which is not quite what one would expect from the genre.
In fact, the film is a story about the second sense of police (adjective), namely, about a
police regime that controls society by means of various oppressive means. This police regime
can equally be the democratic post-communist society where people are controlled in different
58
ways, and the former regime that is still traceable in human relations, the organization of urban
space, and in various mores reminiscent of communal relations under communism.
The film performs a political activity in Rancière’s terminology because it unveils the
means by which the police regime functions (i.e. through deciding whose speech is deemed
intelligible). Moreover, through the visual representation of words, it suggests that the dictionary
language used by the police regime in order to establish what constitutes understandable speech
is not the only valid one. On screen a dictionary page simply becomes an image with an equal
status to the image that shows a page from Cristi’s reports. To go even further, the film also
seems to critique what may be termed its own dominant cinematic “language”, namely, realism.
The understanding of what constitutes realism in cinema is also determined by a police regime
that establishes the kind of aesthetics that truthfully renders reality on screen and the conventions
defining that aesthetics. The long shots where Cristi is following or waiting for his suspects
strike the viewer as the most realist ones because waiting for ten minutes without anything
happening truly feels like real life. But these established ways in which to render a story on film
in a realistic manner are also conventions that guide viewers and critics in categorizing these
films as being realist.
To broaden this critique of the notion of realism I will refer to the film scholar and
producer Colin MacCabe who argues that realism is explained in most debates about the topic as
discourse adequate to the real, whether arguments come from realists who support this view, or
from anti-realists who claim that the real in its complexity cannot be fully rendered in any
discourse (Realism 7-8). MacCabe argues that the notion of the real that lies behind this
understanding of realism has been decisively influenced by the classic realist novel of the 19th
century (Realism 8). He uses the term “classic realist text” as applicable to both novels and films
and critiques it by exposing its structure (Realism 8). The reason why he uses this structure to
analyse films as well is the considerable influence the classic realist novel has had on film
production (8).
Thus, MacCabe explains the structure of the classic realist text in the following way: “[a]
classic realist text may be defined as one in which there is a hierarchy among the discourses
which compose the text and this hierarchy is defined in terms of an empirical notion of truth”
(Realism 8). He illustrates this hierarchy by pointing to the difference between the language in
inverted commas in the classic realist novel and the narrative prose which establishes the truth of
the language in inverted commas (object language he calls it) and the degree to which what the
object language maintains is adequate to the real (Realism 8). The narrative prose functions as a
59
“metalanguage” that appears to be devoid of materiality in the sense that it conveys the
impression of a perfect identification with the real (Realism 8). Whereas the example of the
inverted commas used to designate the object language reveals the materiality of that language
and in doing this opens that text for interpretation, the metalanguage looks immaterial in its
allegedly truthful representation of the real, appearing thus to convey definitive truths (MacCabe,
Realism 9).
With MacCabe’s ideas in mind, one can read Police, Adjective as a film that undermines
the logic of the classic realist text by providing the viewer with images of dictionary pages, of
Cristi’s report to his superiors or of his definition of conscience written on the blackboard in
Anghelache’s office. Anghelache refers to the dictionary for the definitions of the words
“conscience”, “policeman” and “law” because the dictionary is considered to be a sort of
metalanguage, to use MacCabe’s concept, which establishes the truth of both Cristi’s and his
own words. Moreover, he uses this language in order to demonstrate to Cristi how incoherent his
language is (for instance, as the quotation given earlier reveals, when Cristi gives his own
definition of what “conscience” means, Anghelache makes fun of him). Nevertheless, since the
materiality of the dictionary language is exposed by providing the audience with an image of the
dictionary page, this language gains an equal status to the one used by Cristi to write his reports,
of which the viewer is also provided with an image.
While Police, Adjective performs a critique of the classical realist text, to use MacCabe’s
concept, I would argue that it takes the critique of the notion of realism even further than this.
Specifically, it questions the very idea that “the real” is transparent to the recording camera. That
is to say, it challenges the visual element in the notion of realism according to which what the
camera simply records, ideally without any human intervention, is “the real”. This criticism is
also articulated by MacCabe in another article, where he refers to André Bazin’s understanding
of realism. In his words, “[b]y the criteria of one of the great realist critics, André Bazin, for a
film to be realistic, it must locate its characters and characters in a determinate social and
historical setting. Most Hollywood films, it could be argued, fail to do this and are, therefore,
unrealistic. But Bazin’s characterization of realism is much more centrally concerned with a
transparency of form which is reduplicated within Hollywood filmic practice” (Principles 9).
Police, Adjective undermines this alleged transparency of form in the last scene of the film, when
Cristi draws on the blackboard the plan of the police set-up. While his words describe a perfectly
coherent plan, his drawing on the blackboard appears to be a sketch that means nothing, which is
also to say that it can mean anything. The image is severed from the words. Instead of an
60
elaborate, detective-like pursuit, the set-up is a rudimentary sketch, and therefore the scene
contradicts the alleged transparency of form.
In The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu the nuclei of authority are primarily the medical
personnel. Not only do doctors and nurses display their authority in relation to Mr. Lăzărescu,
but they also do so in their interactions with co-workers who have a lower professional rank. In
this film the hospital in itself may be considered a police regime, in Rancière’s understanding,
because it makes visible a whole network of professional and social relations within which
hierarchies, identities and ways of speaking are clearly distributed among people.
First of all, when Mr. Lăzărescu reaches each of the hospitals he goes to and informs the
doctors about his symptoms, he is not really being listened to. Even though he insists on telling
the physicians that the main reasons why he called the ambulance were his splitting headache
and his recurrent vomiting, the doctors pay more attention to the fact that he smells of alcohol,
that he has an over-sized liver and that he might have a colon problem. For instance, the
ambulance assistant asks him: “Did any specialist see your colon?” to which question Lăzărescu
replies “My colon is fine!” Later on, when Lăzărescu arrives at the first hospital, annoyed by the
fact that the doctor seems to ignore the symptoms he is drawing attention to, he shouts: “I said
my head hurts!”
Furthermore, the first two doctors keep asking him almost the same questions about his
medical history, which is mainly irrelevant to the symptoms Mr Lăzărescu complains about.
Once the doctors find out he underwent surgery for an ulcer fourteen years before, they start
reproaching him that he drinks alcohol in spite of this health problem. Moreover, they initially
ignore the headache symptom because they assume it is the consequence of drinking alcohol. I
will analyse the drinking motif in the film later on more closely, particularly because Mr
Lăzărescu is constantly being preached to because of it. But for now, it is should be noted that
the doctors disregard what the patient has to say.
The fact that Mr. Lăzărescu does not have a voice in this context could also be explained
by his status in society as a dying person. In his essay “The Unnamable”, Michel de Certeau
refers to the “uselessness” of the dying patient for societies entrenched in the capitalist system
focused on productivity. Thus, he writes that “[a]long with the lazy man, and more than he, the
dying is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no
longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others” (190). In this light, since Mr
Lăzărescu does not produce something for his community anymore, he is silenced during the
61
decision-making process regarding his own condition. As de Certeau argues, the dying patient is
the breach in the Western discourse centred on efficiently accomplishing tasks (191). Therefore,
the dying person “is censured, deprived of language, wrapped up in a shroud of silence: the
unnameable” (de Certeau 191). Significantly, Mr Lăzărescu is not addressed by his name by
some of the medical staff in the film. Instead, he is called ‘grandpa’ in a disparaging voice. Thus,
Mr Lăzărescu loses his individuality to become just a generic old person, a social category.
Additionally, his drinking problem, of which he is constantly reminded by doctors, family and
neighbours throughout the film, is criticised because it goes against the moral standards and
work rationale of society. Not only is he immoral because he is dying, in the sense de Certeau
mentions, but also because he drinks often. Mr Lăzărescu’s response to this persistent critique is
telling – “I drink out of my own pocket!” – refusing thus to be considered a parasite for society,
draining the resources of the state.
De Certeau’s argument is similar to the way Rancière explains the distribution of proper
places, identities and ways of speaking within the police regime. As a dying patient, Mr.
Lăzărescu does not really produce understandable speech, but noise and this is why his doctors
behave as if they do not (have to) listen to him. His place within society is defined by exclusion
from it. This phenomenon is not really particular to post-communist Romanian society. The very
production of medical knowledge excludes Mr Lăzărescu from his end-of-life course mainly
because determining diagnoses and prescribing treatments are the prerogative of physicians.
Michel Foucault’s perspective on the medical gaze is informative in this respect: “it [the medical
gaze] is caught up in an endless reciprocity. It is directed upon that which is visible in the disease
– but on the basis of the patient, who hides this visible element even as he shows it;
consequently, in order to know, he must recognize, while already being in possession of the
knowledge that will lend support to his recognition” (The Birth 9). In other words, in order to
determine a diagnosis, a doctor must identify symptoms associated with certain diseases. But in
order to produce this kind of knowledge, he must recognize illnesses based on previous medical
knowledge. Thus, medical knowledge constantly refers back to itself and includes the patient in
the process only as a variable. S/he constitutes the individual object of investigation, but only to
be left behind when her/his symptoms have been identified as being indicative of a certain
disease. The patient grounds the very existence of medicine, but at the same time s/he is
“excluded” from the field because s/he is transformed into mere abstract medical knowledge.
The power of the medical system over the patient’s body can also be emphasized by
turning to Foucault’s theories on bio-politics. According to Foucault, in the seventeenth century
62
bio-power replaced sovereign power, which manifested primarily through its right to destroy life
(The Will 136, 139). The concept refers to a series of strategies aimed at “achieving the
subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (The Will 140). This power has two poles:
the first “centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities,
the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration
into systems of efficient and economic controls…” and the second oriented toward “propagation,
births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity…” (Foucault, The Will
139). As Foucault states, the emergence of bio-power is closely linked with the development of
capitalism, which explains the need for the body to be fit enough to perform tasks efficiently
(The Will 141). From this perspective, it becomes clear why Mr. Lăzărescu is regarded as a
parasitical entity that must be confined to the hospital. Since the development of medicine is the
primary means by which life can be prolonged and preserved in good health, the hospital
becomes a major site for the diffusion of bio-power. Nevertheless, Foucault’s link between
capitalism and bio-power seems to be at odds with attempts in present-day hospitals to keep
patients alive as long as possible by means of life-support technologies. From a capitalist
viewpoint, these patients are not productive in any way, except by ensuring the activity of
different players on the market, such as pharmaceutical companies.
If the Romanian hospital as it is portrayed in The Death of Lăzărescu may be considered
a police regime because it ensures a certain organization of bodies – Mr. Lăzărescu is dragged
from hospital to hospital because he is a retired man with no connections – it may also be
considered so because it displays a network of professional hierarchies assigning people a certain
status and an identity based on that status. Specifically, the professional hierarchy established
within the medial system as portrayed in the film points to the nature of communal relations
under the communist regime. This is evident during Mr. Lăzărescu’s visit to the third hospital
where, together with the ambulance assistant Mioara, come across a medical resident. Even
though Mioara shows the latter all the results of the medical tests carried out at the second
hospital, all of them indicating the urgent need for brain surgery, the resident insists on
examining the patient herself. Since her examination is ludicrous, particularly given Mr
Lăzărescu’s poor condition, Mioara loses patience and tells the doctor: “He also has a neoplasm
on his liver. He has to be operated on urgently!” Mioara’s interference generates a dispute
revealing the hospital culture in Romania, where the importance of the medical hierarchy, and
the ego associated with social status, come to the fore. The following dialogue ensues:
Resident: Does it bother you that I examine him?
63
Mioara: God forbid, no! But here are the results of the tests!
Resident: Because if you have a problem with my examining the patient I will ask you to
get out and let me work!
Nurse (talking to Mioara): Why are you so surprised? Didn’t you know one also has to
wait in hospitals?
Mioara (talking to the nurse, ironically): No, I didn’t know! I’ve been doing this job for
16 years, if that counts.
Nurse: Then you should have known!
Later on, the resident starts explaining to the ambulance assistant why the neoplasm on
Mr Lăzărescu’s liver cannot be considered cancer, as Mioara presumed based on what the
doctors at the second hospital had told her, because no biopsy had been carried out. Mioara’s
response to this is: “Thank you, Ms. Resident, for a medicine lesson”. In turn, the young doctor
says: “It’s 3 a.m. and we are all tired. You know your job, and we know ours. And stop looking
down on me by calling me a resident!” The resident’s case is also endorsed by the doctor
working the night shift:
The resident (talking to Mioara): You should know your place and let us do our job.
(emphasis added).
Mioara: But you asked me to leave the room Miss! We are all medical staff here. You
don’t behave like this!
The doctor: We are medical staff with different qualifications. You can’t teach me, a
doctor, what to do! This is what I call impertinence. From this moment on, if you want to
stay in this room, you mustn’t talk anymore. Otherwise, you may wait in the hallway.
This whole argument illustrates the pre-eminence of social status in post-communist
Romania, as I illustrated earlier with the example of Otilia’s parents in 432. Paradoxically, the
regime’s attempt to level differences between people had the opposite effect, leading to an
overestimation of social hierarchy. However, this does not mean that the former regime created
an elitist society, where only the very best were worthy of consideration. On the contrary,
climbing the social ladder was based on the willingness to collaborate with the Secret Police or
to praise the dictator, not on meritocracy. That is to say, social status did not designate certain
values corresponding to particular social classes. Since the communist system designed a
radically egalitarian society, where knowledge and skills would not entail recognition, respect or
higher wages, social status became solely a signifier for power, ensuring better connections. As
the vast majority of the population earned the same wage under the former regime, that is, they
64
were equally poor, except for the party cadres, well-connectedness replaced money as the
currency shaping communal relations and providing even for basic needs.
It is perhaps this focus on social status that generates such a pointless dispute between the
ambulance assistant and the medical staff from the last hospital she reaches. Even though Mr
Lăzărescu is in dire need of treatment, the doctors are more concerned with the fact that Mioara
does not seem to know her proper place in the hierarchy. Their egos become more important than
their duty. Thus, the doctors’ personal feud with Mioara is their priority, and not the dying
patient. Not only is the physicians’ behaviour toward her humiliating, but it is also endangering
Mr Lăzărescu’s life.
The physicians’ patronizing attitude is also directed at Mr Lăzărescu. Since he is a poor
old man with no connections, he displays no authority in the eyes of his doctors. One of the most
humiliating situations he faces is the encounter with doctor Ardelean from the first hospital he
goes to. The following dialogue clearly illustrates this:
Mr Lăzărescu: Doctor, my head hurts.
Dr Ardelean: If your head hurts, why do you drink? If you don’t want headaches, stop
drinking.
Mr Lăzărescu: It started hurting in the morning, and I don’t drink in the morning.
Dr Ardelean: Then stop drinking at night!
Mr Lăzărescu (attempting to get out of the bed where he was being examined): Please
don’t talk to me this way! I’m also an educated man!
Dr Ardelean: Who do you think you’re talking to? Go to hell, you and your ulcer! You
are a shameless drunkard and you want me to cure you! Doctors operate
on
you
and
then you go home and drink! Am I to blame for your ulcer? Hospitals are full of people
like you. You drink and then you attack you wives and children.
Mr Lăzărescu protests against the doctor’s calumnious accusations by saying that he has
never hit his child. However, his response is futile in this context because the physician’s main
purpose is to humiliate the patient to the point where the latter acknowledges his subordination to
him. Dr. Ardelean may have been insulted by Mr Lăzărescu’s claim that he is an educated person
as well, which suggested that they are both equals. It goes without saying that not even a less
educated person deserved to be treated by the doctor the way Mr Lăzărescu was and that medical
treatment should not depend on one’s social status. Nevertheless, the dialogue speaks volumes
about the obsequious nature of communal relations in post-communist Romania, a lingering
65
effect of the communist regime. To explain this in view of Rancière’s concept of the police
regime, human relations under communism reproduced on a smaller scale the logic of the
totalitarian police regime which subordinated them to its discretionary rule as can be observed
from Ceauşescu’s decree banning abortions. Not only did this assign specific roles to women’s
bodies, but it also imposed a very rigid conception of the family, both subordinated to the
dictator’s vision of the nation as demographic communist powerhouse.
As I have shown so far, in Rancière’s understanding a police regime assigns identities,
roles, ways of speaking and being. It configures a distribution of the sensible, which for Rancière
implies a certain partition of time and space. This latter idea leads me to the next section of the
chapter where I will address the ways in which the communist police regime distributed
individuals in an (urban) space re-build to express its ideology.
3. Urban space
The Communist regime in Romania under the rule of Ceauşescu brought about a massive
destruction of the country’s villages and towns, followed by a systematic reconstruction
consonant with the system’s political goals. Following the Law for Territorial, Rural and Urban
systematization in 1974, a large proportion of the country’s architecture was demolished. Thus,
according to the Romanian historian Dinu Giurescu, “from 1978-1980 on, up to 90 percent of the
traditional architecture was razed in many towns and replaced by new structures of a completely
different scale and style, often in a totally changed urban setting” (39). By the time the
revolution took place in 1989, at least 29 cities were levelled to the ground and 85 to 90 percent
rebuilt (Giurescu 39). Apart from reconstructing the urban and rural areas, the regime forcefully
displaced peasants to the cities and expropriated both villagers and city dwellers of their houses.
According to the Systematization Law, the rural population, amounting to more than 11 million
people, was supposed to be moved from privately owned houses to rented apartments in
standardized multi-story buildings in the cities (Giurescu 67). However, the law was not fully
implemented because the time frame for the accomplishment of its objectives was extensive and
the revolution stopped it in its tracks. For instance, the official plan was to raze 7-8,000 of the
13,123 villages by the year 2000 and build agro-industrial centres in their place (Giurescu
preface).
66
The Systematization Law greatly affected Bucharest, the capital of Romania, because
radical demolitions were carried out all over the city. Thus, “everything was levelled to the
ground: mansions, villas, one and two-story houses almost all surrounded by gardens, small
constructions of three and four apartments, public buildings, churches, historical monuments,
statues and a whole area highly characteristic for Romania’s architectural heritage, the Uranus
Hill, which for centuries had been one of the city’s landmarks” (Giurescu 48). In the place of the
Uranus Hill, which was located in central Bucharest, Ceausescu ordered the construction of an
immense building, the House of the People, considered the second building in the world in
surface, after the Pentagon, and the third in volume. 1 Dennis Deletant writes that this building
“assumed Orwellian overtones” as around 40,000 people were evicted from their homes in order
for it to be constructed (Ceauşescu 308).
Rapid industrialization and the erasure of differences between villages and cities was
another purpose of the systematization plan, as is evident from the above-mentioned forced
displacement of peasants to the cities. Corollary to this accelerated urbanization was the
demotion of rural culture and of agricultural labour (Lowe 174). This disparaging attitude toward
the rural can also be noticed in 432, when Otilia tells Găbiţa that the latter should not be
superstitious because she does not come from the countryside, thus depicting the countryside as a
backwards, pre-modern area. Ceauşescu himself made clear that his systematization policy was a
means to homogenize the Romanian population to the point where it becomes a people of
workers. As he stated at the 1988 conference of the Chairmen of People’s Councils, his intent
was to “radically wipe out the major differences between towns and villages, to bring the
working and the living conditions of the working people in the countryside closer to the towns,
to provide for the harmonious development of the whole country, to more powerfully
homogenize our socialist society, to create a single worker people” (qtd. in Lowe 178).
The Systematization policy may be compared to the communal dwelling policy in Soviet
Russia, introduced after the October revolution. According to the scholar Neil McCartney, the
latter was meant, on the one hand, to make up for the housing shortages and, on the other hand,
to enforce a social structure that would encourage an ideologically correct domestic life among
Soviet citizens (6). In a similar vein, the scholar Svetlana Boym writes that communal housing
aimed at producing the change from the individualistic, bourgeois habits of living to the
proletarian togetherness: “The house-commune would radically reconstruct the individualist
bourgeois quarters, ‘defamiliarize’ them in a literal sense of the word by subverting the structure
1
The information is to be found on the website of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies which is based in the House
of the People (now the House of the Romanian Parliament).
67
of the bourgeois family and instituting the relationship of proletarian comradeship” (127).
Nevertheless, Boym adds that not many of these dwellings were built and that by 1930 they were
abolished (128). They were eventually replaced by communal apartments, which were similar to
house-communes in that kitchens and other places in the apartment were to be shared (Boym
128). The communal apartment became “a prominent Stalinist institution of social control”
(Boym 129), a feature that this kind of dwelling shared with the Romanian socialist blocks of
flats. Even though in the latter buildings inhabitants did not share certain rooms or utilities, it
was still very difficult for people to undertake activities such as listening to the radio, or to have
visitors without the neighbours (i.e. potential Secret Police informers) finding out.
The historical context outlined above is meant to point to a connection between political
power and space. More precisely, it shows that through reorganizing the space people inhabited,
the dictatorial regime attempted to strengthen its control of the population and to accomplish its
goals. Deletant also argues that in changing Bucharest through the systematization process,
“Ceauşescu, like Mussolini and Hitler before him, sought to express his power and to symbolize
the creation of a new society, and it was through architecture that he strove to leave his most
enduring mark on Romania” (Ceauşescu 294). Of course, architectural change was just one
strategy among many on the totalitarian political agenda aimed at consolidating its power, but
important nonetheless.
In order to explain this relationship between political power and space I will appeal to the
French sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s theory on social space. In his book The Production of Space
(1974, first translated in 1991), he proposes and sets out to demonstrate the hypothesis that
“(social) space is a (social) product” (26). Lefebvre concedes that the proposition might seem
evident, but he points to the specificity of social space by comparing it and differentiating it
from the “mental space” described by philosophers and mathematicians and from the “physical
space” delineated by “practico-sensory activity and the perception of nature” (27). Thus, social
space comprises two kinds of relations: (I) social relations of reproduction, that is the
organization of the family and of relations between sexes and age groups and (II) the relations of
production which refer to the organization and division of labour (Lefebvre 32). In capitalist
societies, these types of relations become three: beside social relations of reproduction, one can
identify the reproduction of labour power (the working class) and the reproduction of social
relations of production characteristic of capitalism (Lefebvre 32). To put it differently, the
capitalist mode of production brings about a social space that reproduces certain relations and
hierarchies between social classes. This social space reveals the power relations maintained
68
within capitalism. For instance, one can think about the distribution of urban space according to
the wealth, age (students or elderly people), or ethnicity. An urban space divided into poor and
wealthy neighbourhoods does not merely reveal the aesthetic differences between expensive and
poor housing, it also discloses social relations of production under capitalism that make possible
a certain valuation of labour and distribution of wealth that subsequently enables people to afford
different housing conditions. According to Lefebvre it is not solely the capitalist mode of
production that generates a particular social space, but any mode of production: “Every society
and every mode of production produces a space, its own space” (31).
It is this latter argument that enables a dialogue between the films and Lefebvre’s theory
on space. If every society and every mode of production produces a particular space, then the
socialist mode of production under the Romanian communist regime also produces its own social
space, and its own social relations of production and reproduction. The historical context I
outlined earlier illustrates that Ceauşescu’s Systematization law was meant to produce a space
that would mirror the new organization of labour under the Romanian socialist state. This new
space, clearly premised on state ideology, would radically change, among other things, urban
dwellings. The demolitions of private, one-storey houses and their replacement with blocks of
flats that assigned fixed proportions for rooms and apartments was supposed to illustrate the
passage from a mode of production that generated inequalities of wealth, and implicitly
differences between housing, to a mode of production where these inequalities have disappeared
and everyone enjoyed the same living conditions. Apart from this, the forced migration of
peasants to the cities and of urban dwellers to the countryside (for work) was also aimed at
erasing differences between cities and villages. By forcibly confiscating the peasants’ land and
the city dwellers’ private houses, the socialist state changed property relations, an essential
element in changing and constructing social relations for Lefebvre (85).
The social space thus produced can be observed extensively in three of the proposed
films: 432, 12:08 East of Bucharest, and Police Adjective. I am specifically referring to the urban
space characterized by socialist dwellings because it is these that are primarily represented in
those films (to which I will return shortly). The same cannot be said about How I Spent the End
of the World and The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu. In the former film the viewer can only once get a
glimpse of the socialist blocks of flats, because for the rest of the film “urban” space looks quite
similar to the countryside. This is owing to the fact that filming took place in a village-like
suburb of Bucharest or in natural landscapes. As for the latter film, it focuses more on interiors,
such as the emergency rooms in hospitals or Mr. Lăzărescu’s shabby apartment than on the
69
urban space, even though there are a few shots revealing socialist neighbourhoods. Interestingly,
by rarely showing the neighbourhoods as cold, dimly-lit apparitions, they reinforce an otherwise
dark and gloomy atmosphere of a late Bucharest evening.
To return to 432, it recounts a story taking place under communism, whereas 12:08 East
of Bucharest and Police, Adjective tell stories from post-communism. In 432, it may be argued
that the city becomes one oppressive character among many in the film, especially during the
stalker-like shooting from behind Otilia as she tries to get rid of Găbiţa’s aborted foetus so that
the police would not discover that her friend undertook the medical procedure. Not only is the
scene dramatic because Otilia is visibly scared as she does something illegal in a rigorously
policed state, but also because she seems to be constantly watched from the shadows of those tall
blocks of flats she walks along. The latter also convey a claustrophobic and eerie atmosphere,
indicative of a highly surveilled society.
Although urban dwellings in Police, Adjective and 12:08 East of Bucharest look very
much like those in 432, they mostly suggest run-down, desolated cities, which have not shrugged
off the communist penury. What is particularly significant about comparing social space in 432
and the other two films is that one can observe that even though the mode of production has
changed from the socialist (in 432) to the capitalist one, this has not altered social space
considerably (I use social space in Lefebvre’s understanding, to encompass social relations). I
used the adverb “considerably” because the element of totalitarian surveillance is missing in
Police, Adjective and 12:08 East of Bucharest, despite the fact that in the former film
surveillance is instead enacted by the (democratic) police department in that city.
Therefore, as I have explained before by connecting Rancière’s concept of police regime
to the films, the social hierarchies and communal relations under communism (in 432) are very
similar to those in post-communism (in Police Adjective and The Death of Mr Lăzărescu). For
instance, the relation between Otilia and the receptionists, the one between Mr Lăzărescu and his
doctors, and the one between Cristi and his superior are similar in terms of social hierarchies
established and displays of authority.
The similarity between these social interactions actually suggests that the films speak
back to Lefebvre’s concept of social space. In other words, judging from the way social relations
are portrayed in 432, Police Adjective, The Death of Mr Lăzărescu or How I Spent the End of the
World, social space and the social relations it produces do not entirely change with the change of
the mode of production or of political power. In 432, it is not the lack of wealth or social status
70
that places Otilia in the position to be dominated and humiliated by the receptionists or by Mr.
Bebe. For one, it is the unavailability of some services denied by the state power (performing
abortions, booking a hotel room without being suspected of anything) that confers power to the
receptionists and to the abortionist. Apart from this, the fear of state repression and of constantly
being surveilled also confers power to people in places of authority. In The Death of Mr
Lăzărescu, Mr Lăzărescu’s lack of wealth and social status play an important role in him being
humiliated by his doctors, since the story takes place in post-communism, when the capitalist
mode of production has replaced the socialist one. However, the demeaning and domineering
attitudes that Otilia and Eva face in their various social interactions under communism
(emphasized in the previous section) are to be found also in Cristi’s or Mr Lăzărescu’s
encounters with other characters. This is why it can be argued that Lefebvre’s idea according to
which every society and every mode of production produces its own social space and its own
social relations is rather static and restrictive because it does not account for the existence of
social relations that endure under different modes of production.
It is important to note that Lefebvre does not argue that it is only the mode of production
that contributes to the production of social space, but also the state and its regulatory
mechanisms. Thus, in Lefebvre’s words, “the state and each of its constituent institutions call for
spaces – but spaces which they can then organize according to their specific requirements; so
there is no sense in which space can be treated solely as an a priori condition of these institution
and the state which presides over them” (85). Thus, social space cannot simply be considered
“empty” space, a space that precedes the political and economic organisation of society, but a
space in the guise of the power relations maintained by the mode of production and the state. Not
only is space a (social) product that can be used, but it is also “a means of production” (Lefebvre
85). In Lefebvre’s words, “[t]hus, this means of production, produced as such, cannot be
separated either from the productive forces, including technology and knowledge, or from the
social division of labour that shapes it, or from the state and the superstructures of society” (85).
That is to say, the production and reproduction of space stand in dialectical relation: as a product
that results from the just mentioned processes, space also produces human relations within it, and
this network of relations and its arrangement in space again reproduces the produced social
space. However, as I showed in the previous paragraph by giving examples from the films, it is
not necessarily the case that a change in the mode of production produces new social relations.
In bringing up this possible critique that the films suggest, I focused primarily on the role
of the mode of production in shaping space and social relations. However, according to the
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scholar Mark Gottdiener, Lefebvre’s theory on social space should not be narrowly understood
as centred on the economic factor in the tradition of orthodox Marxism, but as a unitary theory
that encompasses and links together physical, mental and social spaces (131). To this triad
corresponds another one according to which the concept of social space is divided into perceived
space, conceived space, and lived space. Thus, the first is the physical environment that people
perceive; the second “a semiotic abstraction that informs both how ordinary people negotiate
space (the mental maps studied by geographers), and the space of corporations, planners,
politicians and the like”; and the third is “a medium through which a body lives out its life in
interaction with other bodies” (Gottdiener 131). This general triad is further developed by
establishing yet another triad based on it according to which “[s]pace is simultaneously a spatial
practice (an externalized, material environment), a representation of space (a conceptual mode
used to direct practice), and a space of representation (the lived social relation of users to the
environment)” (131).
With these distinctions in mind, one may argue that in my reading of the films so far I
conflated social space with mental space because I used the former to analyse what may be
considered mental spaces, namely, the representations in film of the socialist cityscape. Lefebvre
actually cautions against attempts to reduce social space to a message to be decoded and to
equate inhabiting it to reading it like a text because this presupposes “evading both history and
practice” (7). And yet, urban space as represented in the films through the rendition of socialist
blocks of flats becomes a message encoded in a visual language that is to be deciphered. They
may be considered signs within a visual language that transmits a message about what
communism was for Romanians – among other things, a transformed urban space. However, I
would say that even though urban space rendered in this way on screen becomes a mental space
to be explored and deciphered by vast audiences, it does not evade history, as Lefebvre contends.
As I understand it, by saying that mental space and physical space evade history and practice,
Lefebvre means that as concepts for investigating the social they are insufficient and ineffective
(when taken separately), because they do not grasp the complexities of social relations of
production and the way they produce and are produced by space. While I consider that
Lefebvre’s theory offers a very important analysis on the way space bears the mark of the mode
of production and of political power, I do not agree that conceiving of space as mental in certain
contexts is devoid of political significance because if one reads a space as a text, this does not
necessarily imply that the ensuing mental space cannot also be conceived as a space that bears
the mark of a particular mode of production and political system. To put it differently, while
watching the films belonging to the Romanian New Wave in a cinema theatre, the audience has
72
access to a representation of urban space as it was altered by the Romanian communist regime,
but this representation can make the audience question why this space is almost omnipresent in
the films. By posing such a question the audience may come to realize, depending on historical
knowledge, that space is shaped by political power and the mode of production employed in
society. Of course, this is not the case only with the countries of the former socialist bloc, but
also with the ones where the capitalist mode of production is employed. This is where I would
argue lays the political significance of the mental spaces created by the analysed films: in
travelling across space and in being “read” by various audiences they can make those audiences
pose questions about what they watch on screen, stir their curiosity to find out more about a
historical period, or influence their political attitudes.
So far, I have been exploring the relationship between space and power inaugurated by
the Systematization policy in communist Romania and its effects in post-communism, both at the
architectural level and at the level of social relations. However, the demolitions inflicted on the
urban and rural structures also allude to a tension between present and past, between how space
used to look and how it looks in the present, which brings forth the problem of memory in
relation to space.
When writing about Berlin after the Second World War, Andreas Huyssen compares it to
a palimpsest (Present Pasts 81). The city is thus understood as a text that “implies voids,
illegibilities, and erasures, but it also offers a richness of traces and memories, restorations and
new constructions that will mark the city as lived space” (Huyssen, Present Pasts 84). It is this
dialogue and, simultaneously, this co-existence, between present and past within the city as text
that confronts the reader-dweller with both memory and amnesia. In this respect, it can be said
that in the Romanian cities, as in Berlin, the social space is always related to memory. When
Michel de Certeau writes that “[h]aunted places are the only ones people can live in” (108), he is
referring to places people associate with memories, places they “appropriate” by giving them a
personal meaning. But Berlin and most of the Romanian cities are also haunted by history, a
history visible in their architecture, in their lived space, where the past is present. In Bucharest,
where so many old buildings were destroyed and replaced by new constructions the past is
present also through its absence. Moreover, traditional architecture stands alongside the socialist
and the more recent corporatist ones. The old buildings blend with the socialist ones and the city
as a whole looks like an advertisement board, which exposes a multi-layered past in contrast
with the present.
73
Although here I insisted on the urban space of Bucharest, most Romanian cities look
similar to the capital in terms of the socialist dwellings. In fact, it is this common trait that I have
in mind when using urban space as a concept for analysing the films. It is mostly the
representation of these buildings from urban space that brings the communist past into the
present of the films. That is to say, these dwellings become a visual sign for the former regime.
When reading the sign with a historically informed perspective, the viewer can remember at least
one aspect about the past, namely its restructuring of urban space.
The socialist apartments could be considered common places in both senses employed by
Svetlana Boym. According to her,
[c]ommon places refer to both the organization of space and the organization of
speech. This trope has degraded through history: from the noble Greek topos, a site
of classical argument, it has turned into the modern commonplace, the synonym for
a cliché. Common places (koinos topos) date back to the ancient art of memory;
they were familiar sites in a building or on a habitual walk through the city to which
one attached memory images. (11)
Thus, the socialist dwellings are both common places that confront the city-dweller with the
concrete ghosts of the former regime, and topographical commonplaces, because they constitute
a cliché of urban space throughout Eastern Europe. Surely, people can also invest this urban
landscape with different personal meanings that break free from the historical interpretation
assigned to them. My interpretation is that, in the films, the realism of these cityscapes informs
the viewer about the past’s presence in the present.
All in all, urban space and sources of authority that shape human relations (as represented
in the films) work very well together in providing a reading of these films from the perspective
of memory because the connection between the two is very well rendered through Rancière’s
theory of the police regime and Lefebvre’s theory of social space. Nevertheless, in order to
clarify how the analysis which I have undertaken in this chapter informs the broader topic I
approached in the thesis, it is necessary to draw an overall conclusion for the paper in which to
integrate all the chapters and the main ideas into a coherent picture.
74
Conclusion
My reading of the Romanian New Wave emphasized its construction of a memory discourse
about the communist past, which also brought to the fore the different ways in which memory is
shaped by the various contexts and media in which it is embedded. Thus, the New Wave
discourse on memory is based on the representation of social relations and interactions, and the
urban space where they develop. The approach to memory of the presidential report as an official
document is different in that it is centred on the vindication of the victims of communism and on
strategies of public memorialisation to counteract forgetting. In electoral debate, as it is rendered
on television and in newspapers, the discourse on memory offers moral legitimacy and is used to
secure votes from an audience receptive to the topic. Underlining this difference is in itself a
productive endeavour because it reveals how collective mnemonic practices change with the
availability of various media to preserve memory.
But why is the Romanian New Wave particularly significant in exposing these changes in
memory practices? The answer to this question and a main argument of my thesis is that the
films propose a visual language by means of which to deal with a traumatic past that still haunts
present-day Romania. As I have shown, the films employ a realist style, even though in using it,
Police, Adjective also critiques it. The realistic portrayal of communal relations under
communism and after, and of urban space, is an attempt to give (a) visual expression to the
Romanian totalitarian experience that is still difficult to grasp, two decades after the 1989
revolution. The critique of realism in Police, Adjective may actually indicate that the New Wave
film-makers still strive to find a visual language by means of which to approach and deal with
this disturbing experience. It may also imply that realism is not an adequate expression for
coming to terms with the past because realism presupposes that what the films render as
characteristic of the Romanian totalitarian experience is transparent to the recording camera. But
it is precisely because this traumatic collective experience cannot be easily translated and
grasped in any medium that finding a visual language to represent it becomes a strenuous task.
Thus, in my reading the Romanian New Wave brings a contribution to visual artists’ efforts to
represent and make visible past collective suffering, such as life under totalitarian rule.
Corollary to this contribution is the fact that, by virtue of their being mass media, the
films make available their portrayal of the past to vast audiences, which emphasizes the ethical
dimension of their memory discourse. In other words, they create prosthetic memories
(Landsberg) of the Romanian communist regime for viewers that have not lived through
75
communism, but who can experience in cinema theatres a perspective on what this regime was.
Thus, the films can bridge spaces and temporalities, anchoring memory of human suffering
outside (national) territories, and making it possible for people to remember collectively a
traumatic past, without necessarily having lived through it.
But why is the fact that the New Wave creates a visual language within which it
articulates the memory of life under the former regime meaningful? To put it differently, how is
this endeavour different from that of, for example, Romanian documentaries on the topic? The
latter often rely on images of the communist political prisons and on testimonies from surviving
victims in order to anchor the memory of the communist past, a well-known example being the
series of documentaries entitled Memorialul durerii (The Memorial of Suffering 1991-2006)
produced by the Romanian director Lucia Hossu Longin. 1 What I have been arguing in this
thesis is that the specific contribution of the New Wave to attempts at visually representing and
anchoring the memory of the Romanian communist regime lies in its rendition of everyday life
under the former regime. It is the everyday life as embedded in social relations and the urban
space in which these take place that links the communist past and the present in dialectical
relation.
To name some of these prisons: Sighet, Jilava, Gherla, Piteşti etc.
1
76
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Filmography
The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (Moartea domnului Lăzărescu). Dir. Cristi Puiu. Perfs. Luminiţa
Gheorghiu, Ioan Fiscuteanu. 2005. DVD.
80
12:08 East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost?). Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu. Perfs. Mircea
Andreescu, Teodor Corban, Ion Săpdaru. 2006. DVD.
How I Spent the End of the World (Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii). Dir. Cătălin Mitulescu.
Perfs. Doroteea Petre, Timotei Duma. 2006. DVD.
4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (4 luni, 3 săptămani şi 2 zile). Dir. Cristian Mungiu. Perfs.
Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov. 2007. DVD.
Police, Adjective (Poliţist, Adj.). Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu. Perfs. Dragoş Bucur, Vlad Ivanov.
2009. DVD.
81