Cinematographic Art & Documentation Journal, No. 9(13)/2014

Hyperion University, The Faculty of Arts,

Bucharest

Cinematographic Art & Documentation (CA&D)

Journal of cinematographic studies, Nr. 9, New series. 2014

biannual publication

Tracus Arte Publishing House Bucharest, 2014 ISSN:1844-2803

Hyperion University, Bucharest Cinematographic Art & Documentation Journal of cinematographic studies, nr. 9, New Series, 2014 ISSN: 1844-2803

Editorial Board

Editor in Chief

Professor DOINA RUŞTI Hyperion University, Bucharest

Associate Editors

Professor NICOLETTA ISAR Institute of Art History, Department of Arts & Cultural Studies,

University of Copenhagen Denmark

Professor EFSTRATIA OKTAPODA

Sorbonne, Paris IV

Professor ILEANA ORLICH Arizona State University

LINDA MARIA BAROS, Ph.D.

Sorbonne, Paris IV

Redactors Lecturer IOAN CRISTESCU, Ph.D, Hyperion University, Bucharest Lecturer COSMIN PERŢA , Ph.D, Hyperion University, Bucharest Alina Petra MARINESCU-NENCIU, Ph. D.c, Bucharest University

Professor RAMONA MIHĂILĂ, Ph.D. Dimitrie Cantemir University, Bucharest Associate Professor LIANA IONESCU, Ph.D., Hyperion University, Bucharest

Associate Professor ELENA SAULEA, National University of Drama and Film, Bucharest, "I.L. Caragiale", Bucharest

Managing Editor IOAN CRISTESCU

Editorial Secretary MIHAELA CAZAN

Advisory Editors

Professor EUSEBIU ŞTEFĂNESCU, Hyperion University, Bucharest Associate Professor Vlad Leu, Hyperion University, Bucharest

Associate Professor IOAN CĂRMĂZAN, Ph.D., Hyperion University, Bucharest, Film Director, vice-president of Filmmakers Union (UARF)

MAIA MORGENSTERN, Hyperion University, The National Theatre, Bucharest Professor ION SPÂNULESCU, Hyperion University, Bucharest

Cover: EMILIA PETRE Foto: GABI BOHOLT

DPT&Pre-Press EMILIA PETRE

SUMMARY

I. Cinematographic Art

Editorial

Alexandru IORDACHESCU, M.A., Elefant Films, Geneva – Le cinéma est mort, vive le cinéma!

Réalité, mort du cinéma d’auteur et transhumanisme / 5

Alina Petra MARINESCU-NENCIU, Ph. D. c, Bucharest University – Image Perception in the Realm of

Media Manipulation. The Misleading Use of Newspaper Images / 8

Monica ILIE-PRICA, National School of Political Science and Public Administration – Film Noir and

Femme Fatale. A Contemporary Perspective / 18

Beatrice MEDA, Ph.D c. National University of Theatre and Film "I.L.Caragiale", Bucharest – Exploring

the Suspect Dimension of Realism in the Latest New Wave Romanian Cinema / 24

Daniela DIMA-RIAIN BA, International Make-Up Artist Trade Show, London – The Romanian

New Wave / 34

Alexandru IORDACHESCU, M.A. Elefant Films, Geneva – Rêves éveillés, entropie et paradoxe de la

reine rouge. Le pouvoir ambigu du cinéma. / 38

II. Cultural Studies:

Inherited ideas

Irina Airinei Vasile, Ph.D. National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, and

Sorin BORDUŞANU,Vicepresident of the Assigning Names Committee of Bucharest – A cultural

perspective: suggestion for a documentary film.The toponymic heritage of Bucharest -Streets bearing

Jewish names / 43

Diana MEŢIU , Ph.D, Hyperion University, Bucharest – The Golden Ratio. From the oldest

to the newest arts / 52

Florin TOADER – Postmodernism in the art of film (lecture notes) / 57

Cinematografic Art & Documentation, nr. 9 (13) /2014

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Editorial

Le cinéma est mort, vive le cinéma! Réalité, mort du cinéma d’auteur et transhumanisme

Alexandru IORDACHESCU Elefant Films, Geneva

Abstract : Whether among filmmakers or sales agents, the sentence: "our movies do not sell anymore" is a leitmotif during the "Berlinale 2014". As this phenomenon has grown over the past ten years regarding Arthouse movies, it is necessary to outline some assumptions. The one we will explore here is the following: it’s not the intrinsic quality of the films which is declining, but the technological dimension associated with them. Keywords: Berlinale, Arthouse movies, technology, transhumanism

«Avenir» et «cinéma d’auteur» sont des termes qu’on a de la peine à associer lors de cette édition 2014 de la Berlinale.

Pourtant ce n’est pas en raison du manque de qualité ou de pertinence des films d’auteur, mais en raison d’un malentendu.

Quel est ce malentendu? Encore aujourd’hui, lorsqu’on parle de cinéma d’auteur, les mots qui viennent l’esprit sont: vision singulière et personnelle, valeur ajoutée culturelle et artistique, réflexion sur le monde et sur nous-mêmes, etc…

Or, si nous analysons – au long de l’histoire du cinéma –, ce qui a fait son succès, y compris celui des films d’auteur, ce ne sont jamais uniquement ces aspects là, mais une conjonction entre des valeurs et une technologie, la coïncidence de deux en quelque sorte.

Revenons au point de départ, à cette suite d’images que tout le monde connaît, qui marque le début de l’expérience cinématographique: un train qui entre dans une gare, celle de La Ciotat. Ce sont des images saccadées, en noir et blanc et sans son.


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Pourtant les spectateurs du premier rang – dit-on –, se sont enfuis à la vue de cette image projetée qui se ruait sur eux… Quelle décharge d’adrénaline ça a dû être pour eux, quelle expérience profondément physiologique.

Qui s’enfuirait encore aujourd’hui à la vue de ces mêmes images? Qui aurait ne serais-ce qu’une légère accélération du rythme cardiaque? Personne.

Que s’est-il passé entre la première projection de ces images de train et maintenant?

D’une part, la technologie cinema-tographique, proprement révolutionnaire lors de son apparition, a beaucoup évolué. Elle a même été dépassée, du point de vue de l’immersion du « spectateur», par d’autres formes audiovisuelles, tels que les jeux vidéo.

D’autre part, et corollairement au premier constat, le cinéma a perdu de sa «magie», au sens propre comme figuré. Tout le monde sait que le cinéma est une convention, que le sang est du ketchup et que les effets sont modélisés à l’aide de programmes 3D.

Et c’est là que nous constatons que McLuhan avait raison: ce n’est pas le contenu intrinsèque des films ou des formes narratives des jeux qui ont perdu ou gagné, mais la technologie qui les véhicule. Ce qui gagne invariablement c’est la forme susceptible de générer le plus d’excitation neurologique, quelque soit sa nature ou son niveau intellectuel.

Supposons maintenant que les mêmes images du train qui rentrent dans la gare soient projetées directement dans le nerf optique, voir encodées dans le lobe frontal, en y rajoutant l’excitation des autres sens, la réaction physiologique serait très élevée, comparable à une expérience réelle.

Or c’est précisément ce que les spectateurs ayant vu pour la première fois ces images, il y a plus d’un siècle, on ressenti: l’impression qu’une véritable locomotive leur fonçait dessus. Et c’est également ce que cinéastes et spectateurs ont cherché à recréer par la suite dans les salles de cinéma: une convention de réalité, l’immersion dans une réalité «autre», dont l’illusion technologique était suffisamment développée pour berner les sens.

C’est là où, à mon avis, le cinéma d’auteur a un «train» de retard : en axant tout son effort sur le langage cinématographique, en misant intellectuellement sur la convention qui le lie à la réalité, il a ignoré sa dimension technologique.

Lorsque les néoréalistes italiens ont fait des films qui étaient à la fois des succès artistiques et commerciaux, c’est principalement à cause du fait que le cinéma, à cette époque, était encore une technologie de pointe et le vecteur d’un espoir de transformation dans la société : une société qui pensait encore que le progrès, la science et la technologie pouvaient la libérer et révolutionner le monde.

Que le geste «libérateur» des néoréalistes, qui consistait à prendre la caméra à la main et à sortir des studios pour filmer dans la rue soit contemporain aux mouvements de mai 68, à la libération sexuelle, à l’exploration d’états altérés de conscience ou à l’avènement de la cybernétique, est tout sauf une coïncidence : la technologie pouvait nous libérer, nous en étions les maitres et l’avenir semblait radieux. Les cinéastes étaient, dans ce sens, des héros prométhéens, les vecteurs / narrateurs de ces mutations profondes dans la société.

Or, aujourd’hui nous commençons à bien le comprendre, la technologie ne libère pas. Elle transforme sans doute nos vies, mais ne les améliore pas nécessairement au vu des questions fondamentales que l’être humain est en droit de se poser (et ne manque pas de le faire).

C’est ainsi que le cinéma, en ignorant sa dimension technologique, peut travailler contre une partie de lui-même. Lorsque James Cameron filme Avatar à l’aide de caméras 3D et que les studios décident de le projeter en salles uniquement dans un format numérique, l’histoire du film a beau à raconter la victoire de sortes «d’indiens» sur les colonisateurs, dans les salles de cinéma c’est le contraire qui se produit : le taux de salles qui changent leur système de projection et adoptent le format digital passe de 20 % à 80 % en Europe, marquant la fin du film 35mm et l’avènement d’une forme de distribution qui va définitivement mettre hors jeu les films «d’auteur», des films d’indiens en quelque sorte. Mais, même si ce cas est emblématique, ce n’est pas le film ou le réalisateur qui est en cause. Car l’évolution de la technologie se fait en quelque sorte «malgré nous», malgré James Cameron et même malgré les studios. A chaque échelon du système cette évolution est perçue comme «inéluctable», semblable à la nécessité d’adapta-tion pour la survie.

Car au fond, ce que nous voulons, sans vraiment le savoir ou se l’avouer, ce sont des illusions de plus en plus perfectionnées ; des simulacres qui peuvent non seulement rivaliser


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en intensité et perceptions avec la réalité, mais la dépasser.

Dans cette perspective, la quête de l’homme contemporain est surréelle, le développement et l’usage que nous faisons de nos technologies vont dans le sens d’une transcendance de notre réalité et de nos capacités cognitives.

Mais, en même temps, cette quête semble nous dépasser, tant les bases philosophiques et spirituelles nous font défaut face à cette véritable boîte de Pandore que nous avons ouvert. Le salut ne viendra peut-être pas

du cinéma ; mais le cinéma peut par contre, en reconnaissant et en assumant son «destin technologique», suivre deux voies radicales: la première est celle adoptée en ce moment par l'industrie, qui pousse l'illusion et la technologie toujours plus loin. Le film „The Congress“ de Ari Folman nous fournit une belle métaphore.

La seconde voie, théorique à ce jour, consiste à „hacker“ la technologie pour en faire une expérience psychotrope visant à altérer la conscience (à provoquer une prise de conscience). A défaut, il est toujours possible d'en faire un scénario de science-fiction.


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Image Perception in the Realm of Media Manipulation The Misleading Use of Newspaper Images

Alina Petra MARINESCU-NENCIU1 Ph. D.c, Bucharest University

Abstract: The purpose of the present paper is to accomplish a study on the role of the written press in manipulating the readers’ perception by using specific means: press images. On the one hand, in order to support my hypothesis, I shall take into consideration different approaches regarding the role played by vision in constructing one’s perception. To construct the framework of my interpretation I shall look into the dynamic net of relationships unfolding among three concepts intensively debated within recent studies: public opinion, mass media and manipulation. The analysis will also make use of considerations regarding images in general and press-images as well as their impact on the reader’s perception in particular. On the other hand, I shall illustrate the aspects in the theoretical background by using research data making part of an analysis I assessed on the occasion of the media campaign on the opening of the Security files that took place between 2006 and 2007. Keywords: manipulation, perception, image, media, opinion

Introduction Vision is said to have taken over the

traditional oral-aural society apparently due to the accelerated technological development that started with the invention of the printing press in 1440 and came to the point of taking the social evolution to another level, seen by some as post-modern and by others like a second, high modernity.

Whether or not the tendency of prioritizing vision within the five-sense-sensorium (McLuhan, 1961) is responsible for the social changes and technical quantum leaps that have been taking place during the last 100 years, or vice-versa, is still to be discussed. What we know for sure is that we would rather say I see than I understand or I shall see instead of I shall work this out somehow. Meaning – vision is gaining more and more space in the sensorium, as it is more and more exploited in all the realms of our daily existence. Exploited by us and used by others to exploit ourselves. And this last part should not come as a surprise as St. Thomas himself is said to have alleged more than 2000 years ago that “seeing is believing”. This would mean that your eyes can not lie to you. But what is to be done when what you see is a counterfeit, a fake or something that is aimed to nudge your opinion into a different direction up to the point of changing your perception over what you see and what you believed about what you saw? And who would be inclined to change your beliefs, why and by what means?

According to the premises set by the technological realm, it’s the printed press that seems to have led the way towards the merely visual society we are living in. This controversial machine used to be the tool of the royalty, of the church or of any other authority said, at a certain point, to contain power. As being able to popularize one’s opinion over a specific fact, being able to disseminate, on a large scale, the social representations you are interested in, makes you powerful and in control.

Around the year 1800, the theoretician Edmund Burke looked towards the place occupied by journalists in the House of Commons and said: “There sits the State's fourth power”. Burke knew that the media would become one of the most influential containers and disseminators of social representations. 1

At that time, the press had begun to show its influence over a public that the researchers called mass society, a homogeneous 1 Alina Petra Marinescu-Nenciu is a Ph. D. candidate in Sociology at the Bucharest University, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. She received her master’s degree from the same institution after graduating “Research in Sociology”. Alina is mainly interested in studying the dynamics of values in relation to the corporate environment, the issue of meritocracy, discourse analysis and the process of narratively constructing various experiences in conversation. In 2007, she graduated Journalism with a thesis on informing and manipulating through the written press, a topic representing another research focus of hers. E-mail: [email protected]


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group not yet initiated in the processes of selecting and interpreting the media message delivered with purposes of informing and obeying different interests. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed so much until now, even if the 21-century media consumer is considered selective and reflexive – as a consequence of the, so called, second modernity, far from being directly affected by the news as being stung with a hypodermic needle as believed in the 1920s. At present, the purpose of the ones who make the existence of mass-media possible is not very different from the purpose followed by the media at the beginnings.

Despite all the above, terms as misinformation or manipulation have entered the common vocabulary quite recently but became a constant issue in formal or informal conversations about the media. The phenomenon began taking proportions at the same pace with the conversion of the written and audio-video press into the most important message bearers, with a growing impact on the public.

Vision and perception Taking into account the ups and downs

of sight and hearing in order to find out which sense is more powerful out of the five existent ones, Ingold (2000) reached to the conclusions that “a radical contrast is established between hearing and vision (...) within the Western tradition. Among the criteria of distinction are that sound penetrates whereas sight isolates (…) that the auditory world is dynamic and the visual world static, that to hear is to participate whereas to see is to observe from a distance, that hearing is social whereas vision is asocial or individual, that hearing is morally virtuous whereas vision is intrinsically untrustworthy, and finally that hearing is sympathetic whereas vision is indifferent or even treacherous” (p.252).

Put in comparison with hearing, vision seems to be that sense capable of identifying a certain thing out of the numerous palpable realms of one’s life but also that sense having a propensity to misleading the individual due to its decontextualizing capacity. Thus, vision is a powerful sense, able to construct perception, but one should rather not trust his eyes “no matter what”.

Jonas (1966) underlines another important feature connected to the eye-bounded perception: “With vision you have only to open your eyes, and the world is there, already spread out as a ground for any further exploration of it. Only with vision, therefore, is it possible to

distinguish being from becoming, and hence to entertain a concept of change” (pp.36-45 apud Ingold, 2002, p.259).

From a certain point on, Jonas’s conclusion supports Ingold’s former opinion: seeing is an easy way to get in contact with the surrounding reality/realities but, at the same time, it’s contradictory, alleging that due to vision one can witness and be aware of the first, the final and also of the intermediate processes of transformation an image is submitted to. But what if the viewer is shown only the result of the process? How could he understand and objectively make up his mind regarding the signification of what he perceives? Is vision a really fit channel to be used for deceiving? At what extent is one able to control the ways and the thing he gets exposed to by using his eyes? According to Merleau Ponty (1964), one barely could be selective in this respect as he considers that vision “is the means given me for being absent from myself“. So, in a certain way, our eyes would be working like two little windows, through which we gaze outside in a careless manner and forget about our profound, reflexive self. But what would happen with all the information we would be taking inside? How treacherously would it act?

Merleau-Ponty (1964) also answers this question, when referring to a painting: one doesn’t look at it, nor does one see it, as one would see any ordinary thing. It’s that, you see according to it, or with it. And he explains: “is not a view from the outside, a merely «physical-optical» relation with the world’. It is rather a «continued birth», as though at every moment the painter opened his eyes to the world, like a new-born infant, for the first time (…) And so the painting to which it gives rise is an embodiment of this creative movement: it does not represent things, or a world, but shows «how things become things, how the world becomes a world»” (Ponty, 1964, pp.186-187, apud Ingold, 2002, p.264). Ponty describes the author’s subjective stamp put on his creation – it’s depicting the World through the eyes of the creator, according to his feelings and impressions. I believe we could dare to call it an unintended misleading process. Still, non-objective, but biased by the painter’s creative self. And the viewer would internalize the impression the final image makes on him and get misled without intention.


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But what if the painter would want to change the viewer’s opinion about a certain fact or person by nudging him into perceiving things differently?

Technological development has brought the things people just fantasized about in the 1900s into real life. In his book called The Problem of Form (1893), the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand alleged that true vision must be much imbued with tangibility and that creative, aesthetic awareness was touching and making. So the issue of interfering with the objective perspective of things was presented openly and praised for. From that point on, until the invention of Photoshop-like graphic programs was just a step. Technology and creativity have done their job in creating the best prey for the wide opened eyes to internalize.

Still, another question stands in line: why would be one inclined to trust an image nowadays, in the image modeling age, without at least double-checking its trustfulness?

In order to try to answer we have to give a look to Richard Lanham’s Economics of Attention (2007), more exactly to the concept of fluff that he brings about. Lanham alleges that the material, palpable world we were used to was transformed in an immaterial one made up of ideas and virtual realities. And this process has been taking place for more than 20 years now, enough time, one could say, for people to accept and learn how to deal with things that aren’t things as they knew them before. Still, human beings have gotten used to stability and concreteness since the dawns of times and habits gained more than 2000 years before are quite difficult to change, practically, overnight. Consequently, people need to stick to things allegedly objective and concrete, seeing as such objects and images, even if they are not so. More than that, due to the enormous quantity of fluff that surrounds and gets involved with them everyday people lack time, interest or simply cease to double-check the things they see. And by acting so, their perception gets manipulated.

I believe that, nowadays, media is one of the most powerful creator and disseminator of fluff. By stating this, I also mean that media is the greatest perception manipulators, be it by being used as a propagandistic tool by different persons, but also, more interestingly, by transmitting the journalists’ own perception as information. How can this be possible?

Public opinion and the linkage function of the press One of two people in the world is

exposed to all sorts of messages produced and disseminated by different mass communication media. The same newspaper is read, sometimes even simultaneously, by an American and by an Asian, international radio news channels are listened to by people in different countries linked by the understanding of a language, the same TV show is watched, each evening, by hundreds of thousands of people in the same country, at the same time. All these people are driven by the same need of being informed or entertained and get connected to the same few sources of mass communication that deliver the same messages.

Marshall McLuhan was talking, almost 50 years ago, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), about a global village which would appear as a consequence of the masses being informed through mass media, having the same informational background and that it would be dominated by a sort of spontaneous and unconscious solidarity, which he called planetary tribalism (Coman, 1999).

Taken this into consideration, mass media become public and social networks creators. Consequently, more theoreticians drew the conclusion that one of the most important functions of the mass media is creating an imaginary community.

This linkage function of mass media exercises itself, in the same manner, at the society level, where strangers get to interact having as a common discussion topic a show they use to watch or a newspaper they read. Sociologists have analyzed this and concluded that mass media manage to create a new form of solidarity, characteristic to mass society. Another consequence of the linkage function is represented by the appearance of the public sphere, concept explored, among others, by Jürgen Habermas (1962). According to the theoretician, the public sphere came to life thanks to mass media and has been developing since the 18th century as an area of public debate where problems of general interest can be discussed and opinions can crystallize.

Barnays (2003) looks to public opinion from a different angle underlining its versatility. “It's the phrase that defines a diffuse and unstable group of people who share changing individual opinions. The public opinion results from personal opinions – sometimes alike, other times different – are belonging to people who


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make part of the society as a whole or to any social group. (...) The regular individual’s thinking consists in a large number of opinions on a wide range of topics that get in contact with his physical and mental life” (p.23). Chelcea analyses the concept and dedicates a large part of the study Opinia publică. Strategii de persuasiune şi manipulare (2006) to the relationship between public opinion and mass media concluding that communication can activate latent attitudes and make active the emergence of personal opinions.

In his book, Public Opinion (1922), the first study entirely dedicated to public opinion, Walter Lippman alleges that the public perceives only what it is ready to perceive. The public meets the bunch of happenings and new situations with specific knowledge, with a certain cultural and experience-based background. This knowledge is often translated in intellectual stereotypes used as lenses through which the public looks, trying to understand real life.

Some of the researchers mentioned before have concluded that the impact of mass media on public opinion is decisive while the other ones showed that this influence is minimal. All in all, the connection between the two entities has been never denied.

Another type of approach belongs to Stan (2004) who says about the “public opinion” concept that it represents “the key element of stability in a democratic system. The public opinion keeps the balance straight in the relationship between the Press and the Power. (...) it's the key to any manipulative act that can be made through the media. The one thing that the ones initiating manipulative acts try to change is public opinion” (p.17).

Indeed Stan’s conclusions bring forward the idea mentioned before when talking about the mass media status in the society: providing information and obeying specific interests. From this perspective, the media practically creates a public in order to expose it to all kinds of messages aimed to different purposes, most important being the political and the marketing ones. But how does the mass media message affect the public? One answer would be: by setting up “interpretative schemes” through “frame analysis” (Goffman, 1974). Such an “interpretative scheme” of an event is, in fact, a media frame of that specific event. “Media uses such framing in order to depict the events so they could be perceived in a certain way” (Vlăsceanu, 2011, p.691).

Next to the influence theories mentioned before, one must take into consideration that there are different ways and stages of transmitting one’s opinion to the public, so the individual can be influenced, persuaded and, finally, manipulated by the press. For an unprepared target, manipulation can't be felt or perceived while it takes place and sometimes not even afterwards. It just changes the individual’s state of mind on a specific issue without him even realizing that he's not the only ruler of his thoughts. So what kind of phenomenon is manipulation and how does the media put it to work?

Manipulation: concept vs. phenomenon Popescu defines manipulation as “a

manner of altered communication that uses in variable proportions dishonest argumentation, lies, bits of information all being put to act in different trial methods. Rumor, diversion – placed next to or even supporting propaganda (meaning also next to or supporting persuading), taking forms of public relations – especially publicity – that is aimed to create wrong opinions at an individual, group or society level. Manipulation is a form of fraud” (2002, p.210).

Chelcea (2006) also talks about the concept as having a dynamic shape and underlines the purpose of exercising manipulation: to create some kind of change in perspectives as starting point in the whole snow-ball effect of manipulation that ends up with a different behavior than previously stays the modeling of perception. He clearly differentiates manipulation and the other forms of influence like persuading, propaganda and advertising and maintains the hypothesis belonging to Beauvois and Joule (1997) who considered that in order to change attitudes is better to firstly obtain a preparatory behavior.

Manipulation theoreticians have also illustrated the concept in connection with the brain washing method used, for the first time, during the Korea War: the American soldiers were submitted to an intensive brain manipulation program in order to get to serve the Korean interests against The United States.

Empirically speaking, the brain washing method continues to exist in the contemporary society being now connected with the influence that mass media can exercise over the people's minds. This is how the words are now assimilated with manipulation.


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Generally, manipulation cannot be considered as being exercised by a certain part of the society or by a certain social class. Different types of manipulation can be found in everyday life, in multiple situations. Relationships among people, the functional rules of every community, need of belonging to certain groups or even simple, apparently unimportant, gestures are sometimes premises for manipulation. The most of them usually remain stuck at an unconscious level, the individual not being able to perceive them. In other cases he deals with them as being little, otherwise important, compromise that he needs to accept during his adaptation process to different situations.

Given all the above, manipulation appears to be an omnipresent mind-connected process, exercised in contemporary societies, by all individuals, without the use of physical power. Manipulation is not palpable. People use it in order to obtain certain responses from other people – individuals, groups, masses of people. The process can be exercised intentionally, with more or less important purposes, or unintentionally. Manipulating the masses to obey one’s interest can be considered immoral or even illegal as it resembles to a type of fraud.

Group or societal manipulation is commonly associated with political or commercial interests and in order for this kind of influence to happen one needs a mean to communicate its manipulative message or idea. As seen before, in the first part of the essay, mass media creates public, they are even said to transform the whole World into a global village by transmitting similar messages towards all communities around the Globe. As a consequence, mass media seem to be the best facilitators for manipulative messages given to their “linkage function”. But how does manipulation through mass media work? The next chapter is aimed to briefly explain this process.

Manipulating the perception through the written press According to Cazeneuve (1970) the

tendentious information can create opinion through the selection of a specific type of information, cutting parts of the information, transforming the context, combing real and unreal data, underlining less important aspects and not mentioning the essential, transmitting false news.

At the same time, Stan (2004) alleges that the three factors that intersect and create a refined manipulating system through mass media are the Power’s tendency to control, the intention to apparently keep the freedom of the press intact and the commercial system that influences any medium and its products. These three characteristics give birth to the press reality which is often just one perspective over the truth.

Regarding reality and the relationship between reality and knowledge, sociologists generated two opposite perspectives:

the realistic one alleging that individuals have direct access to the information surrounding them, determining a direct connection between reality and knowledge;

the constructive one that considers that reality is built more or less consciously and that it offers the journalist a privileged position – a gate-keeper in the process of selecting and transmitting the information.

That means the journalist has the freedom to choose what subject should make the news and this choice can be biased both by his personal opinions and representations on reality and by the interests he would obey – commercial, political etc. The journalist also gets to pick the length and the placement of the article in the editorial section and page.

The type of the mass media product – quality, tabloid, leisure – also influences the choice from starters, dictating what subject would be of interest for the targeted public and how it should be depicted.

Depending on the readers presumed interest, an article can be followed by others on the same topic, so the issue stays in the public opinion's attention for longer and can enter the public agenda, people talk about it and are made to get the idea it could influence their everyday life even if it really wouldn't. Media holdings can easily place a topic on the public agenda as they have multiple media of transmitting, can use different approaches and can reach more people. This means that manipulation through media holdings is much easier to be exercised than through single mediums.

But not only journalists have a word to say in the process of delivering the news but also the medium: written press, audio, audio-video, Internet. The written press is the oldest among all and one that has been constantly changing during the decades, especially in terms of style


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and content. News at the beginning depicted rather subjectively and the so-called newspapers were fulfilled with personal opinions. Nowadays, objectivity is usually thought as being the most important feature for a quality newspaper. But even this concept can be debated.

Jaques Legris, journalist working for Le Monde, made a difference between intentional and apparent objectivity. The first one is about those journalists who firstly decide to understand the events, the people and the ideas they will write about afterwards, whilst the second one implies a pre-existing judgment. By using apparent objectivity, the journalist can influence the selection made by the individual when getting in contact with mass media messages every day (apud V.Volkoff, p.166, 1999). This can be considered a genuine form of manipulation as the journalists depict the facts in a certain manner so the individual will concentrate on that emphasized section, detail, title, word, paragraph or subject.

Regarding style, Legris (1999) says that an almost incidental dependent clause could be enough to give the article the aimed effect as well as an ambiguous word, a word with multiple meanings. Indeed, even one comma can totally change the transmitted message by isolating an idea, for example. The same happens with suspension points that keep the sense of ambiguity. Key-words or those words which, when put together, give the sense of the article are also to be taken into consideration when one intends to manipulate his reader. The chosen vocabulary and the sense of the words used compile the journalistic speech that can be neutral, can accuse or can sustain an idea. Verbs, for example, can easily transmit a certain point of view: “pretends” instead of “declares” transforms the quoted personage into a less credible one.

The main message of a longer article is usually depicted in the abstract of the article, commonly called chapeau. This gets usually written in italics and / or is bolded. Sometimes journalists bold one or more words even within the article to point out a certain idea. The detail draws the reader attention without him even noticing.

The titles are one of the best methods to manipulate a reader as they tend to stick in one’s memory long after the process of reading has finished. People usually consider that the title represents the main idea of the press material and they can be easily taken in by an untrue one.

Apart the writing style, the type of the journalistic article can be an important manipulative factor – the same topic can be depicted in a report, an interview, a simple informative article and all of these can be written in hundreds of manners depending on the focus of the journalistic approach. The writer can leave his personage speak more or less, can underline some or other characteristics, can decide to keep only parts of what the personage said.

Regarding journalistic styles, the opinion articles are prone to be ones of the most manipulative as they represent a subjective approach by definition. Everything that the journalist writes can be considered “personal opinion”. But this doesn’t mean that his “personal opinion” will not influence the readers’ opinion which is caught off-guard. Even if the editorialist’s conclusions are fact-based, the facts can be chosen arbitrarily.

Page placement could also be a good method of manipulating the reader whose attention focuses on the optical center placed in the upper left side of the page and not in the middle of the page, as one would think. In the same spirit, an article placed at the bottom of the page will be automatically perceived as being of less interest than one placed in the upper side. A little note in a colored frame or a little cartoon strategically placed next to an article can draw away the readers’ attention or even change the way the material is perceived.

Before talking about the way visual representations, newspaper pictures, can be used with a manipulative purpose, let’s take a look at several considerations regarding images.

Image perception and manipulative newspaper images What is, in fact, an image? Can one talk

about true images? According to Pierre Bourdieu there aren’t such things as real images, but “just images” (1998). Taking into consideration the above conclusions regarding the subjectivity of vision Bourdieu’s statement sounds as much frightening as it is true.

One of the most well-known image analysts, Enrico Fulchignoni (1969), made a clear distinction among two types of instances staying under the same word: image. The author talks about objective images (that result from the sensorial data collected by vision during the direct perception of the world) and subjective images (subjective representations resulted from a creative process that involves imagination).


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Visual representation is said to have as much impact as 1000 words have and this can be considered true, as the picture is directly dedicated to vision – a sense that occupies a privileged position in the five-sense-sensorium as we showed in the first part of this paper. Let’s just remember about the way Merleau-Ponty talked about a painting, as being imbued with the author’s perspective over the world. The same idea is underlined by Burke (2001, p.21), when writing about historical-images, known to have the purpose to depict, as accurately as possible, the surrounding environment: “All the same, it would be unwise to attribute to the artist-reporters an <<innocent eye>> in the sense of a gaze which is totally objective, free from expectations or prejudices of any kind. Seen literally and metaphorically, sketches and paintings record a <<point of view>>”.

Living in the age of graphic distortion and of technological development, even the minute perception of the camera’s eye cannot be trusted anymore to deliver an accurate result, but merely illustrating the author’s perception.

Taken into consideration our former considerations regarding the manipulative effect of the media on the public opinion’s perception, but also Lewis Hine’s statement: “While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph” the process by which newspaper images nudge the readers into changing their perception on a certain event or person comes almost as natural.

Usually, images used to illustrate a certain article have got the role of checking-up visually the information in the text and of making it credible by showing it as realistically as possible. This category doesn’t include the large narrative photos that tell stories by themselves and are not placed within a large block of journalistic text. They talk by themselves and their purpose is to do so. Thus, sometimes illustrative images become narrative ones, offering the reader a secondary key of interpretation, sometimes different of the article’s frame of interpretation, aimed to change the reader’s perception smoothly, without making use of words and risking clear manipulation purposes. In conclusion, lots of images deliver hidden messages that influence the consumer’s interpretation of the specific article they are part of.

Among all types of newspaper images stand the cartoon-like ones. By hiding behind the pamphlet type of press, journalists freely accuse and mock different characters. “Newspaper

images that are placed within different article can be used whether just to distract one’s attention by underlining a certain detail or even to contradict what the article alleges (...) Choosing to publish such images where the secondary details have no connection with the article main idea, is a clear attempt of changing the reader’s perception by using subliminal messages” (Stan, 2004, p.53).

Another way of manipulation when making use of media images could be done by the so-called “Chinese drop” method: during a media campaign that can count tens of articles on the same subject, journalists use photos apparently different, but still imbued with the same message. After being systematically exposed to a certain idea, even the selective media consumer tends to ask himself questions about the things he thought he knew for sure and finally he gets clearly manipulated.

The images depicting a certain character are ones of the most prone to subjectivity as any gesture or even any look the personages takes can be misleading and misunderstood when taken out of the context. The clothes one wears or the frozen frame of the personage’s body-language are very good predictors for changing a reader’s perception regarding a person in relation to a certain topic. As we saw before, text and image work together in order to transmit the desired message – sometimes deliberately contradictory in order to puzzle the consumer.

Page placement of the picture, the colors used, or the picture description is among the tools a journalist can make use of when setting a frame of interpretation.

All of the above got very well illustrated

during the media campaign occasioned by the opening of the Security files (2006-2007). One of the characters whose credibility was put into debate then was Mona Muscă and the pictures used supported the considerations made regarding the role of the media in changing the reader’s perception on a certain topic. When the press campaign ended the polls showed that people’s trust in Mona Muscă had decreased significantly and that people’s opinion regarding the politician’s public image got also severely affected. As a consequence of the media campaign the politician stepped down from the political stage.


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Misleading newspaper images Study case: “Media Informing and

Manipulating on the Opening of the Security Files (2006-2007). Research focus: Mona Muscă”

I decided to study this topic as it entered

the public agenda and public debate after all the Romanian mass media showed great interest in presenting and discussing its multiple perspectives. Regarding the character I chose, Mona Muscă was a well-known, quite uncontroversial politician, whose public image was perceived dramatically different after the opening of her Security file and who finally retired from the political stage.

As mass media were, for many people, the only information channels used in this case I wanted to find out at what extent their approach changed people's perception. Did they inform or manipulate the public?

As study material I chose two daily quality newspapers: Cotidianul and Gândul that were targeted to a premium audience, the same audience as the one that Mona Muscă targeted in her public speech, her voters. Both newspapers covered the topic with priority. Moreover, within the both editorial teams one could find influential opinion leaders at that time.

The representative sample consisted of 153 articles (80 from Cotidianul newspaper and 73 from Gândul newspaper) published between the 9th of August 2006 and the 9th of May 2007. The articles covered different types of journalistic approach: from interviews to simple notes. The unit of work was considered to be the entire article.

The content analysis I conducted included several approaches like the analysis of the frequency of different topics in the selected articles (research also based on key-words), the calculation of the attitude coefficient, the analysis of the selected journalistic genres in terms of type, section and page placement, the analysis of the journalistic speech, titles and pictures used.

In order to assess the analysis of the images used during the media campaign I selected two groups of four images each, belonging to the two daily newspapers.

The editorial policy of Gândul required the use of black and white pictures depicting the main character debated in the near-by article. This newspaper did not prioritize images, but texts that occupied the most part of the page.

Even so, the used photos were chosen in such way as to transmit both an evident message and a subliminal one.

In Cotidianul newspaper another approach could be discovered. Even if the images were not used excessively, the opinion articles (most important manipulative tools, as seen in the overall study) were always backend by very suggestive cartoons. Sometimes, these images were as big as half a page, being a clear attention point for the reader.

Given the remarks above, I decided to analyze a group of pictures from Gândul newspaper (the 9th, 10th, 11th of August 2006) and a symmetrical group of cartoons published in Cotidianul (the 14th and 16th of August, the 4th of September 2006).

Conclusions Regarding the Assessed Research The study stressed up the editorial policy

of the two newspapers given the types of journalistic speech they choose.

On the one hand, Gândul newspaper maintained its objective approach both at the text and at the image levels. The delivered message was information and event-based so were the pictures used. On the other hand, the titles of the articles depicted the journalists’ opinions regarding the topic, being often sensational, lacking straight information. The opinion articles placed in the optical center of the first page also delivered a harsh, accusing and even defamatory attitude towards Mona Muscă.

When talking about Cotidianul newspaper, the results of the research were more obvious. This could be a consequence of the editorial policy of the newspaper that allows more subjective approaches both for opinion and information articles. The public was permanently exposed to articles that accused and condemned the personage using a broad range of defaming words as “squeak” and mostly insinuating phrases instead of words with a clear meaning. The images and especially the cartoons used to illustrate opinion materials depicted the politician in all kinds of contexts perceived as mocking and / or embarrassing. These cartoons were introduced during the entire media campaign, bearing changes depending on the way the events went.

All in all, the message delivered by the two newspapers to the public was not an equitable and objective one but one that contradicts journalistic deontology. The people's


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perception was influenced by being conse-cutively exposed to defaming texts and pictures aimed to affect the personage’s public image.

As a consequence of the media scandal that took place between the months of August 2006 and March 2007, the results of the opinion polls showed that the people’s trust in the politician had decreased with 30 percent.

Taken this into consideration the manner that the two newspapers decided to present this topic seems to have been more manipulative than aimed to inform the public.

Discussion The fact that we are living in an age of

performance and that this type of world is constructed in such a way as to be merely perceived as visual have become over-debated issues. Moreover, rather recently, there could be heard voices that pleaded for the return of the former aural-oral society and of its intrinsic values. Though, the technological development we have been facing has clearly prioritized vision even if, nowadays, its trajectory seems to be towards synesthesia. All in all, people still believe in what they see and believe in it even stronger when they receive the same information through other channels dedicated to other senses as their hearing, for example. And who else, if not the media, masters this synesthesia of information being able to select, elaborate and transmit widely the same messages!?

More than two hundred years later after Edmund Burke legitimated its actions by acknowledging publically the power of mass media we face a professional journalism that aims a resembling audience. The multiple means of mass communication target well determined niches of public, people who make up the society of the “high modernity” age and who are characterized by much more reflexivity and

individuality. Still, the journalistic act itself is prone to subjectivity as it’s conducted by self-aware human beings, not mentioning other interests that media has been serving since the invention of the printing press.

At the same time, “manipulation” is a hardly perceived process that firstly affects the person’s perception getting it modified. Secondly, the molded perception over reality turns into opinions and finally into decisions and actions. It’s a hardly perceived phenomenon but yet very much present in our everyday lives, even if it’s conducted on intention or unintentionally, by the media or by a close person, with an ultimate purpose of ruining someone’s public image or with an innocent motivation as being more appreciated by a dear person by offering her a rose.

What we know for sure is that, as the main message carriers in the contemporary society, mass media are able to deliver both information and specific ideas and opinions belonging to a few people. And this happens when the press obeys interests different from the public’s ones. And the result is that the audience is nudged into changing its perceptions and eventually into changing its behavior regarding a certain subject or person.

Still, due to recent technological discoveries, as interactive media, manipulation is not as easily to be practiced as it was before. People have now lots of ways to verify the truthfulness of the information and they are taken in more and more difficult. Moreover, the Internet offers a global debate area that becomes harder and harder to control every day.

Nevertheless, as the analysis presented within this paper has proved, perceptions can be still changed by the media and the written press is still a powerful weapon when used for other purposes than for informing.

List of References 1. Barnays L., E. (2003). Cristalizarea opiniei publice, Bucureşti: comunicare.ro 2. Burke, P., 2001, Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, London: Reaktion Books Ltd 3. Cazeneuve, J. (1970). Les pouvoirs de la television, Paris: Gallimard 4. Chelcea, S. (2006). Opinia publică. Strategii de persuasiune şi manipulare, Cap. 4 Construirea opinie publice: rolul mass-media, Cap. 6 Manipularea: o perspectivă psihosociologică, Bucureşti: Editura Economică 5. Coman, M. (coord.) (1999). Introducere în sistemul mass-media, Bucureşti: Polirom 6. Dâncu, V. (1999). Comunicarea simbolică, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia 7. Dobrescu, P., Bârgăoanu, A. (2003). Mass Media şi societatea, Bucureşti: Comunicare.ro 8. Fulchignoni, E., 1969, La civilisation de l'image, Paris: Payot 9. Giddens, A. (2001). Sociologie – ediţia a 3a, Bucureşti: All 10. Ingold, T. (2002). The Perception of the Environment. Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, Chap. 14: Stop, look and listen! Vision, hearing and human movement, Taylor & Francis e-Library, pp. 243-287


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11. Joule, R.V., Beauvois, J.L. (1997). Tratat de manipulare, Bucureşti: Antet 12. Lanham, R. (2006). The Economics of Attention, Chap.I, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 13. Lucrare de diplomă: Informare şi manipulare în cazul deconspirării dosarelor Securităţii. Studiu de caz: Mona Muscă, absolvent: Alina Petra Marinescu, coordonator: Prof. univ. dr. Marcel Tolcea, 2007 14. McLuhan, M. (2005). Inside the Five Sense Sensorium, in Howes, D., Empire of the Senses: The Sensory Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg 15. Stan, S. C. (2004). Manipularea prin presă, Bucureşti: Humanitas 16. Vlăsceanu, L. (2011). Mass media, public şi societate în Vlăsceanu, L. (coord.), Sociologie, Bucureşti: Polirom, pp. 682-736 17. Volkoff, V. (1999). Tratat de dezinformare, Bucureşti: Antet


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Film Noir and Femme Fatale. A Contemporary Perspective

Monica ILIE-PRICA1 National School of Political Science

and Public Administration Abstract: The present article is a contemporary view on film noir and its iconic female character, the femme fatale. The significance of these two important concepts in cinema history is reflected here through some of the most relevant studies conducted in this field. It is also a synthetic presentation of the main characteristics that define the film genre mentioned above and its prominent heroine and, ultimately, it proposes a discussion on the impact that film noir has on the modern times, mainly on the contemporary public, taking into consideration several aspects related to the yesterday’s and today’s society. Keywords: film noir, film neo-noir, gothic film, femme fatale, Expressionism

Introduction Throughout the twentieth century, the

cinema, entitled “the seventh art”, has become a means of entertainment and education for a variety of audiences around the world, and it is acknowledged its major role in the birth of television. At the same time, it is an entire industry that promotes legendary figures and motion pictures through publicity campaigns.

In my opinion, the cinema is the most complex form of art, as it represents a fascinating combination between high culture and popular culture. Over the time, it promoted an impressive range of artistic movements (from German Expressionism and French Poetic Realism, to Neo-Realism, and Post-Modernism) and genres (drama, romance, comedy, musical, horror, thriller, western, adventure, epic, science fiction etc.).

One of the most interesting creations of the seventh art is, of course, the film noir. As I will present in this article, film noir combines characteristics from other film genres, such as the Expressionist films, the gangster films, the gothic films, the horror films, and the melodramas. It might be as well seen as a stylised thriller, which depicts fictional or real-life stories (especially after the late 1950s, when it became a sort of semi-documentary), with powerful characters, like the outstanding femme fatale, who dominates not just the plot of the film or the hard-boiled hero, but also the audiences that seem spellbound once she appears on the screen.

In the present article, I also try to emphasize the main physical and psychological traits of the femme fatale or the deadly woman, in accordance with the vision of film scholars and other specialists who made studies on the femme fatale and film noir.

Film Noir as a subject for discussion The subject of film noir has been

debated by many authors who represent all kinds of fields, not just the cinema. Psychology, philosophy, sociology, and history are other domains that films noirs seem to cover not just because of their stories, but also because of their impact on the general public. I might as well add here that film noir is still a popular topic, and as a cinematic product it is kept as fresh and modern as always, especially once the neo-noir genre (the modern phase of film noir) came2 to surface in the late 1960s-1970s, and which still exists even nowadays (see The Dark Knight and The Black Swan, among the most recent titles).

But what is this „film noir”, after all? This generic term was first introduced by the French journalist Nino Frank, in 1946. Inspired

1 Monica Ilie-Prica is currently attending the courses of the Master in Audio-Visual Communication at the National School of Political Science and Public Administration, in Bucharest, and is about to earn a Master’s Degree in July 2014. Interested in television, film, public relations, diplomacy, history. As a film collector, she coordinates several blogs (http://moniqueclassique.wordpress.com) and websites dedicated to film actors (Conrad Veidt, Vivien Leigh, Lana Turner, John van Dreelen, Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner). E-mail: [email protected]


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by the crime novels published in France under the name of “série noire”, Frank observed the sombre and sinister atmosphere of the latest American thrillers (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, and Murder, My Sweet) that were shown in the cinemas after the end of WWII, and so he came up with the name of “film noir”. In fact, the films noirs are the screen versions of several best-selling crime novels that were published in the 1920s-1930s in Great Britain and the United States. Some of the famous authors were Dashiell Hammett, with his novels The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon, James M. Cain, with Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler, with Lady in the Lake and The Big Sleep, and Graham Greene, with This Gun for Hire and The Third Man.

It is considered that there are two stages in the history of film noir. The first is the classical period, beginning with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and ending with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). Then followed the 1960s, a moment when film noir, as a genre, became to decline, but it was revigorated in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, also known as the postclassical period of film noir. From then on, renowned filmmakers, like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Paul Verhoeven, and Quentin Tarantino directed retro-noirs, like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Chinatown, or neo-noirs, with such films like Blue Velvet, Basic Instinct, Fatal Atttraction, Body Heat, and L.A. Confidential.

Film noir – definitions and characteristics There have been many attempts to

define “film noir”, but nobody really found a precise definition. Some people consider it a genre, an aesthetic movement, or a constellation: “a loose group of motifs, stylistic devices and plot lines between which a critic can draw endless imaginary lines connecting them with a shifting series of figures” [Tom Gunning apud A. Spicer & H. Hanson, 2013: pp.111-112]. Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton were the first authors who tried to define „film noir”. They consider that “it’s the presence of crime that gives film noir its most distinctive stamp (…). Film noir is a film of death in all the senses of the word” [Borde & Chaumeton, 2002: p. 5]. Owing to its violence, film noir has a certain impact on the public’s perception towards the real life and the environment, in general. The

authors argue that “the moral ambivalence, criminal violence, and contradictory complexity of the situations and motives all combine to give the public a shared feeling of anguish and insecurity, which is the identifying sign of film noir at this time. All the works in this series exhibit a consistency of an emotional sort; namely, the state of tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their psychological bearings. The vocation of film noir has been to create a specific sense of malaise” [Ibidem, p.13].

One of the main characteristics of film noir is the ambiguity and the ambivalence in portraying the heroes. As Borde and Chaumeton noted, “usually, in film noir we see angelic killers, neurotic gangsters, megalomaniac gang bosses, and disturbing or depraved stooges” [Ibidem, p. 8]. The protagonist is usually a hard-boiled policeman or an ordinary man who deals with psychological problems and social crises, which reflect a seriously disturbed society, with dangers at every corner. Justice is never a key to the solution, and the hero takes life in his hands and tries to clear the difficulties of his existence, no matter if he commits a crime or becomes a victim of his own fate. Sometimes he dies because he is seduced by a femme fatale, the most important and prominent character in film noir. The deadly woman is a goddess who possesses not only a perfect face and a perfect body, but also a strong personality. Her problem is that she never stops until she gets things in her own way – and owing to her struggles she, too, becomes a victim of her own faults. Both protagonists are punished for their attempt to betray and break the rules, even if their reasons are very realistic and pragmatic. They behave this way because they need money, power, freedom, and equity. They fight for their goals and they have a passionate attitude towards life. The hero and the heroine in film noir don’t care how much they live. They want it all and as soon as possible. They never surrender easily, unless they are seriously injured or killed, and they only live the present. They try to escape from their problems and to satisfy their most demanding needs, but in their attempt to set themselves free from the uneven boundaries of the unfair society, they become more disturbed and they get into more troubles than in their initial state. The crisis of the individuals is always developed in the city, which is the main background used in films noirs. Dark alleys, dump streets, rainy nights, deserted places, funfairs, parks and


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railway stations, bizarre nightclubs and cafés, usually used for the clandestine reunions of the mob. There is a sense of fear and panic that one could get killed at any time… This is the general setting and mood in film noir.

In terms of cinematography, film noir is famous for several specific traits that one could easily identify while watching a motion picture of this type. For instance, the chiaroscuro lighting, the fascinating combination between lights and shadows is one of them. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson consider that Orson Welles was the first filmmaker who introduced film noir to the public, through his masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941), which despite not being truly a film noir, it became a source of inspiration for the real films noirs that were made after 1941. The authors point out several aspects that define film noir, as follows: “1. Depth staging 2. The sequence shot 3. Subjective camera positions to suggest psychological states 4. Anti-traditional mise-en-scène 5. Expressive montage instead of découpage classique 6. A baroque visual style characterized by mannered lighting and photography 7. Formative use of sound: for example, overlapping dialogue, aural bridges, modulations in the amplification of sound effects 8. The displacement of “wall-to-wall” romantic scores with expressive and interpretative music 9. The use of documentary conventions within the structure of a narrative film 10. A convoluted temporal structure involving the use of first person voice-over narration 11. Psychological of Freudian tones 12. Use of an investigator who attempts to order an inherently incoherent and ambiguous world 13. A morally ambiguous protagonist” [Spicer & Hanson, 2013: p.22].

One could obviously notice that film noir has some distinctive qualities, not just visually, but also when it comes to the storytelling. The narration is made in a subjective manner (at least in the initial films noirs), as the hero remembers, in a flashback depiction of the events, how his life changed, especially after meeting a femme fatale (see Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Detour, and Sunset Blvd.). In the later films noirs, from the 1950s, the narration was made in a different perspective, more objective, neutral, without the slightest emotion. The so-

called “Voice of God” was used instead of the emotional narration of the protagonist. This different technique of storytelling was inspired by the news bulletins and it reminds of a documentary. The city is illustrated as it is, without exaggerations. Some of the stories were the screen versions of real criminal cases solved by the police, and so we can say that “reel life” (life in the movies) identifies itself and even coincides with “real life”. What is important to mention here is that film noir is not necessarily shot in black and white. There are films noirs (both classical and modern) that were shot in colour. One of them is the acclaimed motion picture Leave Her to Heaven (1945), in which the storytelling, the characters (especially the heroine, who ruins the life of the hero), the camera shots, the camera movements and angles are typical to the noir style. But the most stylised film noir, which brings to attention the most stylised femme fatale and, perhaps, the definitive spider woman in history, is a black and white masterpiece, directed and produced by the talented Billy Wilder. Of course, I refer to Sunset Blvd. (1950), with the enigmatic and controversial silent film star Norma Desmond, a character portrayed by a real star of the silent era, Gloria Swanson, a great personality, larger than life. What is even more interesting about this film is the presence of the illustrious giant of the European cinema, the equally enigmatic and formidable legend of the silver screen, the actor, director, screenwriter and producer Erich von Stroheim. A film noir that has Stroheim and Swanson in the cast, and Billy Wilder as a director, is certainly a sample of pure artistic values. This time, film noir is no longer an ordinary thriller, but art itself. It is a piece of artistry, an A-picture, winner of three Academy Awards, for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Music.

In general, film noir has a major artistic importance, because it encompasses the characteristics of other film movements and genres. The most influential of them all is the German Expressionism. Several prominent directors of films noirs in Hollywood were actually Jewish emigrants from Germany, who escaped from the Nazi regime to save their lives. Among them were Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Siodmak, and Joseph von Sternberg. It is only natural that they used the filming techniques and style of Expressionism in order to promote, in the United States, a very sophisticated and subtle form of


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propaganda, during and immediately after WWII. Expressionist films and films noirs have in common the psychology of the characters, who are usually tormented people, the voice-over and flashback, as narrative methods, and the chiaroscuro lighting. Film noir has also some important aspects in common with the French Poetic Realism (promoted by Julien Duvivier, Jean Renoir, and Marcel Carné) when it comes to pessimistic atmosphere, cruel reality and the tough manner in which the characters and the stories are depicted. In fact, Expressionism, French Poetic Realism and film noir have all in common the social, economic and political crisis, because they appeared in periods of war or during serious conflicts, with disastrous consequences on the people and the society, in general.

At the same time, film noir has a lot in common with the gothic film, too. They resemble when it comes to filming and narrative techniques, direction, general atmosphere, that is sinister and terrifying, but also when it comes to symbols like staircases, mirrors, and paintings. Some of the characters in both genres are mentally disturbed people, who imagine or really are in great danger (see Gaslight, The Spiral Staircase, Secret Beyond the Door, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Suspicion, and Shadow of a Doubt, among others). Most of the times, the wife suspects of the husband that he wants to kill her, and the public comes to believe this, too, because the hero is ambiguous. But, whilst the gothic film has a damsel in distress, a heroine that might be in danger and who investigates a possible crime and seeks for help, in film noir the heroine is, indeed, a dangerous woman, capable of killing her husband (who is usually much older than her) for money, for freedom (because she wants to take control of her own life, without ever depending of anybody else), and for power. The deadly woman also condemns her lover to death, as she disposes of him once he helped her in her malevolent scheme, which might be described as “the perfect crime”, or, in other words, a crime without trace.

Film noir has something in common with the horror films, as well, especially when we refer to the suspenseful moments and the lugubrious scenes which induce a state of fear, of panic, maybe even of shock to the public. The difference is that the horror film is sustained by the supernatural elements, such as phantoms and monsters, while film noir is as realistic as possible. Film noir also has something in common with the

gangster film from the early 30s (we remember easily the iconic Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, and James Cagney). We have many depictions of the mob in film noir, and the “Scarface” type of character is quite often seen especially in the productions from the mid-50s, such as The Big Heat and The Big Combo. But in film noir, not only the leader of the mob is capable of conducting criminal activities, but the ordinary citizen, too. Film noir conveys an important message here: that the society is profoundly corrupt, unfair, chaotic and dangerous, even more because no one is really what he or she pretends to be. In other words, an angel could be a demon and vice versa. The continuous switch between the roles of the good guy and the bad guy is typical to the film noir; but also the unpredictable situations, the twists and turns of the plot might take by surprise and confuse the audiences. So, watching a film noir is equally tiring and demanding, as it is a challenging and an interesting experience for the viewers.

The femme fatale – the demon with angelic face One of the most discussed characters in

cinema history is the femme fatale, the definitive heroine in film noir. The dominant female image on the big screen exists for a long time. First it was inspired by the vamp ladies of the 1910s-1920s, with such luminaries like Theda Bara, Alla Nazimova, Gloria Swanson, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, and afterwards, in the 1930s, by legendary actresses like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Mae West... Thus, the transition from the vamp to the femme fatale was made quite easily, so that in the 1940s appeared some iconic female performances in films noirs. I would mention here Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gene Tierney in Laura, Ava Gardner in The Killers, Rita Hayworth in Gilda and in The Lady from Shanghai, Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Joan Bennett in The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, Veronica Lake in The Blue Dahlia, Ella Raines in Phantom Lady, Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. and, among the more recent ones, Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, and Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential.

One of the essential traits of the femme fatale is her beauty and her desire to control men through her sensuality, sex appeal and


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domineering attitude. She is self-confident, intelligent, ambitious, and very much aware of her physical qualities, but despite her exquisite looks, she is an evil woman, incapable of love. Men are only an instrument for the fatale’s schemes. She is willing to sacrifice everything to get what she wants – money, power, freedom, total control over her destiny and over those who surround her. The female character in film noir is much stronger than the male character, but in spite of that, she loses every time, as she is punished and sentenced to death by destiny, so she becomes the victim of her own fatality. Still, in film noir the femme fatale is not the only female character that we notice. For instance, we can encounter the businesswoman (see Mildred Pierce), the loyal secretary (see Phantom Lady), the mother and wife devoted to her family (see The Big Heat) and, probably, an alternative for the hero who is forced to choose between her and the antagonist, the deadly woman.

Another interesting aspect is the duplicity in the portrayal of women in film noir. This reminds me of The Dark Mirror (1946), with Olivia de Havilland in a dual role of the twin sisters, who despite being physically identical, they differ radically when it comes to their personalities (one is good, the other one is evil). In addition to this, the double image of the heroine is created through symbols like paintings, photographs, mirrors that are used for her own contemplation, because the femme fatale is not only histrionic, but also narcissistic. Furthermore, these symbols constitute her alter ego or doppelganger, as separate images of her own self. The femme fatale is, in my opinion, both an angel and a demon (who is, after all, a fallen angel, too). She is forced by circumstances to make a drastic change in her life, to avoid the boring routine of being married to an old man, who might turn out to be also a cripple or, anyway, a totally unattractive, but wealthy man. The beautiful young woman who plans to kill her husband with her lover and succeeds in doing it is portrayed in two very famous films noirs, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Phyllis and, respectively, Cora manage to dispose of the husband with the cooperation of the naïve and smitten lover, but their efforts seem to be futile, since both of them and their accomplices lose their lives tragically.

The controversial depiction of women in film noir was amply discussed by different authors over the time. For instance, Helen Hanson presents, in her interesting book Hollywood Heroines. Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, the reason why such domineering, ruthless and independent women were promoted in the cinema. The fact is that during WWII, the women were obliged to replace the men who were fighting on the front, and so they sustained their families by themselves [Hanson, 2008: p.18]. Rosie the Riveter, the iconic female worker in the USA, was no longer the acceptable image of the young and modern ladies of the 1940s, and so this way appeared the beautiful and effective secretary, who earns a living and who manages to arrange very well her daily life. There was also an important political and social context in that period, which had started even much earlier in time, and that was the feminist movement; it promoted the liberty, integrity and the status of women in the society. Thus the women’s identity became a topic that was widely discussed in the press, in literature, but also in cinema. Helen Hanson shows the results of a Gallup poll from 1946, in which 54% of the female respondents preferred romantic dramas, while 29% preferred mystery films, types of films that encompass both the noir crime thriller and the female gothic film [Ibidem, p.8]. Moreover, the public of the cinema in those years was mostly composed of women, and that is how the film industry created the cult for the great female image, even more because in Hollywood there were women screenwriters and directors, like Ida Lupino, a pioneer in this domain. The stories of the heroines of the big screen had to resonate with the stories of the real-life women, and that is how this kind of motion pictures, including the films noirs and the female gothic films, appeared.

In the 1940s, women were seeking for a superior status, both economically and socially. An interesting study, written by Scott Snyder, professor at the University of Georgia (USA), illustrates how several social factors during and after WWII influenced the portrayal of women mentally disordered and how this topic itself shaped the American culture in that period. The author considers that the 1940s were the period of the “women’s pictures”, because the public consisted mainly of women, and the successful film stars at box office were also women [Snyder, 2001: p. 155]. That is why, Snyder


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says, “it may be no accident that the overabundance of films exhibiting the femme fatale coincided with female acquisition of economic and social clout in real life. In fact, film noir movies may be a result of the alteration of forties American culture, symbolizing the female threat to the status quo. Hollywood simplistically depicted this shift in terms of the film noir femme fatale – a composite of power, lust, and greed. These motion pictures implicitly criticized women for considering alternative roles” [Ibidem, pp.155-156].

But the femme fatale is a film character that continues to be popular even nowadays. She is seen as being antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic. Aesthetically, the femmes fatales look like goddesses. They have long hair (blonde or brunette), long legs, prominent breasts, slender figure, they wear makeup and jewels, and usually wear clothes that emphasize their physical qualities.

Another major societal factor that influenced the production of the films noirs and the creation of the femme fatale is criminology. As Snyder argues, “the viewing of film noir and its (...) disordered characters by the general public may be a reflection of, as well as a contributing factor to, violent crime of the 1940s. Homicide rates usually increase after wars. The U.S. homicide rate jumped from 1943-1950” [Ibidem, p. 163]. It might be said also that the femme fatales tried to break the rules in a patriarchal structure, because men became their victims. These femmes fatales are the archetype of the seductive, aggressive and malefic woman. As Snyder puts it, “the type of character pathology personified in the femme fatale may be viewed as representative of certain misogynistic conceptualizations of the women of the time. Concurrently, these screen women may have helped to create a certain cultural image for some real-life women of the 1940s and 1950s as reflected in the areas of fashion and style, personality, and social status. These fatal women

are both a representation of some aspects of the larger American culture and a causative factor in helping to create a certain style and personality for this era. These cinema seductresses, with the potency and strength to annihilate men, may in some ways be viewed as overdrawn, cynical, precursors of the liberated woman of the sixties” [Ibidem, pp.165-166].

As for today’s femme fatale, the focus is mostly on her sexuality, on her eroticism. The heroines of the neo-noir postmodernist films are represented by such personalities like Madonna and Sharon Stone, who contribute to “the proliferation of sexual discourse which dominates postmodern media, both in images of sexuality and debate about its import” [Stables in Kaplan, 2012: p. 167]. In my opinion, the contemporary depiction of the femmes fatales is quite different from the classical period, because the actresses of the past possessed a sensual, mysterious, sophisticated, attractive air, and they could be sexy without being vulgar, as it happens with the modern heroines from the so-called “erotic thrillers” like Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct.

Conclusion All in all, we might say that film noir is

the genre that survived the best over the years, without losing any of its qualities for which it is widely known. Film noir is a unique case in the history of cinema, as it managed to capture the attention of the contemporary public and to adapt itself to the modern times. And the femme fatale, as an important component of film noir, manages to keep her popularity and attractiveness to generations after generations, from the public of the 1940s to the contemporary public. She is not just an iconic character of film noir, but she is also “a woman for all seasons”, owing to her extraordinary capacity to reinvent and to adapt herself to the changes that occur by the passing of time.

References BORDE, Raymond, CHAUMETON, Etienne (2002). A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953), San Francisco: City Lights Books. HANSON, Helen (2007). Hollywood Heroines. Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, London: I. B. Tauris. SNYDER, Scott (2001). „Personality disorder and the film noir femme fatale” in Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, vol. 8, nr. 3, pp. 155-168, University of Georgia. SPICER, Andrew, HANSON, Helen (2013). A Companion to Film Noir, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing. STABLES, Kate (2012). „The postmodern always rings twice: Constructing the femme fatale in 90s cinema” in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir (the 7th edition) (pp. 164-182), London: British Film Institute, Palgrave MacMillan.


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Exploring the Suspect Dimension of Realism in the Latest New Wave Romanian Cinema

Beatrice MEDA1, Ph.D c. National University of Theatre and Film "I.L.Caragiale", Bucharest,

Abstract. Romanian new wave cinema is mainly seen as a homogenous realist direction. Starting from such unifying elements, this article analyzes the becoming of the genre towards new dimensions found in latest films: Aurora and Police, Adjective. These works point towards a slightly different approach, a step beyond commonly known realism. Exploring the limits, film directors rediscover the power of time in cinema. This new coordinate of the medium, points to a special realism that researches the concept of durée – time seen as an element of telling the story beyond words or even space.

Key words: realism, time, new wave cinema, communism, imagination

Rediscovering neorealism and exporting masterpieces. Highlights and context

This pessimistic cinema that you wanted to suppress or at least to reclaim lit a torch in the dark forest of our age. Cesare Zavattini

Transition periods always give rise to

unexpected territories, whether they are at the boundary of political, social or artistic eras. The border line of 10 years from the communist period in Romania (since Stuff and Dough appears in 2001), raised a cultural wave that very few imagined coming and maybe fewer from the field of cinema. The socio-political freedom gained in those recent years, demanded the same movement in arts. Along with external reality the inner one also changes and with that also changes art. The becoming of times would inevitably bring in Romanian film that specific generation that not only needed visual delight, while the mind was anesthetized, but also a „revolution against that lie that had been silently indulged by previous generations, that lie that was conjugated in all existing modes, reaching deeply into the social fabric – and, by extension, into the arts” (Șerban 2009: p. 59). Democracy awakened a kind of social conscience that needed truth and life in the most transparent way possible. A direction cinema could perfectly lead.

Hence the answer to the question why exactly did this happen in film: perhaps because the new era demanded a new artistic medium as such or perhaps because this instrument was the only one that could get the most accurate reflection of times, delivering 24 instances of perfect reality per second. Art was indeed craving for that precious lode of truthfulness that communist utopia kidnapped. Romanian cinema emerged with a new generation, and the new generation needed life and truth along with their closest to real experience. In these circumstances, young filmmakers returned to the first truth of film, which latest formulas have forgotten, sometimes slightly and imperceptibly: „everything that happens on the screen bears a realism factor that not any other figurative technique can claim. Film is always woven from representation and language, but its first and universal understanding is the representation.” (Bazin 1968: p. 218) The seventh art inevitable means reality in the purest possible form; untainted life captures beyond any convention, abstraction or metaphor. 3Even passed through

1 Beatrice Meda studied Acting at The National University of Theatre and Film "I.L.Caragiale", Bucharest, and also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication and PR from The National School of Political and Administrative Studies. She graduated two masters – one was an interdisciplinary programme in theatre and film at The Centre of Excellence in the Study of Image (University of Bucharest) and the other in Diplomacy and foreign policy in international relations at Lucian Blaga University. She is now a PhD student in Theatre (Aesthetics, theory and pedagogy) at UNATC I.L.Caragiale, while she also works at the Research Department there.


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technical instrumentation, the cinematic product permanently bears captive in it some concrete form of reality stamped on the film roll. Light reflected from objects and actors forever engraves its mark on the film surface. The primary function of cinema is revealed since the early religious origins of statuary art, as being the salvation of man by his appearance: „artificially fixing the human carnal form ultimately means to save it from the course of time: to anchor it in life” (Bazin 1968: p. 9), and beyond fine art’s realism cinema is nothing less than the most evolved aspect of artistic truth.

Its strength that must be released comes from this significant added dimension. That strange embalming that Bazin wrote about brings to the fore a magical factor that most arts escape – time – which through cinema becomes enslaved and trained by directors, like a wild animal held captive for the insectary. The way in which the spell of duration is presented and manipulated, splits common realism in two distinct areas outlined on one hand by film as medium and on the other by film as metamedium. The first category uses time as a tool of fixation for realism with the purpose of a closer to life image. However, as we get closer to a one on one temporal relation with life and even beyond, the time factor becomes not only a tool, but a particular kind of analysis and self-reflection coordinate that turns over on its environment.

From the certainties of this first belief had risen in the recent history of Romanian cinema the movement started by film directors like Lucian Pintilie, Liviu Ciulei, Andrei Blaier or Victor Iliu, researching that wonder act born when the camera bows to the truth with genuine movements and authenticity. Bringing elements of real life in counterpoint to imagination, the new wave first developed daring contact surfaces to life: documentary style, authentic filming locations preferred to those made in the studio, socially defined context, faded boundaries, means that reach for authenticity – sincerity and interest for an image without any makeup done, in exchange for the sense of reality.

Seeking new aesthetic strategies for the representation of external images to match the new found freedom, Romanian cinema becomes an exigency for revalorization, understanding and approach to contemporary life. A journey worthy of the most important international

awards, the past 10 years representing film as the most important Romanian cultural card.

Although conceptual and artistic lines of the new wave cinema are easily captured under the realist theory, latest films imperceptibly develop a new dimension. Forced to extremes realism transforms into magical realism. Not because of the fantasy in space that it brings but because of time becoming a symbol. Ellipses and editing can function as extraordinary metaphors as well as they can become masks that hide. Set free beyond representing a tool, time becomes in cinema the new main story.

Marshall McLuhan (1992: p.129) assessed, in one of his lesser known works, that there are four lines of analysis to be applied to any media. The last refers to what would happen with a medium when pushed beyond its known limits. What does realism turn into under such circumstances? Watching carefully some of the last films trademarks of the Romanian new wave cinema, for example Aurora and Police, Adjective, we observe a certain obvious conceptual turn that reminds us of McLuhan's idea. So the real question: beyond its borders, in what can the Romanian new wave cinema transform into? becomes impossible to avoid.

It is said that a prophet is not the one who has a vision sensing the future, but he who perfectly reads the signs of times. If so, then these two films have that more value, since they contain signs for the films to come and a forecasting of the following artistic directions.

Man. Waiting. Life. Consciousness – instruments for the birth of new wave cinema.

We answer to everyone who asks where life is, go to the poets and artists! If they are true artists, they will speak to you about life, about the essence of life, about its importance; for they have the ability to see, to feel and embody what is essential. (Vogleman 1991: p. 28)

The slowest and hardest, although the

most important, of changes taking place in contemporary world is certainly found in the way people think. The new realism begins as a basis for the new movement. It is a concept arising from this new way of looking at the world,


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proclaiming freedom from dogmas and ideologies. Its primary value is life, and man becomes the most important link to it. It thus gives up the ”sacrificing of human issues and concepts in favor of grotesque and fantastic elements; gives up the historical staging and adaptations and the rhetoric that claims that we are all moved by the same noble feelings” (Lawson 1968: p. 193) – all outdated patterns from the past.

Armed with precise recording instruments, matching bits of feelings and memories, using documents, testimonies and stories (for example, Cristi Puiu in the making of Aurora recounts a long time watching programs about criminals and many other materials or interviews and attending crime scenes), „the most furious neorealists of the moment – Puiu, Porumboiu and Mungiu” (Șerban: 2009, p. 111), carefully and lucidly dissect life to re-establish the real image of life, instead of the built one and the living man instead of the dead one who does not know how to revolt anymore in search for himself. They do this in the process of awakening a new sense in film, society and man.

On Romanian land, this movement has built incredible reference works, multi-winning films guaranteeing cinema’s ability to become an important international ambassador for the national. In full modern age, moving towards American hegemony, cinema managed to join this together under a European dome that held through the most important jury verdicts. In the "centre of a modern culture now in full process of globalization” (Tomlinson: 2002, p. 5), Romania manages to value the national existence trough cinema. A centre in which the particle man reality finds the position that humanism praised. And this is not due to exposure to exotic items – revolution, anguished abortions in hotel rooms or poor hospitals – but by valuing an individual point of view which can also reach millions of cultural and human perspectives.

„Buried among legends, reality gradually flourishes” (Zavattini: 1968, p. 194) to research man in the basis of psychological investigations. Thereby we see images emerge with nothing below or above life, slices of truth and magical observation: an old man, a raped a girl and another who laughs, a provincial television set, one family dinner, a dictionary, a criminal – all immersed in dilated frames with an organic care for being, all gathered in excitement of what and how will it be. As Fellini

said „the main feature of neorealism is really the waiting, a heavy and unfulfilled expectation” (Martin: 1981, p.194), solved maybe only through hope. That waiting which Aurora and Police, Adjective so profoundly portrait by both leading characters: Viorel and Cristi.

Times encouraged a truthful cinema, a cinema with realistic expression based on the values of life. They discovered that „the creative act is always an overwhelming release through a living force. Fear, pain, weakness must all be conquered by creation” (Berdiaev: 1992, p. 30), by assuming life in ever more vivid and sincere quantities, „not by what is added, but by what it reveals” (Bazin: 1992, p. 33). This is precisely what the end of Police, Adjective recalls – consciousness and awareness – human granting to itself and to the world, by reflecting upon reality in its applied research: „I repeated the researchers approach in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu” 24 or „I saw a show on a local television station in Vaslui that followed for years. I really looked for that show, and the first phone in the movie is real. It was research and documentation for what I wanted to do”3. 5

That's the real artist awakened consciousness to contemporary man, and „the most important quality of realism is trying to establish the link between the personal life of the individual and the social relations system”

(Lawson: 1968, p. 201): the friendship kind of communication – Otilia and Găbiţă in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or the helpful kind of communication – Lăzărescu and Mioara in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, but also instances of the impossibility of communication on multiple levels in Aurora.

The consciousness that Police, Adjective is so concerned with also regards Bazin’s belief of reflecting reality as highest cinematic formula. The French critic even referred to the phrase „consciousness of reality” (Bazin: 1968, p. 155). This fully awakened state of man and art in relation to the immediate universe again reminds their role as social tool but not only.

Following this, after 1989, film began to work towards its own means by self-reflection. It seeks freely in lesser known areas of language and visual thinking. The inner world and reality

2 Interview with Cristi Puiu: http://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-film-15870320-video-interviu-regizorul-cristi-puiu-adica-chiar-nu-vezi-pai-vezi-esti-tara-adibas-dar-vrei-fii-tara-adibas.htm 3 Interview with Corneliu Porumboiu – TVR Cultural, 2010


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all around, both become the foundation for the new universe of cinema.

Raising the wave and preparing its transition towards time.

The truth is that I never saw it coming, this so-called new wave... I don’t call it so, but neorealism, but these are theorist stuff. (Șerban: 2009, p. 55)

Theorists truly write about the new wave

as a uniform current. As a whole, it is indeed a continuous movement but contains however two perspectives: the first started with social, political and artistic inner needs, building a new aesthetic, but the second was born gradually by pushing the boundaries of those aesthetics, revealing the inside and thus researching another dimension.

We may follow Bazin and say that indeed „there is no single realism, but only realisms” (Bazin: 1986, p. 51). Not only that every age has got its own, with different techniques and aesthetics, but each ones divides it in layers and depths. In a perpetual antagonism but also in balance, Méliès vision, traveling to the moon by imaginary and fantastic realms, and the realistic Lumière trend are both on screen since the beginning in various instances: from revealing social concerns, to understanding the complex and irresistible force called time – for which man finally has a control instrument: cinema.

In this second phase, we don’t just have realistic edited frames, but life raised to power, the power of time-image as opposed to movement-image (Deleuze: 1989). There is thus a real time – the first stage of realism and a lived time on which Gilles Deleuze grounded in film the time-image and the crystal type of space. This lived time is equivalent to the experimented time, passed through the senses, a feeling based on the theory of active perception, not on simple observation.

This comes in the Romanian new wave cinema with the feeling of waiting. Those long inactive minutes in which the characters along with the camera apparently do nothing. Nevertheless this is not the usual nothingness, but the most powerful one which sets free the soul of images. Here we get to a point where all the instruments of film become not only a

window to life but its translation beyond what we think we see. Bergson explains: when we look at the outside world, our perception seems to be doubled – internal and external; as a subjective state of consciousness and as an external image of reality (Bergson: 1889).

Thus the sublime transparency that What is cinema? was speaking of appears clearly. It cannot interpose any editing lie, no cognitive theory, no common pattern or fantastic element. Between the spirit of the viewer and the story in moving images develops a perpetual flow unhindered by any illusion or by any word.

We see this performed on many directions:

- portrayal of man at the beginning of some great crisis: physical decay towards dying in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu or advanced pregnancy that cannot wait in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,

- cameras constantly chasing the character (most often hand filmed),

- proliferation of mysteries – in most films for the first 20 minutes we still know almost nothing about the characters or about the story: in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 33 minutes pass by until we hear the line How many months pregnant are you?; The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu even though it is seen as a film about an old man who dies in the hospital, we spend the first hour of the film just in his house. And Aurora even though it speaks about a criminal, lets us see the crime after 70 minutes of film.

The new Romanian cinema plays hermeneutics in the layering of meanings, strong sensory feelings (weaving prolonged moments of silence to those of unexpected excitement or for example in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days we get all sorts of amplified noises that surprise the viewer – ball hitting Mr. Bebe’s car and scaring Otilia, the noise that bothers Găbiţă on the hallway when she lives Otilia alone with Mr. Bebe, the fetal body falling in the garbage and so on).

Just as Torben Grodal (2009: p. 251) writes again, years after Bazin and strictly from the camera’s point of view, we are dealing with two types of cinematic realism: that which is based on the idea of screen as window and another one that introduces a type of camera with human features merged inside the movie scene. In The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (the camera shakes – especially in the first sequence) or in 12:08 East of Bucharest (camera movements during the TV show) we clearly see


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the second technique used. But in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the lenses of Oleg Mutu don’t freely search everything, resting in long observation angles.

Easily with the "revealing of tempo, those specific rhythms which particularizes”, we see a transition towards time (Lazăr: p. 159). Hence, in Cristian Mungiu’s film already, the camera reaches powerful framing statements. In the hotel room from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, when Găbiță stands up to give the money to Mr. Bebe, the framing catches them in profile, one on the right and one on the left, separated by a door in the background. While we only see the girl from the neck down to the knees, we see Mr. Bebe’s face is in front of her abdomen – we have the face of a man and a female body that seems offered to him. The fact that this frame is not just passing by, but stays with us for the whole conversation, proves that time mastered to its higher power can penetrate the being to its aching core. Left with the image like an opened book for our eyes to read, we better understand the relation between the characters. Our mind has time to penetrate deeper meanings.

Other strength points in the characters are defined by very close to natural states, uncorrected by fast editing. They seem to be given all the time in the world: they sigh, they have fix eyes and points of view, verbal tics, worries, credible gestures and strong feelings; all framed in authentic frames, used as magnificent tools. Details of all kinds are used by directors to support the construct of reality on screen, but also to emerge empathy for the audience. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, we fall through this time factor and enter the process of emotions. We remember, and memory ultimately means relation, connection and the human sharing of feelings – perhaps the most valuable but unintentional product of communism. By means of cinematic slow time, we connect to a special kindness for the human being – that special something close to hope and wonder.

That already classic movement of cutting space-time in precise frames that the camera processes remains somehow behind. Driven towards borders in Aurora and Police, Adjective, it brings glimpses of a new state that not only shows life as it is, but reveals its magic core, analyzing it. A camera that captures in a short frame a man reading a letter is the realism that we were used to. A camera that shows in real time the reading of a letter (Police, Adjective) is already in a kind of suspect

dimension of realism. Something new is taking shape around the waiting that the new directors are portraying in these two films. Something new that has little to do with the realism we know, but maybe with a different kind that is paradoxically a transition to imagination. A realism dedicated par excellence to time not to space and even not to the story but to that transparence in instruments that makes the film almost disappear. We only remain with the characters and with the beautiful appearance of images cast like a spell in awe. We are dealing with a different type of cinema communication process. The one that reaches for the invisible beyond images.

The new filming rhythm in Aurora and Police, Adjective brings as to an active contemplation by an engaged inner world. Feelings move from screen to the audience mind slowly and with ease because in the apparent lack of action we have more time to feel. Only completely engaged in the outside space and time we can fall inside ourselves. Time is a call for the senses and his presence ultimately means an intimate bound with what we see and ultimately with our being. To get out of time, to conquer it, would be the equivalent on an exit from the cosmic order, which is impossible for man (as Husserl and Heidegger pointed), but we know that at least for a few hours, art has the ability to suspend the real temporality by some illusion of its constructed worlds. Time thus becomes the anima of being (Hagen: 2008), its concrete manifested essence. Researching this realm, „cinema represents objectivity in time”

(Bazin: 1986, p. 15) and much more. By its power of controlling the temporal flow it raises above all other arts. The reason for this is „the fact that time belongs to all its elements like an organic component” (Balasy: 2010, p. 121).

Communication – subject and means of the story The communion of such kind of cinema,

to simple communication (be it aesthetically exquisite) of the usual realist cinema, involves a merging of the visible and the invisible, a different time involvement as means of the story. The first plays within its mirror function, where image reflects life. We have a whole series of films which already fulfilled this instrument, most of them. But the second direction has the function of a magnifying mirror by which it penetrates the depths of the soul (in


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its surface image, it reflects the inside like Aurora). Here, the story is not made out by the text or by the characters, but by the cinematic instruments that work upon them, like framing, editing, sound, image and mostly time – rhythm.

„Time is a dimension aligned with the focus on contemplation in aesthetic theory and existential phenomenology.” (Wahlberg: 2008, p. 79) Overcoming the old moving-image, the time – image is created in a different way. Its viewer finds himself immersed in perception, by „experiences and optic situations that are purely visual” (Deleuze: 1989, p. 47). We have so few words in Aurora that even the colors of the sky seem a better candidate for the leading. Most of the sentences we imagine. We imagine them running through Viorel’s mind while he endlessly waits/prepares. The absence of action is not an empty space though, but a full of potential one. It is precisely the void not the fullness which becomes a vessel for everything.

In Police, Adjective, Cristi is also walking on the edge of time, in his stakeouts, like the world wouldn’t exist for him. The camera silently follows. And it’s not only the waiting, but the fact that nothing seems to be happening. Are we in a point of a strange communication without communication? Yes, because again this nothingness it the only way of really communicating everything, from the inside out and backwards.

In interviews for their latest works, Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu, talk about two directions that reveal the act of communication: primarily seen as a process happening between characters and the outside world or between characters and their selves (especially for Viorel in Aurora) and second in relation to the cinema language, bringing the film in the middle between transmitter and receiver, as means. In this special turn towards a language – cinema „the filmmaker can bring out a precise meaning which at first sight is only representation” (Martin: 1981, p. 32). The images are not those who make the film – said Abel Gance – but their soul; more precisely communicating their soul.

To address this, film begins to research itself right from within. Police, Adjective is investigating along with words its own language, while Aurora becomes an enormous experience centered on senses beyond the limits of words. The direction in these two last films, comes up from the vast raw elements of realism and raises towards the „completion in time of photographic

objectivity. For the first time the image of things is also the image of their duration.” (Bazin: 1986, p. 14) In the last new wave films that the exterior appearance begins to be equal with the interior realm, reveling it in cinematic form.

With a subject that can be told in just one sentence, Porumboiu's film is translucent and sharp both for cinematic language and for its story questioning. Following 12:08 East of Bucharest in which the television show started with „you may be wondering why we still make today broadcasts about revolution” which translates easily into „you may wonder why we still make today films about revolution”; Police, Adjective goes a step forward and says directly, through Cristi's wife: ”I don’t think they’re images, they’re symbols. In fact, these are related. Images that become symbols”. Images by through time become symbols. This is the new dimension of realism.

As with Aurora, meaning is layered in complex structures, from self-reflexivity of cinema, to representing the invisible through visible – the interior of mind through the exterior of image.

We have two movies about solitude, lack of communication and the impossibility of leaving the labyrinth of one’s own thoughts and open towards another human being. These works understand Bazin’s realism in its double perspective: as essence for cinema – its ontology – but also as rhetoric in simplicity, purity and time.

From this we also have two perspectives of communication in cinema. The first is called contemplation, an intellectual and spiritual exercise meant to restore our relationship with the outside world. It belongs to the artistic realism, like the philosopher Stanley Cavell wrote (Cavell: 1979). The second is imagination – faculty of mind exercised mostly through fantasy and illusion, which projects us away from reality and life. The filmmakers in the new Romanian cinema, are moving towards the exploration of language by a critique of illusion, because here „the camera, the way in which the film is shot” – i.e. his grammar – „tells you, audience, how to watch the film, because here we talk about cinema and not about an illustrated story”4. 6

4 Interview with Cristi Puiu – http://renne.ro/cultura/aurora-impresioneaza-la-cannes-%E2%80%93-interviu-cu-cristi-puiu/234


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Of all communication processes, new Romanian cinema focuses on human value and action. Not fast rhythm like action as Hollywood understands it but as subjective fact. Like Puiu said about Aurora, action fades away to make room for the how, instead of the what. This is about emotions coming prior to composing objective elements, and verb coming prior to subject. As a matter of fact, it’s neither about the verb nor about the subject. It’s about the adjective. Like in Porumboiu's film which urges us to put an adjective next the subject, the new cinema places feelings right next to images, because „it claiming the filmic processes itself” (Martin: 1981, p. 256) along with that irresistible and irreversible force called time. Temporality is not just the subject anymore, but the powerful adjective which determines and names the new attributes for cinema. „Our consciousness is permanently and almost exclusively under the control of the time factor, for it is the essential condition of the human being.” (Lawson: 1986, p. 185)

Time, Adjective

Time is a state: the flame in which the salamander of human soul lives. Andrei Tarkovsky There is nothing more superna-tural than reality itself. Salvator Dali

„A truly realistic cinema is a cinema of

duration” (Bazin: 1986, p. 185) and besides the masters of words we need, for the same kind of purpose, the language creators for image, movement and sound; because indeed words cannot express all, as the director of Aurora recalled. Life is the highest known value but before everything, we must experience it, with our eyes opened, in its closest possible form. This is reachable in film because precisely this medium represents „a rebellion against the old methods of literature and a plus over fine arts. An assault... The film reveals movement, and this is a big thing” (Tolstoi apud Barna: 1963). Romanian realism reaches artistic form of moving in time by manipulating its matrix beyond the using of words.

Commonly, films are laid on an editing structure where we have information – cut – information – cut and so on. However in Aurora

we have the same formula but on a brief moment of action and then a long moment of silence in which the realist story can become absolutely magical or abstract, a magic of concreteness that overwhelms perception. Before this formula, information regarded only the story. For the new direction followed by Puiu and Porumboiu, it already regards many other things and much of that information is expressed in the area of space-time. Yes, we also have space here, but why isn’t it an equally important element in this theory? Because „despite the realistic appearances of the image, when we connect with a film, it is not space that speaks most powerful, but time” (Khatchadourian: 1986, pp. 169-177). Here we get to the point of transition from chronotop (Bakhtin) to the concept of durée (Bergson). Assuming the version in which time would be related to space, Bergson clearly answers: „Can time be adequately represented by space? Yes, if we refer to elapsed time. No, if we refer to elapsing time. All problems within this vision, start with the desire to see this durée as being expensed, by expressing the idea of freedom in a language which is obviously impossible to translate” (Bergson: 2010, p. 221).

Therefore we have a time from the space-time construct (in chronotop) and another time which is strangely unrelated to space – durée. „The pure durée is that state which the successions of our consciousness when our selves allow themselves to live, when we abstain from going on separating thing from their past states […] as it happens when we recall the notes of a song that melt let’s say one into each other.” (Bergson: 2010, p. 100)

In Police, Adjective and Aurora, transition is made towards „the most active level of film – the selection of time and its investment with meaning” (Lazăr: 1986, p. 159). The narrative usually takes place in present tense. Now it goes not just towards the real time but beyond. For example, after each stakeout, policeman Cristi prepares his report which the camera is filming slowly, in real time, while he reads it. Reality is cleared of any musical or plastic intervention and just remains in front of us floating slowly in a sea of time – patient and profound, until it reveals all insights. From an apparently dole action, like eating or smoking a cigar in the street, we feel unrevealing the thoughts that torment Cristi’s mind and conscious.

Police, Adjective is a film about signs, but does not stop in just using them. In a sign


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meaning could have been induced by two or three simple frames, maybe an ellipse, but for Porumboiu a sign is not enough, nor a symbol. Facts need its mark present in real form and time to signify in a sensitive way. „For time to stop we must get rid of the consciousness of its flow, but if it is materialized by a slow motion in image, it imposes even more awareness” (Martin: 1981, p. 256). That's what all those long empty actions are all about: waiting outside the house of the offender, chases, eating dinner, waiting outside the chief’s office and so on. We have an almost undivided and untouched time, not as a series of events but as durée, awarding the film with a special capacity, for this is what contemplation means: „unmediated perception, that occurs in the process of interaction (communication) between man and the surrounding world (or the film world), which gives people (audiences) a fair reflection for the properties of objects, vivid intuition” (DEX: 1998).

Capturing on film the actual duration of events, especially in relation to a being that only lives a long waiting is without a doubt really rare – we have the example of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – director Chantal Akerman or Gerry – director Gus Van Sant. There's something strangely suspicious happening with reality along this emptiness. It’s as if time could increase or completely fall apart, step by step, through its ruptures reveal the realms of a new universe. The image of an object or of a simple and day to day action, filmed for 10-15 seconds is more that tolerable and passes by as pure reality, emptied of meaning in itself. Maintaining the same frame for 2-3 up to 10 minutes, unfolds reality with an increasing tension. This brings power of attention, image settlement in the mind and spatial-temporal suspense. The film seems flooded with a strange possible meaning in every framed corner. When images give it freedom in time, the human mind that is not programmed to easily stop, continues on, restless looking for meaning. That’s why one of the ladies who interviewed Cristi Puiu after Aurora said: „I feel like my mind is exhausted, I’ve been doing gymnastics with it”.

Police, Adjective is a film about signs in the sense that it tested their limits within its own system. Along Puiu's film aiming toward a slow frame fresco, having more alert and sharp cuts Porumboiu sets off far beyond the perimeter of the usual cinema. He discovers something not

necessarily new but certainly unprecedented at such magnitude in the national landscape. A work in which restlessness transmits its palpable strangeness and heaviness.

The only obvious designed cut in Porumboiu film is that of the opening of some doors passing from one space in a completely other. The first time that Cristi goes to Alex’s girlfriend home, after heading down the stairs, he disappears around a corner – cut – and we see another door that opens into from foreground exactly into Cristi's office. Or, When Alex's dad comes home, gate closes – cut – and again the door to the police office opens. So thus arises a middle world of infinite possibilities and cinematic language research, in which realism becomes, as Alex Leo Serban mentioned, a necessary instrument for abstraction. Porumboiu and Puiu have the credit of announcing a new way of exploratory research beyond the so well knew neorealism of the new wave. Police, Adjective together with Aurora are not just a great exhibit of realism but a marvelous step outside it and forward on.

It is true that space and time are organizing principles in any art, as well as they provide the basic structure of the (Kant); but the power of time mainly belongs to film, and Cristi Puiu along with Corneliu Porumboiu managed to reach this power different than others, much more profound and sensitive. This kind of cinema calls you barely whispered and ever-patient. It does not roughly assault you whit its dynamic visual universe. This is not about a controlled audience conquer, but about a delicate call. Being so subtle and unusual that’s why it hasn’t got very large audiences. Awards though show its worth, because the real value is the actual experience, and „space and time are the two only categories that life is built on so on them we must also raise our art.” (Boldea: 2002, p. 353)

„Always young, unable to age or die, it goes pursuing its destiny and sees succeeding generations. It is present in every morning as a symbol of all possibilities, as a sign of awakening the rediscovered world.” (Chevalier & Alain: 1993, pp. 158-159) Aurora – in Cristi Puiu's universe – becomes a state that marks a spiritual tension (that in which the primary event takes place). We have a boundary place in the silenced twilight of nature still deciding whether to continue night or go towards day. At such times there’s no speaking, no leaving the self and no explanation, beyond the puzzling words


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of Viorel: „Amalia is a child... she doesn’t... I do not think that justice has access to understand the nature of the relationship I had with my wife” or „I've listened and I saw how you think you know and have understanding of what I say and... I became frightened”. Because the very thought that anyone could understand what is on your mind is awfully surreal, close to impossible. But really incredible and almost magical, is only the fact that Puiu succeeds in not using words, but still moves those instances of mind and feelings through film.

By a mysterious process of the image developed in space and time, in the light’s rhythm and ritual, something new gets perceived – a reality that seems to exceed its coordinates. It's not just social, nor just ontological; it’s cosmic, because Aurora has also a delicate care for the colors and faces of time in nature. The frames voluptuous run directly to the senses. With smooth attention to light, the moving images capture the inner turmoil of human wanderings. And they do this with the same sensitivity that captures translucent light beams in almost surreal frames. The visuals in Aurora speak in time’s and space’s language about the ending of being and also about the ending of days. This interior-exterior established relationship – in the thoughts of the character and in the essence of nature – releases in audience a certain atmosphere that kneels any possible spoken words. We are dealing with films that tell their story by the language of image and far less in the language of words. Cinema makes another big step outside literature and into perception, affirming its visual and imaginative nature.

Hence the eerie dimension of realism. Working with time and space can just become a mirror for life or its true visual symbol. In Aurora and Police, Adjective this is not even happening as it usually would within the time-image concept of Deleuze. We don’t have a maze of overlapping temporal lines or a garden of forking paths as Borges would see it. It is just time working in its slowest way and so becoming a magnifier. Even in life we rarely stop and contemplate the surroundings be they

objects or people around us. The second we do reality begins unfolding in front of us and starts whispering all sorts of possible meanings. It unravels the story not in the sense that it actually speaks some kind of silenced language, but in the sense that it actually lets out mind do the talking, imagining. And sometime, in front of breath taking images and curious human emotions, it has some very interesting things to say. The three hours of the silenced Aurora clicks something inside us that is worthy of being cinema’s precious research material.

Following the direction presented by Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier, we could say that this new direction in cinema develops somewhere in the space between dream and conscious fantasy: in reverie – neither in pure realism that we are used with, nor in the fantastic imagery. „Dreaming has in itself the childhood and also the night. Film is about reverie. Like an adult who belongs to day but not in its fullest light, but rather in a kind of dusk” (Metz: 1977, p. 168) or in aurora – some diffused and reddish light that, for a few moments, becomes perceptible somewhere between realism and imagination. Just as it happened when the moon and the sun intertwine – giving birth to that strange light on Viorel’s face in the moments of his final confession.

Tarkovsky was right; the film is not defined by real time, but by the possibility of sculpting this time thus creating a new shape – a different universe. „Time printed in its factual manifestations and forms: this is the supreme idea of cinema as art. […] What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as a sculpture in time.” (Tarkovsky: 1989, p. 63) Just as the work of Garrett Stewart Framed Time. Toward a Postfilmic Cinema analyzes it, „the editing, by this means, doesn’t record time, but makes it” (Stewart: 2007, p. 114). What kinds of time can cinema fabric? – remains a question that can continuously define and redefine the genres. Still, it appears that the highest name for time in cinema is not just real time but durée – as being liberated of space and reality as we common perceive it – the time of imagination and contemplation.

References A şaptea artă, îngrijită de Ervin Voiculescu (1966): vol. 1, Bucureşti: Meridiane. Aitken, Ian (2001): European Film Theory and Cinema, Edinburg: University Press. Balasy, Bela (2010): Theory of the Film. Nabu Press. Bazin, Andre (1968): Ce este cinematograful?, Bucureşti: Meridiane.


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Berdiaev, Nikolai (1992): Sensul creaţie, București:Humanitas. Bergson, Henry (2010): Time and Free Will, Nabu Press. Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin (2008): Film as Art, New York: McGraw-Hill. Chevalier, Jean şi Gheerbrant, Alain (1993): Dicţionar de simboluri, vol. 2, București: Editura Artemis. Deleuze, Gilles (1989): Cinema 2. The Time-Image, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. Gorzo Andrei (2012): Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinematograful, de la Andre Bazin la Cristi Puiu, București: Humanitas. Grodal, Torben (2009): Embodied Visions, New York: Oxford University Press. Hagen, William (2008): Time: the Anima of Being, http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Hagen_ANIMA01.pdf?phpMyAdmin=0c371ccdae9b5ff3071bae814fb4f9e9 Khatchadourian, Haig (1986): Space and Time in Film, The British Journal of Aesthetics, no. 27 Lawson, H. John (1968): Film şi creaţie, București: Meridiane. Lazăr, Ion (1986): Cum se face un film, București: Cartea Românească. Martin, Marcel (1981): Limbajul cinematografic, București: Meridiane McLuhan Marshall and Eric (1992): Laws of Media: The New Science, University of Toronto Press. Metz, Christian (1977): Le signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinema, Paris: Union General d Editions. Miller, Toby and Stam, Robert (2004): A Companion to Film Theory, Blackwell Publishing. Rosellini, Roberto (1995): Aspectul microscopic al cinematografului în Cahiers du Cinema, September-November. Stewart, Garrett (2007): Framed Time. Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, London: University of Chicago Press. Şerban, Alex. Leo (2009): 4 decenii, 3 ani şi 2 luni cu filmul românesc, Iași: Polirom. Tarkovsky, Andrey (1989): Sculpting in Time, University of Texas Press. Tomlinson, John (2002): Globalizare şi cultutră, Timișoara: Amarcord. Vogleman, Bruno (1991): Noul realism, Timișoara: Centro de Esperanta. Wahlberg, Malin (2008) – Documentary Time. Film and Phenomenology, London: University of Minesotta Press.


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The Romanian New Wave

Daniela DIMA-RIAIN1 BA, International Make-Up Artist Trade Show, London

Abstract. This article explores the disconnect between the Romanian audience and the films that are part of the phenomenon recognised as the Romanian New Wave, a cinematographic movement awarded many prestigious prizes at top international festivals, yet which has had little box office success in its country of origin. Keywords: realism, black humour, detail, voyeurism, trapped

Introduction. The starting point for the movement is

considered to be Cristi Puiu’s The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes in 2005. The movies that followed in 2006, Catalin Mitulescu’s The Way I Spent The End Of The World (Un Certain Regard for Best Actress award at Cannes) and Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (Camera D’Or at Cannes), ensured that Puiu’s movie was not just an isolated incident, and that the new wave continued gathering international critical acclaim. A new style of cinema was born and Romania was viewed as a strong contender on the international movie scene.

In 2007 Romanian cinema had another strong showing at the Cannes festival with Cristian Mungiu’s masterpiece, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, winning the the Palme D’or and Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’ taking the Un Certain Regard award.

More films followed in the same genre from Cornel Porumboiu (Police, Adjective 2009), a collective effort from directors Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru and Razvan Marculescu (Tales From The Golden Age – 2009), Radu Muntean (Tuesday, After Christmas – 2010) and Florin Serban (If I Want To Whistle I Whistle – 2010).

2012 was also a good year for Romanian cinema abroad, with Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond The Hills taking the Best Screenplay and Best Actress at Cannes, and then in 2013 Calin Peter Netzer’s drama Child’s Pose taking the top award the Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival.7

1 Diploma in Spanish, Instituto Cervantes, Dublin, Ireland Translator for Make-Up Artist Magazine, Vancouver, WA, USA and IMATS (International Make-Up Artist Trade

Out of the twelve movies mentioned above, seven of them have been Oscar submissions for Best Foreign Language Film. As we can see, these new wave Romanian films have been met with critical acclaim by foreign critics, however despite their success abroad they have found no favour with the Romanian audience, with the exceptions of The Death Of Mr Lazarescu, which was considered the most successful Romanian film of 2005 by number of spectators, and Childs’s Pose, which took the top spot in 2013, having sold 117,809 tickets. This made Child’s Pose not only the most successful film of the Romanian New Wave, but also the best received movie of the decade by the Romanian audience.

The rest of the New Romanian Wave movies fared quite badly; Even Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days managed only 7th place in 2007’s most successful movies list with 70,953 tickets sold, while the other films barely registered at the Romanian box office. There are a variety of reasons for the low takings of these movies, including a poor distribution network due to the lack of cinemas and the lack of financial support and promotion from the CNC (National Council of Cinematography), but what will be addressed in this article will be how the themes chosen by the directors and the artistic style used to deliver the movies to the audience affected their popularity in Romania.

Themes. The main theme linking the movies is that

of the individual trapped in a set of circumstances

Show) London. With an interest in cross-media, and holding a BA in Economics from the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest.


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that offer no chance of escape. It does not matter if the movies are set at the end of the Ceausescu regime (The Way I Spent The End Of The World, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Tales From The Golden Age), or in its aftermath, as society both pre and post revolution society is bleak, beset by the same problems – lack of empathy, corruption, oppression of the poorest, inability to help the ones in need; in the end there is little hope for those caught in the web of a dysfunctional society.

These films are characterized by a stark, gritty realism that makes viewers recoil when watching them. They offer an almost voyeuristic experience, by the way in which the audience has access to the private lives of the characters. The stories open a window into what amounts to real life for a majority of Romanians, portraying the familiar, demeaning, depressing, hopeless situations the average person has to endure – the neglect of an ailing senior citizen and the utter lack of empathy by the health care system (The Death Of Mr Lazarescu), the absurdity of the Romanian revolution (12:08 East Of Bucharest), an extramarital affair that destroys a marriage (Tuesday, After Christmas), the plight of the children left behind by those who went abroad to earn money to provide for them after the fall of communism (If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle), the ordeal of illegal abortion under the communist regime (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), the entire system failing the poorest and most vulnerable in society (Beyond The Hills), a policeman's struggle between his duty to follow outdated laws mindlessly and his conscience (Police, Adjective), a dysfunctional mother/son relationship (Child’s Pose), and post-revolution hopes ending in disappointment (California Dreamin’).

As the director follows the main characters through their story, there is a complete lack of artificiality, enhanced visually by the use of long takes, natural light and a sparing use of soundtrack. The general pace of the movies is slow, but with great attention to detail. The communist era is recreated in minute detail, down to the period-correct milk bottles in The Way I Spent The End Of The World or the ever-pervasive colour grey in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. This is real-time cinema as the audience follows the characters over a set period of time, so an intense voyeuristic feeling is derived, as viewers get to see up close the daily life of the characters, including their most intimate and embarrassing moments.

In the The Death Of Mr Lazarescu, we follow Mr Lazarescu from mid-evening to dawn, in his journey through hospitals, while in 4

Months, 3 weeks and 2 days the events unravel in a single wintry afternoon and evening of 1987. In the others, we follow the main character or characters over the course of a few days or weeks of their lives.

The characters are powerless against what fate awaits them – the breakdown of a marriage in Tuesday, After Christmas, the oppression of humanity in Police, Adjective, death in both The Death Of Mr Lazarescu and Beyond The Hills, degradation of human beings in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, loss of a mother’s love in If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle, Tales From The Golden Age, loss of a child in Child’s Pose. The only way to mitigate the grim circumstances is through black humour, such as in The Death Of Mr Lazarescu (situations that become hilarious due to their sheer absurdity), The Way I Spent The End Of The World (three children taking on the communist regime, hatching a plan to assassinate Ceausescu) and Tales From The Golden Age (the pig killed by gas which explodes when the owner decides to singe its hair in his kitchen by blowtorch, the to-and-fro caused by a possible visit by Ceausescu to a middle-of-nowhere village – ending up with everyone ordered to get on a fair ride, including the one person responsible for stopping the ride, resulting in the entire inspection party trapped overnight on a whirling fairground swing).

These stories are woven into the fabric of the average Romanian’s life – they are not unusual, unique situations meant to shock or delight the audience, rather they are a reminder of the facts of life in a broken society, of events that happened to the viewer or to someone they know. For the Romanian audience, viewing these films imparts a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, a loss of heart when these familiar scenarios resurface in the their memory during the movie. It is as if something unpleasant was dredged up from the past that had been consigned to oblivion, brought back to stare the viewer in their face from the silver screen.

Some of the movies are inspired by real events, such as the actual case in 1997 of a 52-year old man that was turned away from several hospitals and then left in the street by the paramedics to die (The Death Of Mr Lazarescu), the death of a young woman in 2005 at a monastery following an exorcism ritual (Beyond The Hills) and even the car accident resulting in the death of a child, with the wealthy parents of the driver resorting to all possible methods to


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exonerate their son's guilt, exposing the corruption permeating every aspect of life in Romania (Child’s Pose).

But then there are the other stories which are easily recognized by any Romanian as part of their cultural heritage – the endless wait for the arrival of the Americans at the end of the WW2 in the hope they would bring prosperity and freedom – when this eventually does happen after the Revolution its meaning is completely reversed, as the Americans come bearing arms and not flowers (California Dreamin’), the reference to the end of the Ceausescu regime as ‘the end of the world’, which was indeed the case for many of the people who lived most of their lives under the communism and were completely unprepared for the lack of compassion on the part of the majority of the population, which is a characterisation of capitalism, which has as its goal the concentration of the most wealth in the hands of a capable few (The Way I Spent The End Of The World), the children never to be saved, forever affected by the neglect of the parents who went abroad to work and never came back to offer them the love and care they needed much more than any money or material possessions (If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle), the failure of all levels of society, including the Church, to care for the most vulnerable – specifically orphans having literally nowhere to go when reaching the age of release from the orphanage, and even those still in the orphanage being vulnerable to sexual and physical abuse (Beyond The Hills), the decision to be made between obeying the rules and obeying one's conscience (Police, Adjective), the truth behind the Revolution (12:08 East of Bucharest).

These stories are not easy to watch, due to the subjects presented, but they have been made into amazing, realist movies, filmed in an almost documentary style. There is no embellishment and nothing to ease the shock, save for the black humour present in some of them. No judgment is passed on what happens on screen, the audience is simply observing the fly blindly following its path, to eventually become trapped in the spider's web. There are no guilty parties. This is the only life that can be known.

There is empathy for the suffering of the characters, and their humanity shines through at

certain moments, such as the wife’s reaction to the husband’s confession in Tuesday, After Christmas or the belated attempt by Voichita to set Alina free in Beyond The Hills, the kiss between the young offender and his kidnapping victim in If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle and the mother’s attempt to connect to her son’s girlfriend in the hope of regaining his love in Child’s Pose.

Conclusion. The Romanian New Wave films are

characterized by such blunt realism that they come as a shock to anyone watching them who actually lives in the society portrayed. The negative reaction of the general moviegoing Romanian public is understandable, as the subjects presented are too close to home and touch a nerve. These are people that still carry raw wounds from their own private 'movies' and viewing them again, this time on the big screen, provokes a visceral reaction of rejection of these films.

The movies themselves are cinematic treasures, raw and unsettling, filmed in painstaking detail and feature world-class performances by the actors, some of which were inexperienced and made their acting debut in these productions.

Unfortunately, it is clearly impossible for these movies to enjoy box office success in their own country similar to that of the Hollywood movies, which offer exactly the opposite experience to the audience – an escape from the grim daily reality using special effects, explosions and emphatic music or easy laughter with no sting in the heart.

The Romanian New Wave stories, with their slow pace but captivating simplicity, grip you by the heart and throat and throw you in a thriller's atmosphere, where the end can be foreseen but not stopped. No lessons have been learnt or unlearnt, at the end of each film there is no sense of accomplishment, no possibility of placing the blame in order to get closure. An uncomfortable, unsettled feeling stays with the viewer, resurfacing whenever thinking back to the story – which can explain these movies have been quite unpopular with the average Romanian moviegoer.


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References http://www.cinemagia.ro/stiri/filmul-romanesc-in-cadere-libera-24877/ http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/jan/11/worldcinema.drama http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2008/mar/25/canromaniasnewwavesustain http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/tuesday-after-christmas/5038 http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/mar/12/romanian-new-wave-after-hollywood http://iknowwhereimgoing.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/nowhere-to-turn-beyond-the-hills-2012/ http://www.filmcomment.com/article/cristian-mungiu-interview-beyond-the-hills http://www.leftfieldcinema.com/analysis-the-romanian-new-wave


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Rêves éveillés, entropie et paradoxe de la reine rouge Le pouvoir ambigu du cinéma

Alexandru IORDACHESCU,1 M.A. Elefant Films, Geneva

Abstract: The cinema, as a media, includes a technology platform in constant evolution. The question is what is the driving force of this trend and if there is any direction. A theory of thermodynamics physics gives us a new angle on this question: extrapolating it to the cinema, we can forward the hypothesis that it is not the quality (variable cultural criterion) that determines the evolution of cinema, but its ability to reduce the entropy of its environment. Keywords: Film, entropy, thermodynamics, lucid dreams, meaning and information Résumé: Le cinéma, en tant que média, comprend une forme technologique en constante évolution. La question est de savoir quel est le moteur de cette évolution et, implicitement, s’il y a une direction. Une théorie issue de la physique thermodynamique nous donne un angle inédit sur cette question : en l’extrapolant au cinéma, nous pouvons émettre l’hypothèse que ce n’est pas la qualité (critère culturel variable) qui détermine l’évolution du cinéma, mais sa capacité à réduire l’entropie de son contexte. Mots-clé: Film, entropie, thermodynamique, rêves lucides, sens et information

Introduction « Le cinéma a le pouvoir de vous

endormir, de vous mettre dans un état d’hypnose : un blanc se rêve noir, un noir blanc, un homme se rêve femme et une femme homme », nous dit Luc Dardenne.

Sans doute, le cinéma à ce pouvoir, mais il n’en a pas le monopole. De tout temps, les êtres humains ont tenté d’altérer leur état de conscience, de l’élargir, de le modifier et de le « hacker » l’aide de pratiques, substances ou technologies.

Le cinéma est la rencontre entre l’art (dramaturgique, pictural, musical), et la science (optique, chimie, électromagnétisme).

Aujourd’hui la technologie numérique et l’électronique ont remplacé le support chimique : alors qu’en 2007, 80 % des projections en salles de cinéma se faisaient encore sur le support argentique, en 2014, l’argentique ne représente plus que 1 %.

Ainsi, la question qui nous posons dans cet article est de savoir si le cinéma est une forme narrative unique, caractérisée par sa capacité à produire du sens ou si ses caractéristiques sont principalement déterminées par la technologie et vont évoluer avec celle-ci.

Le jour où la technologie permettra une immersion multi sensorielle, avec la capacité de

se vivre en temps réel du point de vue de chaque personnage, d’en changer à sa guise et d’en ressentir les émotions, est-ce que le cinéma, tel que nous le connaissons, aura encore une raison d’exister ?

Autrement dit, est-ce que le cinéma survivra à des formes technologiques de réalité immersives, tout comme le livre a survécu à l’apparition du cinéma ?

Pour répondre à ces questions, nous devons identifier d’abord les paramètres qui permettent au cinéma d’exister aujourd’hui, du moins en tant qu’industrie. Or, quelque soit l’angle selon lequel ces paramètres sont abordés, le dénominateur commun est le même : il s’agit du public.8

C’est le public – quel qu’il soit – qui décide à posteriori de l’existence des différentes

1 Alex Iordachescu is a producer and director film, known for Copilaria lui Icar (2009), Le tramway d'Andréa (2005) and Le jardin des autres roses (2000). He is also the director of Elefant Film production studio (Geneva). Productions: Le Mur et l’Eau, de Alice Fargier, 2014. Production Elefant Films Gravity, de Alfonso Cuarón, 2013. Production Warner Bros. 2001: A Space Odyssey, de Stanley Kubrick, 1968. Production Metro-Goldwin-Mayer.


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formes de cinéma, de leur budgets et de leur évolution.

Car, une œuvre sans public – aussi géniale soit-elle –, n’a aucune chance de se répliquer, de voir ses idées reprises et intégrées dans la culture. Tout comme une espèce qui n’a pas de descendance est condamnée à disparaître, une œuvre sans public subira le même sort.

Répondre de la sorte, toutefois, ressemble à une mise en abîme. Car nous pouvons nous engluer dans une régression infinie sur les paramètres qui conduisent le public à apprécier telle ou telle œuvre : culturels, sociaux, politiques, psychologiques, émotionnels, etc.

Il y a toutefois une autre approche, qui ressemble à une « voie diagonale» de par sa particularité à traverser plusieurs disciplines, mais qui peut nous conduire à envisager la question d’une façon inédite.

L’approche est peut-être téméraire, considérant le fait que nous allons faire d’abord un détour parmi des théories récentes qui mélangent évolution, astrophysique et thermodynamique, tout en tentant de les extrapoler au cinéma dans la conclusion de cet article.

Evolution : du génétique au mémétique, la puissance exponentielle de la culture A la question initiale, qui consiste à se

demander si le cinéma sera relégué au sort des dinosaures par les nouvelles formes technologiques de type « ARG », interfaces directes cerveau / contenu ou nanotechnologiques, il se peut que la réponse nous soit fournie par la théorie de l’évolution, à savoir que, durant des périodes de transition, certaines espèces coexistent pendant un temps plus ou moins long avec celles qui les remplacent.

Tout comme la sélection des espèces

opérée par la nature se fait d’abord de façon progressive et prudente, il semblerait que la sélection culturelle suive un processus similaire. Mais, une fois certains seuils atteints, le processus s’accélère de façon exponentielle et telle espèce disparaît brutalement, alors qu’une autre voit son développement s’amplifier. Cela a été le cas du rapport entre la projection sur support argentique et sur support numérique, décrit dans l’introduction de cet article, où personne ne s’attendait que l’effondrement de

l’argentique survienne si brusquement. Le processus peut être expliqué et modélisé de façon mathématique, mais cela n’enlève rien à l’aspect contre-intuitif que nous pouvons ressentir parfois face à l’évolution, qui est tout sauf linéaire.

Revenons sur le terme introduit dans le paragraphe précédent, celui de « sélection culturelle » : est-ce que nous pouvons appliquer au domaine culturel les règles formulées par la théorie de la sélection dite « naturelle » ?

Selon des chercheurs tels que Dawkins, Serres ou Dennett, la réponse est affirmative. Certains vont même plus loin et supposent que l’évolution culturelle de l’homme a remplacé son évolution biologique.

Ainsi, le pendant culturel au code génétique serait le « code mémétique », dont l’ADN serait notre langage et les « unités conceptuelles » qui le constituent. Ce qui se construit à travers eux, c’est notre culture.

Et de la même manière dont des gènes sont en permanente compétition dans la nature, les idées que nous exprimons sont en compétition culturelle : la culture dominante est celle qui pourra se reproduire et subsister dans le temps.

« Donnez à un homme un poisson et

vous allez le nourrir pour la journée ; apprenez-lui à pêcher et vous allez le nourrir pour le vie », nous dit un proverbe chinois.

Selon cette théorie, la raison pour

laquelle notre évolution passe d'une sélection génétique à une sélection culturelle serait liée au fait que les changements induits par les idées – qui peuvent se répliquer et transmettre beaucoup plus vite et à moindre énergie que des gènes – sont beaucoup plus efficaces pour créer et mémoriser de l’information.

Autrement dit, le corpus culturel nous permet de nous adapter plus vite et à moindre énergie à notre environnement que ne le feraient les gênes, qui seraient autrement obligées de « dépenser » des nombreuses générations d’individus pour arriver par sélection génétique aux mêmes résultats.

La clé de ce processus, qu’il soit génétique ou culturel, est la transmission et la création d’informations pertinentes par rapport à notre environnement, nous permettant de mieux nous adapter, et l’évolution semble privilégier les formes qui en sont les plus efficaces.


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Mais quelle serait cette supposée efficacité « informationnelle » recherchée par la nature ? Y aurait-il un sens caché à notre existence, une « direction » quelconque dans l’évolution autre que celle dictée par le pur hasard ?

Entropie : une dramaturgie «épique» au sein de l’Univers La théorie très audacieuse proposée par

François Roddier, astrophysicien, mérite d’être mentionnée ici :

Roddier suppose que l’invariant physique depuis le Big Bang jusqu’à nous est l’énergie, comprise dans ses transformations. Celles-ci sont modélisées par les principes thermodynamiques et par le principe de l’entropie.

L’observation de l’Univers nous apprend que l’entropie (la tendance vers le « chaos », l’état d’homogénéité absolu dans lequel il n’y a plus aucun échange possible) se trouve dans un rapport dynamique avec la néguentropie (le processus inverse à l’entropie), manifestée dans les structures qui organisent la matière et créent de « l’information ».

Notre soleil est l’une de ces formes. La vie en est une autre. Ce sont des formes « auto organisées » qui permettent de maximiser la dissipation du flux d’énergie qui les traverse et, de façon corollaire, de créer des structures et de l’information.

Ainsi, la seule observation nous montre que l’univers est dans une « lutte » permanente entre ces deux principes : l’un structurant et l’autre déstructurant.

Notre univers se dilate et se refroidit, tend vers cet état de « mort thermodynamique ». D’autre part, des formes évoluées très complexes, tels que « la vie intelligente », émergent localement et s’opposent à l’entropie, cette mort thermodynamique.

Le paradoxe de la reine rouge, imaginé par Leigh van Allen à partir de l’histoire de Lewis Carroll, est le constat que « pour rester sur place nous devons courir de plus en plus vite ». Nos sociétés semblent condamnées à la croissance pour survivre, à être de plus en plus dépensières en énergie et à créer de l’information de façon exponentielle. Car « production de l’information » et « création d’entropie » vont de pair : plus nous nous adaptons à notre environnement, plus nous modifions ce dernier. Et plus nous le modifions,

plus vite nous devons nous adapter. Un cercle vicieux.

Nos ressources énergétiques s’épuisent, nous avons modifié notre environnement au point d’approcher des seuils d’irréversibilité et nous sommes « condamnés » à trouver des solutions – technologiques, culturelles, sociales, politiques – de plus en plus innovantes pour survivre.

Le cinéma : un système de représentation alliant idées et émotions Quel lien avec le cinéma ? Ce détour nous permet de comprendre

que la place du cinéma, en tant qu’activité créative et culturelle humaine, a des ramifications et implications importantes.

Si nous revenons aux conclusions auxquelles nous avons abouti au chapitre sur le glissement génétique / mémétique, à savoir que l’évolution de notre civilisation est aujourd’hui essentiellement de nature culturelle, nous comprenons que le cinéma a une place et un rôle particulier à jouer.

Car, en plus de véhiculer des informations, le cinéma à la capacité de leur associer des émotions, ou, plutôt, nous devrions renverser les termes et affirmer : l’émotion est la forme la plus intuitive qui nous soit donnée et permet d’ancrer durablement une information chez le sujet qui la perçoit.

Or pour reprendre la citation qui ouvre cet article, le cinéma a également la capacité de plonger le spectateur dans un état hypnotique. Quels avantages pouvons-nous en tirer ?

Le cinéma n’est pas seulement une « machine à rêver », une forme d’hypnose collective. En permettant d’explorer nos représentations possibles de la réalité et de nous-mêmes, le cinéma en devient le support de projection, où prennent formes nos désirs, fantasmes et peurs, conscients et inconscients.

Il est l’antichambre du réel, un espace où nous pouvons projeter des formes inédites, les évaluer comme dans une simulation, avant de les accueillir dans la réalité ou, au contraire, les renvoyer dans l’océan de potentiels infinis.

Luc Dardenne nous rappelle également que « Le cinéma peut soigner des grandes blessures ». Si cette qualité est probablement l’une des plus belles, elle n’est pas la seule. Le cinéma permet également, à travers des « rêves éveillées », de nous donner confiance dans notre


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nature profonde, nous aider à reconnaître et à nous rapprocher de celle-ci.

Dans le cadre de cet article, la qualité qui nous intéresse le plus est celle que j’évoquais plus haut : en jouant le rôle d’interface entre le réel et l’imaginaire, le cinéma est une sorte d’Anti-Charon qui fait entrer les formes préexistantes dans la réalité ; en agissant sur la représentation que nous avons de nous-mêmes, il a le pouvoir de transgresser les processus évolutifs, en les accélérant ou en les modifiant, en faisant émerger des nouvelles formes du néant.

Conclusion Si nous devons considérer la théorie de

Roddier, qui suppose que la production d’information s’accélère au même rythme que l’entropie, la dernière étant un résidu inévitable de la première, le processus ne peut que s’emballer et notre évolution est condamnée au paradoxe de la Reine Rouge.

Dans ce cas, nous sommes confrontés à un piège : la production d’information devient une nécessité quantitative et non pas qualitative. Et suivant cette observation, de la même manière qu’une personne dépendante d’une substance doit augmenter constamment ses doses pour retrouver l’effet souhaité, ce qui s’imposera culturellement dans le cas du cinéma, c’est la forme susceptible de générer le plus d’excitation neurologique, quel que soit sa nature ou son niveau intellectuel.

Si l’hypothèse est juste et nous tombons dans ce piège, alors le cinéma disparaîtra, sous sa forme actuelle, très prochainement. Des technologies ARG, immersives et multi sensorielles vont conduire à l’apparition de nouvelles formes narratives et émotionnelles.

Est-ce que le succès récent aux Oscars de Gravity, qui fait passer 2001, l’Odyssée de l’espace pour une production appartenant à un espèce très différente de celle contemporaine, marque ce glissement ?

Car si le premier exemple est indéniablement une prouesse technologique extraordinaire, le second arrive à y adjoindre une dimension réflexive, métaphysique et spirituelle.

Fait intéressant, le réalisateur de Gravity n’est pas étranger à (au moins l’une de) ces dimensions, mais il fait un film qui va avec son temps.

Car au vu de l’accélération à laquelle nous sommes confrontés, seule l’efficacité

informationnelle est favorisée, une forme que nous pourrions appeler « hyper impressionnisme », en référence à la première avant-garde de cinéma impressionniste des années 1920, qui s’est soldée par le constat que « la principale tâche du réalisateur consiste à introduire, par une sorte de ruse, le plus grand nombre de thèmes purement visuels dans un scénario fait pour contenter tout le monde ».

La ruse a bien fonctionné pendant près de 100 ans. L’industrie du cinéma a su faire preuve d’inventivité, mais elle s’est fait malgré tout rattraper par la technologie, qui évolue plus vite sur d’autres supports, comme le jeu vidéo.

Dès lors, elle semble condamnée à la surenchère : pour provoquer la décharge d’adrénaline ou de sérotonine, il lui faut toujours plus d’excitation visuelle, d’action, d’effets, d’émotion, de spectacle.

Dans ce sens, pour répondre à la question posée au début de cet article, le cinéma, en tant que langage et recherche, ne disparaîtra pas tant qu’il conservera ses qualités et fonctions essentielles, dont nous avons encore besoin, quel que soit la forme par lesquelles elles s’expriment.

Mais si le cinéma se laisse piéger par le paradoxe de la reine rouge, alors son langage va s’effriter et le sens sera perdu au profit de la densité informationnelle.

Ce que le cinéma, en tant que forme de recherche, peut encore nous amener, c’est la capacité de nous rêver autrement, d’envisager la vie différemment et donner ainsi de l’espoir.

L’espoir qui peut naître d’un nouveau point de vue, viendrait à point nommé. Car notre société contemporaine, en tant qu’entité, est doublement traumatisée à travers ses deux pertes à la fois symboliques et structurelles.

La première est née avec l’avènement de la science : c’est la mort de Dieu et la mort symbolique de l’Art Classique, remplacés par la vision positiviste et la technologie; la seconde perte ressemble à un retour ironique des choses, c’est la perte de confiance dans la science, inaugurée par les explosions de Hiroshima et de Nagasaki et confirmée par la difficulté de construire un monde juste et équitable.

Nous voici doublements orphelins en quelque sorte, privés à la fois des figures tutélaires de Dieu et de la Science.

Le cinéma est le fruit du mariage entre

l’art et la science. En toute logique, il ne peut


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s’abstraire à la « chute » de l’Art et de la Science.

Mais il peut en rendre compte et plutôt que narrer leur « chute », considérer leur transformation. Corollairement, il peut esquisser des nouvelles pistes, témoigner des démarches qui émergent ici et là, voire les accompagner ou les encourager. Et ce faisant, il donne à nouveau du sens au monde qui nous entoure, tout en réinventant sa propre raison d’exister.

Car, selon Roddier, si les « anciennes »

valeurs viennent à « chuter », c’est parce que

leur fonction a été accomplie et qu’elles doivent être remplacées par d’autres, mieux adaptées à notre société moderne et à ses défis. Roddier suppose par exemple l’apparition d’une forme de « cerveau global », à travers lequel l’humanité transcendera les conflits individuels et la peur de l’autre.

Qu’il y ait cerveau global ou pas, ce qui est certain c’est que nous aurons toujours besoin d’histoires à nous raconter.

Et pour cela, le cinéma, tel que je le rêve, demeure un outil formidable.

Références Livres : CARROLL Lewis (1871). Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There DAWKINS Richard (1989). Le gène égoïste, éditions Odile Jacob DENNETT Daniel (1995). Darwins dangerous idea. NY, Simon & Schuster RODDIER François (2012). Thermodynamique de l'évolution: Un essai de thermo-bio-sociologie, Parole éditions SERRES Michel (2006). Récits d'humanisme, Le Pommier Articles : VAN VALEN Leigh (1973). A new evolutionary law, Evolutionary Theory, Vol. 1, pp. 1-30 Conférences : http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us


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II. Cultural Studies: Inherited ideas

A Cultural Perspective: Suggestion for a Documentary Film. The toponymic heritage of Bucharest – Streets bearing Jewish names

Irina AIRINEI VASILE, Ph.D., National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest.

Sorin BORDUŞANU, Vicepresident of the Assigning Names Committee of Bucharest

Abstract. Regarding the protection of cultural heritage and its integration into greater projects of durable development, Romania has yet to implement efficient, consequent measures according to international conventions and public interest represented by cultural and natural heritage. Toponymic heritage is part of cultural heritage; however it has not been the object of systematic, synchronic and diachronic study. As can be observed, the consequence is a rapidly progressing loss of heritage. What Romania has lacked after 1989 was a coherent approach by the responsible authorities, which would have required judiciary acknowledgement of the fact that cultural and natural heritage is a national priority, as well as the necessary financial support and consideration. Architectural and toponymic heritage must become part of the curriculum of all higher schools of public administration, so that they can be known, preserved and protected by future civil servants. This would help configure a local spiritual identity and preserve the particularities of the respective areas. The present paper, regarding Bucharest streets named after people of Jewish origin, past and present, is a component of the interdisciplinary, comparative study of the toponymy of Bucharest streets. These streets, having survived the destructive fury of the Ceausescu era, situated in old quarters of the city, with historic houses and gardens, bear the names of notable figures in the local Jewish community. They are a definitory component of European identity, which must be known to the public in order to increase the respective areas’ appeal and promote durable development and social cohesion. The toponymic heritage in Bucharest is proof of a natural cohabitation of Romanian and Jewish populations, thankfully without having been separated by the walls of a ghetto. Key words: Jewish, streets, toponymic heritage, Bucharest

Throughout the territory between the Danube and Tisza, from the Dnestr to the Criş rivers, the lands once inhabited by the Dacians, the northern branch of the Thracians, were crossed throughout the last two millennia by numerous populations stemming from the East or West. All those who passed through these lands, be they warring migrators or peaceful settlers, left their marks on the conscience of the Romanian people, whose ethnogenesis took place in this area. Reminding us every day of these peoples are toponyms assigned to regions, rivers, roads and settlements, with their respective quarters and streets.

One of the peoples who passed or settled the current territory of Romania were the Jews. Certain historians who have studied ancient epigraphs consider that the Jewish people began to arrive in these lands since the first millennium of our era. According to some analysts of the migration phenomenon, the Jews were the last

migrating people in Europe, which however is not correct in strict terms of historiography.

Beyond controversy and speculation, it is certain that, in the 14th century, the Romanian principalities were settled by Jews coming from Central Europe, the so-called Ashkenazi Jews speaking Yiddish, an idiom based on a German dialect, while during Ottoman domination these lands were settled by Sephardi Jews, originating from Western Europe and bringing to the Balkans their Spanish-born dialect called Ladino.

The presence of Jews in Romania became numerically, economically and culturally significant beginning with the first half of the 19th Century, after large numbers of Galician Jews were forced westward by anti-Semitic measures undertaken by the Russian Tsarist regime. Their integration into social and cultural life took place together with the


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emancipation of the population settled in Moldavia and Wallachia.

Members of the Jewish community actively supported the 1848 Revolution, with names such as Barbu Iscovescu, Constantin Daniel Rosenthal, Solomon Halfon, Davicion Bally, Hillel Manoaha. The painter Constantin Daniel Rosenthal gave his life for the Revolution, after Austro-Hungarian authorities captured him, took him to Budapest and tortured him to death. The Islaz Proclamation demanded, among others, „the emancipation of Israelites and political rights for fellow countrymen of a different faith”. After the two Romanian principalities were united under Alexandru Ioan Cuza, important steps were taken towards integration, with many Jews being appointed to public office and receiving the right to participate in municipal elections. In solidarity with the rest of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Romania, many Jews took part in the First World War, with some reaching the rank of colonel or being decorated for their heroism.

The presence of Jewish people throughout the ages, from the conquest of Dacia by Trajan to the modern-day Romanian state, convinced the great historian Nicolae Iorga to consecrate one of his works to this subject.

The history of Bucharest also brings out the spirit of cohabitation of different ethnic backgrounds, with the city’s administration taking care to keep or attribute street names reminding of great Jewish figures who, through their activity, brought a contribution to the evolution of Romanian society.

No matter the historical period, the Romanian people has always recognized the worthiness of important persons, adding their names to the index of street names. People of Jewish origin are continuously present in the life of the city, despite the hardships of the last century and a half of modern history.

The present study contains a systematization, an analysis and a generalization of streets bearing names of Romanian figures of Jewish heritage, throughout three chapters:

Current names of streets Past names of streets, presently bearing

different names Streets which no longer exist

Current street names reflecting Jewish figures:

YEAR OF ATTRIBUTION NAME 1911 Dr. Iacob Felix (1832-1905) 1930 Mămulari 1947 Iuliu Barasch (1815-1863) 1948 Barbu Iscovescu (1816-1854) 1948 Constantin Daniel Rosenthal

(1820-1851) 1948 Barbu Lazareanu (1881-1957) 1948 Constantin Dobrogeanu Gherea

(1855-1920) 1948 Jacques M. Elias (1844-1923) 1961 Maximilian Popper 1993 Marcel Iancu (1895-1984) 1994 Victor Brauner (1903-1966) 1995 Margareta Sterian (1897-1992) 1995 Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) 1996 Wilhelm Filderman (1882-1963) 2003 Iosif Sava (1933-1998) Traian Popovici (1892-1946)

In the immediate vicinity of Filantropia

hospital, starting 1911 we find the name „Dr. Iacob Felix” attributed to the street going from Buzeşti to Filantropia (now Ion Mihalache) boulevards.

Born January 6th 1832 in Horschitz (Bohemia, Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic) in a family of Austrian Jews, Iacob Dimitrie Felix studies in Gitschin and Prague. Later on, he studies Medicine in Prague and Vienna. On the 22nd of January 1858 he obtains his medical degree, on the 15th of April of the same year the title of master of obstetrics and on the 20th of April he receives his surgeon’s license. He then moves to Bucharest where, as chief doctor of the city, he makes great advances in the field of hygiene. He leads the Turnu Măgurele military hospitals during the Independence War. Due to his great merits, he is appointed to the Romanian Academy as a titular member in June 1879, where he serves as Vice-President between 1885 and 1886. He dies in Bucharest on the 19th of January 1905.

After 1945, following a great increase in the territory of Bucharest through incorporation of suburban settlements, more names of Jewish origin are assigned to streets as the index of street names had to be updated and reviewed.

Thus, in the Bucharest Jewish quarter,

the name of Iuliu Barasch is granted 1947 to the street formerly known as Biserica Udricani,


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stretching between Matei Basarab and Olteni streets.

Iuliu Barasch was born July 17th 1815 in Brody, Galicia, then in the Austrian Empire. He studies Medicine in Berlin and Leipzig and then settles in Romania, becoming a doctor in Bucharest and teaching natural history in St. Sava College, the School of Agriculture and the Bucharest Military School, later becoming a professor in the National School of Medicine and Pharmacy. Starting 1858, he lays the outlines of Romanian pediatric care, organizing a pediatric dispensary and the first Bucharest children’s hospital. 1856, he founds the journal “Isis” (“Natura” since 1862), printed in Iosif Romanov’s National Press. Iuliu Barasch was an outstanding medic, philosopher, paedagogist and had an important role in modernizing Jewish community life in Bucharest.

In 1948, a year which marked a wider operation of renaming streets in Bucharest and the surrounding communes and urban settlements, more roads are dedicated to Jewish people who contributed to the country’s political and cultural life.

In the Marmorosh Blank parcel area, known today as Primăverii neighborhood, the names of two important painters from the time of the 1848 Revolution are attributed to neighboring streets spanning between Teheran street and Primăverii boulevard: Barbu Iscovescu and Constantin Daniel Rosenthal.

A Romanian painter and revolutionary of Jewish descent, Barbu (Baruh, Iehuda) Iscovescu, born November 24th in Bucharest, studied in Vienna and Paris, participating actively in the preparation and development of the 1848 Revolution in Wallachia. Exiled in Zemun, next to Belgrade, Iscovescu met several Serbian revolutionaries and portrayed them, as well as Dimitrie Bolintineanu, who was also in exile. In 1849, he moved to Paris, where he executed copies of famous paintings and, at Nicolae Bălcescu’s advice, copies of portraits of Romanian voivodes inspired from old engravings. He died 1854 in Constantinople, being laid to rest in the Greek Orthodox cemetery together with his fellow revolutionaries Ion Negulici and priest Atanasie Luzin.

Constantin Daniel Rosenthal, another famous painter and revolutionary of Jewish descent, born 1820 in Budapest in a family of merchants, graduated from the Academy of Arts in Vienna. He befriends Ion Negulici, Constantin A. Rosetti and other young revolutionaries. In

1842 he settles in Bucharest as an emissary of the Freemasonry, thanks to painter Ioan D. Negulici, in order to support the movement of national awakening which generated the 1848 Revolution. He was a member of C. A. Rosetti’s secret movement (the Brotherhood) and joined him in exile after the Revolution was defeated, settling in Pest. Rosenthal studies and paints in London and Paris between 1845 and 1848, where he becomes a member of the Society of Romanian Students in Paris. He converts to Christianity in 1847 assuming the first name Constantin.

Rosenthal is arrested in Budapest while carrying revolutionary literature and dies on the night between the 22nd and 23rd of April 1851, having been tortured in prison, without ever betraying his fellows.

In the same year (1948), in the central area neighboring Lipscani street, the street name „Frânge Fier” is replaced with the name of one of the greatest Romanian figures in economic and social life, Jacques Menachem Elias, born 1844 in a family of Sephardi Jews. He was an important businessman (owner of sugar factories), banker (president and shareholder of the Romanian General Bank) and industrialist. He sponsored the reconstruction of the Sephardic Jewish Temple in Bucharest, which was however devastated and set on fire by the Legionnaires on January 21st, 1941. Through his will, drafted December 1914, he left his mobile and immobile wealth at home and abroad (estimated at 1 billion lei at the time) to the Romanian Academy. According to his wish, the Academy founded a cultural and philantropic foundation, the „Foundation of the Menachem H. Elias Family”, his wealth being used for “promoting Romanian culture, curing the illnesses of our poor, encouraging virtue and upholding noble causes”, without discrimination. The foundation was named after his father.

His gesture of great philantropy was praised by his contemporaries, with Nicolae Iorga naming it a “powerful example of human generosity”. Grigore Antipa, vicepresident of the Romanian Academy, in his speech at the Sephardic Temple shortly after the death of Elias, would honor the philantropist “who dedicated all fruits of his labor toward fulfilling a grand ideal, that of raising the fatherland through culture”. 1993, Elias was posthumously elected an honorary member of the Romanian Academy.


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On the grounds of the former Dudeşti-Cioplea commune, currently the third sector of Bucharest, the name Barbu Lăzăreanu is granted to a street neighboring Lt. Pascu Nicolae and Danubiu streets.

Barbu Lăzăreanu, born October 5th 1881 in Botoşani, was a Jewish-Romanian literary historian and publicist, a titular member of the Romanian Academy (1948) who was also a Communist militant. During the deportation of the Jews, he was saved by Queen Mother Helen of Romania. Barbu Lăzăreanu died January 19th 1957 in Bucharest.

Within the former commune of Băneasa, currently in the 1st sector, the Communist regime replaced the name of “King Ferdinand I” street, between Bucharest-Ploieşti highway and Ion Ionescu de la Brad boulevard, with the name of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea.

Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, a Romanian writer and socialist activist of Jewish descent, was born May 21st 1855 in the village of Slavianka, Ekaterinoslav, in the Russian Empire (currently in Ukraine). His real name was Solomon Katz, while his Ukrainian name was Mikhail Nikitich Kass. He was an important member of the Romanian Social Democratic Party and a prodigious literary critic, known for his debates with Titu Maiorescu.

Leon Trotski portrays Gherea as follows: „Among the ministers, diplomats and prefects in Romania, more than a few have learned their political ABC from Gherea. Luckily, they are not alone. Starting 1890, Gherea has led the first generation of Romanian Socialist workers toward the teachings of Marxism. Gherea and Rakovsky were the first who oriented their socialist parties toward the Russian Revolution, initiating a new kind of socialist party.” Through his 1910 volume, „Neoiobăgia (Studiu economico-sociologic al problemei noastre agrare)” – "Neo-Serfdom (A Social and Economical Study of Our Land Issue)" – Gherea becomes one of the fathers of Romanian sociology. He tries to establish possible social causes for Mihai Eminescu’s pessimism, his being one of the first studies on the reception of the great poet’s writings. His fundamental work, a true ars poetica of literary critique, remains „Asupra Criticii” („On Critique”). Gherea dies May 7th 1920 in Bucharest.

In the year 1961, the name of the famous doctor Maximilian Popper (1948-1951) is attributed to Trinităţii street, situated in Dudeşti

quarter, a neighborhood inhabited by numerous Jews.

After 1989, a number of Bucharest roads are granted names of cultural figures of Jewish origin.

One of these is situated between Moşilor road and Episcop Radu street. Formerly known as Argeş street, it bears since 1993 the name of Marcel Iancu. Marcel Iancu, a painter, architect and essayist born 1895 in Bucharest and later settled in Israel, studied the fine arts with Iosif Iser and graduates 1917 from the Zürich Academy of Architecture. Together with Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea he publishes the journal “Simbol”. In Zürich, he frequents the art reunions at the Cabaret Voltaire, where he meets Hans Arp and, together with Tzara, participates in the initiation of the Dada movement. After a short stay in Paris (1921), he parts from Surrealism and Dada. Returning to Romania in 1922, he becomes one of the promoters of avant-garde art. Together with Ion Vinea, he joins the collective around „Contimporanul” journal (1924-1936) and takes part in art exhibitions together with sculptor Miliţa Petraşcu and painter Margareta Sterian. In the effervescent spirit of the time, he joins avant-garde groups such as „Arta nouă” (1929-1932) or „Criterion” (1933-1937), where we also find M.H. Maxy, Victor Brauner, Mattias Teusch, Corneliu Michăilescu. Together with Horia Creangă and Octav Doicescu, he publishes the manifest „Towards an architecture of Bucharest”, a true manifest for a modern capital city. In Romania and later in Ein Hod, Israel, he paints countless works of art, as well as authoring works of architecture in both countries. He dies in Israel on the 21st of April 1984.

In the year 1994, a street cornering Camil Ressu boulevard is dedicated to Victor Brauner, a Surrealist painter and poet of Jewish descent, born in Romania. Born June 15th 1903 in Bucharest, Victor Brauner was the brother of folklorist Harry Brauner and brother-in-law of artist Lena Constante.

He attends the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest and Horia Igiroşanu's private school of painting. He visits Fălticeni and Balcic, and starts painting landscapes in the manner of Paul Cézanne. Then, as he testifies himself, he goes through all the stages: "Dadaist, Abstractionist, Expressionist".

In 1930, he settles in Paris, where he meets Constantin Brâncuși, who instructs him in methods of art photography. In that same period


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he becomes a friend of the Romanian poet Barbu Fundoianu and meets Yves Tanguy, who would later introduce him to the circle of the Surrealists. He lives on Moulin Vert Street, in the same building as Alberto Giacometti and Tanguy. There, he paints "Self-portrait with enucleated eye", a premonitory theme.â

In 1933, André Breton opens Brauner's first personal exhibition in Paris, at the Pierre Gallery. The theme of the eye was omnipresent in Brauner’s paintings: Mr. K's power of concentration and The strange case of Mr. K are paintings that Breton compared with Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, "a huge, caricature-like satire of the bourgeoisie". Afterwards, Brauner takes part in numerous other Surrealist exhibitions.

After the Second World War, Brauner travels to Italy. In 1965, he creates an ensemble of object-paintings full of inventiveness, known as "Mythologie" and "Fêtes des mythes". The mythology of the modern world, where man is portrayed with humor, tenderness as well as pessimism, is clearly visible in his paintings of the time, including those painted in Varangéville and Athanor, where Brauner spends his late years.

In the year 1995, streets are dedicated both to Margareta Sterian and Mihail Sebastian.

The name Margareta Sterian is granted to a street stretching between Dacia boulevard and Alecu Russo street, formerly a part of Dimitrie Orbescu street.

Margareta Sterian, born March 16th 1897 in Buzău as Margareta Weinberg, was a painter, writer and translator of Jewish origin. She was married to a Piteşti banker, and then later to poet Paul Sterian. She dies September 9th 1992, and since 1993 a foundation bearing her name promotes and rewards museographical and artistic creation.

Mihail Sebastian street is situated between Rahovei and Sării roads. Born October 18th 1907 in Brăila as Iosif Hechter, Mihail Sebastian was a novelist and playwright who studied Law and Philosophy in Bucharest and worked as a pleading attorney. Invited by Nae Ionescu, chairman of his Baccalaureate comission, to contribute to “Cuvântul” journal, he befriends Mircea Eliade. Antisemitic laws of 1940 forbid him to work as a lawyer and ban his plays. Amongst his better-known novels are “Oraşul cu salcâmi” and “Accidentul”. Successful plays by Sebastian include “Steaua

fără nume”, “Ultima oră”, “Jocul de-a vacanţa”. The latter was adapted into a successful Romanian-French film (Mona, l'étoile sans nom – 1967) in which the leading role was played by Marina Vlady.

Mihail Sebastian dies in a road accident in 1945, only a short time after fascism had been driven out of Romania.

In the year 1996, at the proposal of the Jewish Federation, the name of Wilhelm Filderman is granted to former Agrişelor alley.

Wilhelm Filderman (November 14th 1882, Bucharest – 1963, Paris) was a Romanian politician and lawyer of Jewish descent who led the Jewish secular community between the end of the 1st World War and the end of the 2nd World War. Filderman was president of the Federation of the Union of Jewish Communities in Romania (FUCE) and representative of the Jews in the Romanian Parliament. During high school, he befriended Ion Antonescu.

Filderman graduated from law school and received his doctoral degree in 1910 at the University of Paris – Sorbonne. During the First World War he fought as an officer in the Romanian army. He was a delegate in the Paris Peace Conference of 1918 and a deputy in the Romanian parliament. He was temporarily deported to Transnistria by the Antonescu regime and fled to Western Europe in 1948, when Romania was under the Communists. He died 1963 in Paris.

In the year 2003, the name Iosif Sava is granted to a square situated between Brezoianu, Şipotul Fântânilor, Poiana Narciselor and Vasile Sion street, neighboring the Bucharest University of Music. A bust of Iosif Sava is also unveiled there.

Iosif Sava (Iosif Segal), b. February 15th 1933, Iaşi – d. August 18th, 1998, Bucharest – was a renowned Romanian musicologist, radio and TV host born to a Jewish family with a three century-long musical tradition. He studied at the Iaşi Conservatory (1944-1945), the George Enescu Academy of Music (1945-1947), the Arts Institute (1947-1949) and the Art High School (1949-1951), then at the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory in Bucharest (1962-1966). He also took courses at the Faculty of Philosophy between 1951 and 1955.

Between 1974 and 1984, Sava played the piano and harpsichord in a number of chamber music groups, earning numerous prizes including the Prize of the Romanian Academy.


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In 1972 he was received into the Union of Composers and Musicologists of Romania (UCMR). As a music critic and TV host, he produced the weekly show “TV Music Evening” (Serata muzicală TV), between 1980 and 1985, as well as after 1990. The show was a forum of discussion with important figures, orbiting around music, but including cultural policy and other contemporary issues. Over 40 books dedicated to the world’s musicians bear Iosif Sava’s signature, among which several, edited by Hasefer publishing house – „The harpists of King David”, „Musicians on the roof” and „Variations on a theme by Chagall” are encyclopedias of renowned Jewish musicians.

In the toponymy of Bucharest street names, we also find names reminding of the main occupation of ethnic Jews in Romania: commerce. One such street is Mămulari street (the archaic term „mămular” means a small trader). We also find names of famous people who supported the community in its most difficult periods, including the Second World War. One of these is Traian Popovici.

Through Decision no. 52 of March the

6th 2003, by demand of the Ministry of Culture, the General Council of the Municipality of Bucharest changed the name of Unităţii street to Dr. Traian Popovici, honoring the mayor of Cernăuţi who saved nearly 20,000 Jews from deportation.

Traian Popovici, born on the 17th of October, 1892 in Rușii Mănăstioarei village, belonging to the Duchy of Bukovine, Austria-Hungary – was a Romanian lawyer and mayor of the city of Cernăuți during the Second World War, known for saving Bukovine jews from being deported.

In 1989, Israel awarded lawyer dr. Traian Popovici the title, medal and certificate of Law between peoples, a distinction given to non-Jewish persons that carried out heroic acts, with the risk of losing their own lives, families and belongings, with the purpose of saving Jews from the Holocaust genocide. As a recognition to his brave attitude and his efforts to protect the Jews in Bukovine, in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv a monument was built in the memory of dr. Traian Popovici.

The same year, the memoirs of Traian Popovici were published in a book called “Spovedanii” (bilingual Romanian and English edition) at the initiative of dr. Wilhelm Filderman and with funds provided by the

Ministry of Culture. The volume had a foreword written by acad. Prof. dr. Răzvan Theodorescu, the Romanian cultural minister.

On the 21st of April 2009, at the initiative of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and also with the help of local authorities in Cernăuți, a black marble memorial plaque was placed on the former house of Traian Popovici (6th Zankovetka Street). In this event, Volodimir Kuliș (governor of Cernăuți district) and Dorin Popescu (diplomatic counsellor, interim consul of Romania in Cernăuți) also took part among other participants. Written in three languages, Romanian, Ukrainian and English, the memorial plaque pays homage to the personality of mayor Traian Popovici (d. 4th of June, 1946, Colacu village, Fundu Moldovei, Suceava district).

Previous names of traffic arteries which

are now renamed

PERIOD NAME RENAMED AS 1889 – 1940 Dr. Beck/ Vasile Adamachi Radu Bek, dr.rabin 1948 – 1990 Olga Bancic Alexandru

Philippide 1948 – 1993 Max Wexler Sică Alexandrescu 1948 – 1990 Lazar Grumberg Alecu Mateevici 1948 – 1964 Baruch Berea strada Călinului (merchant) 1948 – 1964 Andrei Berneth Remetea 1949 – 1965 Haia Lifschitz Washington 1975 – 1990 Miron Sibiu Constantinescu

Between 1889 and 1940, a street in

Unirii neighbourhood, located near dr. Iuliu Barasch Street and Sfânta Vineri Street, bore the name of Dr. Beck/Radu Bek, dr. Rabin, and is at present called Vasile Adamachi. This is where the Great Synagogue lies.

Olga Bancic street, a traffic artery located between Aurel Vlaicu Street and Polonă Street, kept its name between 1948 and 1990, but was eventually renamed Alexandru Philippide.

Olga Bancic (Golda) (b. 10th of May 1912, in Chișinău, Gubernia Basarabia, within the Russian Empire, d. 10th of May 1944, Stuttgart, the Third Reich) was a Romanian and French communist activist, anti fascist fighter, a heroine of the French Resistance during the Nazi Germany occupation of France. In 1940, France was occupied by the German army. A member of the French Communist Party, she left her daughter Dolores in the care of a French family in order to protect her while she would be


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joining the resistance group Francs-tireurs et partisans – Main-d'œuvre immigrée (FTP/MOI), located near Paris and led by Missak Manouchian, with the purpose to fight the Germans. Olga Bancic adopted the surname “Pirrette”. She assembled bombs and transported explosives used to sabotage German trains that carried troops and food. On November the 6th, 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo. Although she had been tortured, she never revealed her accomplices. On the 21st of February, 1944 she was sentenced to death, along with another 22 of her comrades from the famous group “Affiche Rouge” (The Red Posters). The 22 comrades were in fact all men and were shot the same day. Because the laws of France prohibited the shooting of women, Olga was transferred by the Germans to a prison in Stuttgart, where she would stand trial again only to be sentenced to death for the second time. The interrogatories and the tortures continued even after her conviction. She was beheaded on her birthday, the 10th of May 1944, when she was only 32 years old.

In 1959, Romanian painter Alexandru Ciucurencu presented the work called “Olga Bancic on a Scaffold”. In France, on the wall of the building located at 19, rue au Maire, 3ème, Paris (75003), Ile-de-France a memorial plaque in the memory of the resistance group Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP/MOI) that also depicts the name of the heroine Olga Bancic.

In Bucharest, in 1995, after renaming Olga Bancic Street as Alexandru Philippide Street, the memorial plaque was removed from its original place.The commemorative (memorial) stones in Paris 3e, 19 rue au Maire and Valence built for the members of the Manouchian Group and Rue du Groupe-Manouchian, Paris 20e, still exist today.

Between 1948 and 1993 a street located in the second district, between Dumitru Marinescu and Rușchița Street, bore the name of Max Wexler and is now called Sică Alexandrescu Street. The Romanian postmodern painter of Jewish descent, Max W. Arnold, born in the 25th of March 1897 in Iași, was a student of the Belle-Arte School in Iași during 1913-1919, where Gheorghe Popovici and Octav Bancilă had been two of his teachers. He traveled to Germany between 1923-1924, to München and Dresda, because he wanted to study the German expressionists. During 1925-1927 he left for Italy. In Rome, he continued his studies at the Superior Institute of Arts where he

met painters Sabin Popp and Lucian Grigorescu. Later he went on a new trip to Palestine, Egypt and Syria, exhibiting at Hasefer Gallery the works he made during his trips during the winter of 1927-1928. In 1928, he leaves for Paris, and then for Spain. In France, he was very prolific on the Breton coast, at Concarneau and Douarnenez, where he created artistic compositions of static nature with sea fruits, prawns and lobsters. New exhibitions will be held in Paris in 1933 and in Bucharest, in 1934. He became renowned as a watercolor and oil painter after his visits to Balchik, and then to the French Bretagne, Belgium, Greece, England. Although Max Arnold admired him, Paul Cézanne had little influence on his works, as opposed to the greater influence of Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy and Albert Marquet. His paintings approach a large variety of subjects, such as oriental landscapes, the scenery of Dobrogea (Romania), the Seine river, Hyde Park, Florence, nudes, portraits, static nature, interiors, streets etc. He dies on the 29th of July 1946 in Bucharest.

During 1948-1990, a street located between the streets Călin Ottoi and Sică Alexandrescu in the second district was called Lazar Grumberg – as of 1990 it was renamed Alecu Mateevici.

Lazăr Grünberg (1911-1944) was an activist for the Romanian youth and an anti fascist. Grünberg joined the Communist Youth League (CYL), in 1927. In 1935 he was arrested and received a sentence of nine years and ten months in jail. During the Second World War he was imprisoned in the Vapniarka camp (1942) and then in Râbnița jail in the Soviet-occupied Ukraine. He was killed by the Gestapo while imprisoned.

Between 1948 and 1964, the name of a traffic artery was Baruch Berea (glory to Berea/Merchant Berea). Now, its name is Călinului Street.

Andrei Bernath Street, which had this name during 1948 and 1964 was later renamed as Remetea Street.

Andrei Bernath (1908-1944) became in 1927 a member of Communist Youth League, and later became the secretary of the Central Committee of CYL. Since 1935 he was incarcerated in various prisons until his death, in 1944.

Between 1949 and 1965, the street that neighbors the building of the Romanian


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Government, known today as Washington Street, was called Haia Lifschitz.

Haia Lifșiț or Lifschitz (1903 –1929) was born in Chișinău, Basarabia, in a family of ordinary clerks that were of Jewish descent. During high-school she joined the local communist organization. Later, Haia worked as a teacher, but nevertheless she was immediately arrested for her political options by the Romanian authorities when Basarabia became part of the Greater Romania in 1918. She emigrated to Belgium and then to Germany, but finally settled in Vienna, Austria. During the spring of 1926 she came back to Romania, but was rapidly caught and released due to lack of evidence. Her political activities eventually led her to several arrests in June 1929. In prison, she initiated a hunger strike along with other collaborators convicted in the same trial, requesting to be released according to a recently announced amnesty decree. The next 43 days she only accepted to drink water, at the same time rejecting any other type of food. This led to a deterioration of her health which resulted in her death on the 17th of August, 1929, only a few days before the amnesty decree would have entered into force.

Between 1975 and 1990, a street in the 6th district of Bucharest had been called Miron Constantinescu, but was later renamed as Sibiu Street.

Miron Constantinescu (Meir Kohn) (1917–1974), distinguished Romanian intellectual, was a member of the Romanian Communist Party since its early beginnings. He was the editor-in-chief of Scânteia, the main newspaper during the communist regime, and held important leadership positions. He tried to overthrow communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej but did not succeed. He is rehabilitated by Nicolae Ceauşescu, who offers him the position of Education Minister, president of the Great National Assembly and rector of Political Academy “Ştefan Gheorghiu”.

Streets that no longer exist

PERIOD NAME RENAMED/ DISCARDED 1880 – 1948 Fundaţia Intrarea Pitagora Mozaică 1911 – 1948 Col. Orero Abraham

Golfaden 1940 – 1964 Dr. Schachman Colnicul Mic 1948 – 1964 S. I. Halfon Măcin 1911 – 1930 Aleea Halfon

The Mosaic Foundation (Fundaţia Mozaică) was a street that existed between 1880 and 1948 and later became Pitagora Entrance (Intrarea Pitagora). Col. Orero, a street found between 1911 and 1948 was subsequently called Abraham Golfaden.

Abraham Goldfaden (b. 1840, Starokostiantîniv – d. 1908, New York) was a poet, dramatist, director and Jewish actor of Yiddish and Hebrew language, native of Ukraine, author of 40 theatre plays. He is considered to be the father of the modern Jewish theatre. In 1876 he founded in the city of Iași the first professional Yiddish language theatre in the world. Moreover, he is the author of the first Hebrew language play ever performed in the United States. The Avram Goldfaden Festival in Iași is held in his honour.

Between 1940 and 1964, there was a street that bore the name of dr. Schachman and was later renamed as Colnicul Mic. The street named S. I. Halfon during 1948-1964 was renamed Măcin. Both streets no longer exist today.

Solomon Halfon (b. 1790 – d. 1862) was a Romanian Jewish banker of Spanish rite, founder of Halfon Bank, friend of Hillel Manoah, one of the 1848 wallachian revolutionaries, who also had a position in the City Council of the capital city. Solomon Halfon, along with Barbu Iscovescu, Davicion Bally and many other jews took part in the 1848 Revolution in Wallachia.

Up to 1930, in the vicinity of Kiseleff

Road there was an acces alley that led to a group of mansions that was called Halfon Alley, but this name was eventually removed from Bucharest’s street list.

Regarding the protection of cultural

heritage and its integration into greater projects of durable development, Romania has yet to implement efficient, consequent measures according to international conventions and public interest represented by cultural and natural heritage. Toponymic heritage is part of cultural heritage, however it has not been the object of systematic, synchronic and diachronic study. As can be observed, the consequence is a rapidly progressing loss of heritage. What Romania has lacked after 1989 was a coherent approach by the responsible authorities, which would have required judiciary acknowledgement of the fact that cultural and natural heritage is a


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national priority, as well as the necessary financial support and consideration. Architectural and toponymic heritage must become part of the curriculum of all higher schools of public administration, so that they can be known, preserved and protected by future civil servants. This would help configure a local spiritual identity and preserve the particularities of the respective areas.

The present paper, regarding Bucharest streets named after people of Jewish origin, past and present, is a component of the interdisciplinary, comparative study of the toponymy of Bucharest streets. These streets, having survived the destructive fury of the Ceausescu era, situated in old quarters of the city, with historic houses and gardens, bear the names of notable figures in the local Jewish community. They are a definitory component of European identity, which must be known to the public in order to increase the respective areas’

appeal and promote durable development and social cohesion.

The toponymic heritage in Bucharest is proof of a natural cohabitation of Romanian and Jewish populations, thankfully without having been separated by the walls of a ghetto.

The Jewish toponymic heritage found in

the capital city of Romania reveals a page of harmonious history shared by different ethnic groups, especially because during the past century the Holocaust affected mainly the northern region of Transylvania that was occupied by the horthyst Hungary and caused the death of over 150.000 innocent jews. The Jewish toponymic heritage encompasses knowledge, respect and the preservation of real History as a memento that a metapolitical phenomenon like fascism should never be given the opportunity to repeat itself.

References: ***Dicționar Enciclopedic Român, Editura Politică, București, 1962-1964 Alexandru Ofrim (2007): Străzi vechi din Bucureşti, Bucharest: Humanitas. Constantin C. Giurescu (2008): Istoria Bucurestilor, Bucureşti: Editura Vremea. Gheorghe Crutzescu (1987): Podul Mogoşoaiei , Bucureşti:Ed. Meridiane. Ioniță, Elisabeta (1969). "Haia Lifșiț" în Anale de istorie, Vol.. XV, Nr. 5. Institutul de Studii Istorice si Social-Politice de pe linga CC al PCR, București. pp. 178-180. Dimitrie Papazoglu (2005): Istoria Fondărei Oraşului Bucureşti, Capitala Regatului Român, Bucureşti, Bucureşti: Paideia. Michel Allenou, Magéditions. Rieux-Volvestre (1998): Guide des professions artistiques Michel Magnien, Delmas. Paris, 1995, L'entreprise de spectacles et les contrats du spectacle Presidential Commission for Architecture Report/2009: "Romania's natural and built heritage in danger" Raymond Citterio (1993): Action culturelle et pratiques artistiques, Paris: Hachette. Spectacles. Réglementation – protection sociale, fiscalité, Imprimerie des journaux officiels, 1995 UNESCO – SECTOR FOR CULTURE – http://www.unesco.org/culture UNESCO – www.unesco.org Vade Mecum pour un projet culturel de territoire, ADCEI, 2006


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The Golden Ratio – From the oldest to the newest arts

Diana MEŢIU1, Ph.D, Hyperion University, Bucharest

Abstract “Golden proportion – from the oldest to the newest arts“ shows portions of the road of the golden number, from nature, human, fine arts, to cinema. The idea of artistic perfection realized by the golden proportion of Leonardo da Vinci, borne in ancient times, was taken in Fine Arts until today. But, the photography and movies was simplified this idea to “rule of thirds”. Moreover, they allowed to take out of context and analyze inside portions of the frame. Here the analysis of this golden ratio in several of the last movies admired by the public and professionals. Keywords: film, frames, golden section, golden number, golden proportion.

What do the Milky Way, the sunflowers,

the rose petals, the pine cones or the mollusc shells have in common with bee reproduction, with the Egyptian pyramids, with Salvador Dali's amazing paintings, with the harmonious sculptures of Phidias or with famous images from movies like Anna Karenina or The Grandmaster? What is the common element that unites science, art, nature and divinity? It's the golden number or, more concisely, The Golden Ratio. It is present in all of human's great artworks, but also in all of God's creations, including the most majestic one, MAN. 9Beauty, harmony and balance are called, mathematically, 1,618033988... And, as with mathematics, this irrational and immeasurable number is as irrational and immeasurable as beauty itself and seems to be part of the basic structure of the Universe. ''God's existence cannot be proved with the help of words. Likewise, this ratio cannot be defined through a rational number, but it always stays hidden and secret, and that is why

1. Diana Meţiu is Ph.D in Visual Arts and Communication&PR expert, coach and personal development trainer. In addition to the counselling of various companies and private individuals in optimal transmission of messages, she is teaching at the Faculty of Arts of the University "Hyperion". She obtained her Ph.D at the “National University of Arts”, with the thesis "Trash Art – aspects of using waste in the Visual Arts." She is passionate about the relationship between the visual arts and communication and how they influence decisions at conscious and subconscious level. Her profile at: ro.linkedin.com/in/dianametiu/. Her email address: [email protected]

it is called irrational by mathematicians'', said Luca Pacioli in 14962. 10

The History of the Golden Ratio Although this proportion has been known

ever since the dawn of the first human civilizations, it was only late in 1835 that it has become known in history by the name of „divine proportion”, used by the mathematician Martin Ohm (1792 – 1872). Until then, Leonardo da Vinci called it „sectio aurea” and had found out about it from the handbook of roman architect Marcus Pollio Vitruvius. But the first text in which the golden number is defined is Euclid's ''Elements” (300 BC). Afterwards, the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli, in his book called „The Golden Ratio”, illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci (see photo De Divina Proportione – Luca Pacioli illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci), that also included The Vitruvian Man (the ideal proportions of the human body), considered the golden ratio to be the formula of perfect beauty and said that „there is no art without mathematics”. Here, Luca Pacioli presents thirteen effects of the divine proportion (the essential, the singular, the ineffable, the admirable, the inexpressible, the inestimable, the excessive, the supreme, the excellent, the unknowable and the dignisim), throughout which you can create a large variety of simple geometrical figures, from which the regular pentagon is obtained. (see photo De Divina Proportione – Luca Pacioli 2 and De Divina

2. De Divina Proportione by Luca Pacioli (1446/7, Borgo Sansepolcro, Toscana, June 19th 1517, Roma), mathematician and Francincan monk and Da Vinci discipol.


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Proportione – Luca Pacioli attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari, 1495). All these effects have an enormous impact on the sensations we have when we meet beauty in nature or in works of art.

In 1202, the work „The Book of Calculation” comes out in Italy; written by Leonardo Pisano (alias Fibonacci), the book contains a sequence of numbers that appear as a solution to a practical problem related to the reproduction of rabbits: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89. The Fibonacci's series is a sequence of numbers where each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. Dividing each number by its predecessor, you get approximately the golden number (see photo şirul-lui-fibonacci). The value keeps approaching phi as you go further in the sequence, but it never reaches its exact value.

Leonardo da Vinci was the one who frequently used the concept of golden section in his work; starting with the Vitruvian Man, following with the controversial „The Last Supper”, the series of Madonnas and finishing with Gioconda, the world's most famous painting – at which da Vinci worked for four years – you can clearly see the painter's conception that the divine proportion for a face is the proportion between the height and the length of a face.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American mathematician Mark Barr gave the report the name Φ (phi), as a tribute to the great Greek sculptor Phidias, a master of harmony in portraying the beauty of the human body, the author of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, Zeus of Olympia. In ancient Greek culture, the golden number was the symbol of Pythagoreans, who believed that 1.618033988 is the expression of life, love and beauty.

Modern man has created various programs due to mimic nature. One such program is the Golden Section Photoshop plugin that transforms you into a talented photographer with a highly developed sense of proportion, obtaining for you the divine proportion, the golden spiral, the golden triangle or the harmonic triangles of any image.

Such programs are used in the design process of various objects, from cars to porcelain cups, correcting the shape, size and proportions of each object that does not comply with the golden ratio.

Many companies such as Pepsi, Apple and Toyota have used the golden ratio to create their logos or products.

Rules of Composition Based on The Golden Ratio – also called The Divine Proportion: The Golden Spiral, The Concordant Spiral, Spira Mirabilis This spiral, built after the Fibonacci rule,

is found everywhere in nature and from there it has been copied by the human genius and used in art, for the human mind finds it much easier to accept and understand things that we recognize in nature. According to this rule, for a whole divided into unequal parts to look nice, we must have the same ratio between the smallest and the largest part, as well as between the big part and the whole". (see Vermeer, Golden Spiral3) 11

The Rule of Thirds It refers to the fact that the important

elements of the plastic composition should be placed along imaginary lines that divide the image into thirds, horizontally and vertically, thereby obtaining nine equal parts. Items of interest can be placed right at the intersection of these lines, for a more expressive and pleasing composition. By following this rule, we get aesthetic asymmetry, enhancing the drama and dynamism, drawing the eye and the attention from the centre to one of the areas of intersection of the imaginary lines that divide the image into three equal parts. In addition, we can also mention dynamic equilibrium, which is obtained by placing objects of interest (eyes or other anatomical parts that are representative for the idea of the image, the place where the light flows, certain objects that we want to emphasize, etc.), as opposed to the negative space or the empty space of the image.

The Golden Rectangle The special property of the golden

rectangle is that the ratio between the length and the width is equal to about 1,618. The head of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa fits perfectly in this report. (see photo Mona Lisa, golden rectangle4)12Another famous painting depicting the subject more clearly, although belonging to abstract art is Piet Mondrian's "Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow" a modern Dutch artist who lived between 1872 and 1944. The universality of this theme is emphasized by the fact that it was repeated in the aesthetics of the most different objects (see photo Piet Mondrian

3. http://powerretouche.com/Divine_proportion_tutorial.htm 4. http://schoolcommunicationarts.com/14212-2/


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reinterpretat). Drawing more golden rectangles creates a spiral of gold that continues indefinitely.

We start from the segment AB = 1, we

raise on A a perpendicular on which we take AC = AB = 1 and build the arc with centre in D (middle of the segment AB) and radius DC. We find point E and then the relationship between AB and EB represents the golden number (by applying the Pythagorean Theorem). We repeat this reasoning to each vertex of the triangle, in the same order, and we get the following diagram. Between the sides of the rectangle we use a ratio very close to the golden number, having as sizes two consecutive numbers of Fibonacci's sequence or their multiples

The Golden Ratio in Cinemas In photography and film, the golden

ratio has been restrained to the rule of thirds, in the detriment of the golden section used in painting, sculpture and architecture. If the painter prepared by himself the size of his canvas, photographers or cameramen’s have to settle for predetermined dimensions. The 135 standard that used 35 mm perforated cassettes for fixed cameras had a frame size of 24 x 36 mm, twice than that of a teaching film and became by far the most used video until the invention of the camera. So this 1.5 framework ratio is pretty far from 1.618033988... The size of a film frame varies greatly (the lowest: 8 mm amateur format, which is only 4.8 x 3.5 mm, while an IMAX frame is 69.6 x 48.5 mm), and very little are close to the golden ratio. Today, all cameras and video cameras have the option to display the image of thirds over the grid, in order to ease the frame.

In cinema, the Golden Ratio is explained in images rather than words by Ali Shirazi, a young director and screenwriter, in "Golden Ratio on Film: The math in There Will Be Blood's cinematography”. The film was nominated eight times and received an Oscar for Image (cinematography) in 2008. Shirazi examines in only 6 minutes and 15 seconds the most iconic scenes of the film and applies across the running images various grids of the golden proportion, highlighting the talent of Robert Elswit. (see all the photos from the series Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood)

To see how the rules are applied to the golden proportion in the cinema, we propose a similar analysis of three of the most popular

movies of the recent years, movies that have been nominated or have won an Oscar for best picture. 2012 Academy Awards Movies was awarded to Claudio Miranda for his stunning and controversial Life of Pi (Viaţa lui Pi), and the nominees were: Anna Karenina (Seamus McGarvey), Django Unchained (Django dezlănţuit) (Robert Richardson), Lincoln (Janusz Kamiński) and Skyfall (Coordonata Skyfall) (Roger Deakins). In 2014, the award for best picture was won by Gravity with the signature of Emmanuel Lubezki, in competition with The Grandmaster (Philippe Le Sourd), Inside Llewyn Davis (Bruno Delbonnel), Nebraska (Phedon Papamichael) and Prisoners (Roger Deakins).

Life of Pi The film recounts the life of an

exceptional character that bears a great name, Pi, tied somewhat to phi. Pi, as phi, is an irrational number, as the character himself says in the film ("my irrational nickname") and represents the ratio of the circumference of any circle and its diameter in Euclidean space, or the ratio of the area of a circle and the square of its radius.

In the three selected frames of the film, besides the exceptional light that emphasizes the sky's colour, the sea and the skin of the character, we can admire the perfect plastic composition.

In the first frame, the two elements that compose it – the boat that dominates the left and Pi, the main character that just stands to the right of the image – are filmed from above in a spectacular perspective. The interesting and unconventional form of the boat on which he stands fall within the golden spiral, segments three, four, five, eight and nine being highlighted by the boat. In the eighth segment we have the character and three of the boat's elements surrounding him like a fan. (see frame 57:30)

If we apply the same trinity grid on the frame, we see that the boat occupies the top right corner composed of three rectangles in the top right, and the character is placed in the bottom left corner, right on the first section, forming a diagonal line easily stressed by the white and thin rope that binds them. (see frame 57:30)

The second frame changes the perspective, light, for it is another time of day, and brings a new character, the tiger. The man, floating on the raft, is in the foreground and the animal floating in the boat, in the far, builds a small upward bias. The boy and the end of the boat are on sections. The eyes of the two


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characters meet right in the centre of the image / composition. (see frame 57:06) The same frame respects the compositional rules of the golden spiral. (see frame 57:06)

The third frame is emblematic for the film, as it is used for both the movie poster and the trailer (see 1:51). It is composed of three parts: two characters, the boat upright and horizontal, all designed on blue water and sky as background. Applying grid of thirds, we find the horizon placed right on the centre of the image, most of the animal's image being projected on the boat / water and most of the man's image on the sky. The tiger is located right on the left golden section and the man is placed in the centre. (see frame 74:37)

The same framework composed with Spira Mirabilis has the tiger positioned in all nine segments, and the ninth is occupied by the human character and by a great part of the boat. Thus, this area focuses the entire dynamic of the image. (see frame 74:37)

Anna Karenina Even if you haven’t read the book or

have not seen any of the screenings, you only need to watch a few frames of composition from one of the most significant recent films inspired by this story to understand who the character around which everything revolves is and which are the important emotions. The first frame contains two characters: Anna Karenina, in black, and Count Alexei Vronsky Kirilov, her lover, in a white suit, dancing in the ballroom. Placing Anna in the centre of the image makes it clear that she is the main character and the count's hand in the golden section, touching the woman's hand, indicates the relationship between them. (see frame 29:37) The same idea emerges if we apply the golden spiral grid framework that has the man's fascinated gaze in the centre. (see frame 29:37)

The passion between the two characters is seen not only from the woman's clenching fists or from her aglow look, but also from the composition. Their faces are grouped in the centre of the image, between the two vertical sections and the fingertip he touches her face with is at the point of intersection between the horizontal and vertical sections. (see the 107:37) Applying the golden spiral grid over the romantic setting, we note the placement of the faces of the two characters in the latest and widest segment of the coil. (see frame 107:37)

The next frame presents Anna Karenina at the station, in the train, during her first meeting with Count Vronsky. The woman is placed back in the foreground, blurred, and the man is placed on the golden section, so this character is emphasized with light and clarity. The point of intersection of the sections on the left side of the frame is near the left eye of the count, because the whole scene takes place under the sign of the intense gaze that will mark their life afterwards. That fatal coup de foudre is outlined by the intersection of the golden sections. (see frame 17:25)

The third frame, another close-up of count Vrosky, is made by placing the character in the centre and occupying all the space between the two vertical sections of the trinity. (see the 18:27) The scene takes place in the same train where the two are introduced to each other although they had seen each other with other occasions. The count ceremoniously bows and kisses the hand of Anna, keeping his eyes raised towards hers. Very close to the golden section are the open eyes of the count, enchanted by Anna's gaze.

The Grandmaster. Although it didn't get the Oscar, this film

about Kung Fu is astounding in terms of composition. Apart from a few hypnotic and perfect thick-ups which, paradoxically, increase the dynamics, many of the film's images seem detached from the walls of Baroque art museums. Even if the subject is physical combat, Kung Fu, most of the characters are fighting while they are very well dressed, in elegant sceneries. With regard to the fluidity of movement, most of the scenes take place in the fluid element of nature – water. Thus we cast scenes in rain, snow, steam. By contrast, we see more stop-frames, as sepia group photos. During the fight scenes, we have characters who use their hands in order to build frames for their own faces, as a frame within another frame, as if highlighting through graphics or imaging Yip Man's theory about this martial art: "Kung Fu, two words: one horizontal, the other vertical." (frames 25:17 , the 25:26 , the 25:40 , 28:34 , 28:49 , 29:00 , 29:12 , 29:33 , 41:05 etc.).

The first frame is one of the most elegant in the film, both by the perfect position of each character and by the very well balanced framing. The action takes place in a brothel, where the daughter of a Kung Fu grandmaster waits for Ip Man in order to face him. Dividing


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the image using the third rule, we get three perfectly aligned planes: the foreground of the two symmetrical women who seem to fit the image by bending their body, the background – the women at the table, surrounded symmetrically by the two blue lamps and the third plane, composed of characters who stand in the background, framed symmetrically by two men in white. The first horizontal section is made at the table, from the woman's flexed arm of the woman in green to the chest of the woman with green beads, and the final sections follows the nose lines of the first and last man. The main character is centrally located and respects the position of all the women surrounding him. (see frame 39:12)

In a film about fighting, the core of many of the frames is the hand, the hand that is about to strike, hits, or rests after an impact. This framework can be an eulogy brought to the hands of a fighter, because of the composition. Ip Man's arm is positioned in the centre of the image, with palm elegantly twisted right at the intersection of the golden sections. On the vertical sections we have the man's body and one of the pillars of the richly decorated room. If we apply the gold spiral grid over this framework, we emphasize the weight and elegance of the composition. The spiral seems to be coiled around the fingers, the arm, on the forearm, in order to open widely to everything including the torso and the character's head. (see frame 27:28)

The next frame is a close-up of the female character. The composition is unorthodox, in the way that the character looks far beyond the frame, as most of the characters

in this film, being turned towards the edge of the image. From the point of view of the third rule, the composition is classic, because it sets on the nose, eyes on both sides of the section and the mouth on the intersection point. If we apply the sharing of the framework based on the golden section, we find that the positioning of the eyes and mouth is made close to the horizontal golden sections, and the nose near the vertical ones. (see frame 69:07)

In cinematography, the frame construction is done as it is done in painting, respecting the same rules of composition. And the olden proportion, in all its forms, appears in the works of all talented artists in this area. For talent, like every man's natural quality, makes you see the beauty and the balance in nature and determines you to replicate it in everything you do.

The famous number was not only loved by artists and scientists, but also mystics like Jakob Lorber: „And the Earth took love, which was like the seed over the creamy milk and, with the mysterious Power of its hands, he battered it well and made out of it the first human, in accordance to the Golden Number of his order, and then he gave him the Spirit of Life. And Her Spirit became soul inside the man and it quickly spread into his entire body, sealing for ever his bond with the Golden Number of Order. But know that not only man was created after the number, but all the spirits and all the worlds that exist in infinite space, in which we also include Earth with all that is on it, the Moon and the sun.”

Refrences: Mario Livio (2005): Golden Section The story of Phi, the most astonishing number, Bucharest: Humanitas Publishing. Mario Livio (2011): It is God a Mathematician? Bucharest: Humanitas Publishing


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Postmodernism in the art of film - lecture notes-

Florin Toader1 Ph. D, Hyperion University, Bucharest

Artists of all times have searched for the state of excellence. This has always been the underlying reality of practicing the art, but modernism proved to be the one that brought it fully to light. Modernism was singled out by its answer to a heightened sense of threat to the aesthetic value, threats coming from the social and material environment, from the spirit of the time. In fact, modernism is the ongoing effort to stem the decline of aesthetic standards threatened by the relative democratization of culture in the era of industrialization. The romantic crisis to be overcome was – it seems – an expression of the so-called democratization, as Romanticism contributed to a confusion of criteria and quality levels. Before these threats coming mostly from the appreciation level promoted by the new middle class public, modernism was a possible replica. Innovation has come to be taken as the hallmark of modernism, novelty is desired and sought by all means. However, all the great modernist artists who have stood the test of time were actually reluctant innovators, innovating just because they had no other choice, for the sake of quality and self-expression.

At some point, however, it was considered that modernism is not advanced enough; it will remain behind times if it continues to be concerned with things such as standards and quality. For though to make high art is usually part of a difficult process, during modernism, satisfaction and exhilaration required when assessing artistic products were toilsomely acquired. Over the last century, the best new painting and sculpture or new poetry proved, in their time, to be a challenge and a test for art lover. And so postmodernism came – a form of artistic expression that is no longer "obliged" to be critical in relation to itself, discrowning modernism in terms of stylistic development which is rather connected to the cyclical evaluation criteria of the public.

The urge to relax – that has always been, but now it seems stronger than ever – identified the postmodern "business", promoting less intellectually demanding art. Aching for the relaxation has come to be expressed aloud in avant-garde circles with the "challenges" of ready-made sites "brand" Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists, and then in some manifestations of surrealism. But the most coherent expression of that relaxation was the pop art, whose influence has been perpetuated in all different subsequent fashions and trends of artistic fields. The notion of postmodernism arose and spread in the same relaxed atmosphere of taste and opinion where the pop art and its successors flourished.

Where modernists hoped to highlight the universality or the fundamentals of art as a form of creation, postmodernism seeks to discrown, to embrace diversity and contradiction. When the highest quality requirements are not upheld – creation, taste or appreciation – new artistic approach rejects the distinction between "inferior" or "superior" art, rejecting also rigid boundaries, favoring eclecticism, mixing ideas and forms. Partly due to this rejection, postmodernism promotes parody and irony, as the serious tone that accompanied the act of searching for truth will be replaced by the idea of "play".13

In the context of postmodernism, "play" means changing the level of connection of the terms of the discussion, thus allowing for the figurative meanings or the passage of a metaphor from one context to another, from one reference framework to another. As inside postmodernist thinking, the text is composed of a number of "marks" whose meaning is assigned to the reader, not the author, this play is based on the

1. Florin Toader is an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University Hypeion, specializing in photography. He wrote the essay "Oglinda – element fundamental la graniţa dintre teatru şi film", Europolis, 2010


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means by which the reader constructs or interprets the text, and by means of which the author becomes a presence in the reader’s mind. The play involves also works written in the same style in order to weaken the authority, either by parodying their meanings or style, or by successive layers of false indications regarding the author's intention.

Posmodernism, attacking Modernism elites sought a strong connection with a wider public, and so-called availability has become a focus of dispute in favor of postmodern art. The mixture of artistic languages, the quotation or the collage were attempts to multiply and diversify media and messages, many elements focusing on a change when choosing the themes, closer to the average taste of the viewer. In this context, postmodern artists see media as one of the fundamental sources of inspiration. Andy Warhol is an early example of post-modern artistic trends by how he assumes common popular symbols and ready-made cultural artifacts, making what was once considered, "worldly" or trivial on the field of high art.

Postmodern cinema is distinguished, in the opinion of many commentators, through various forms of pastiche or stylistic multiplicity. Sometimes it is an intrinsic element of the film, as in Kiss of the Spider Woman, where the parody of Hollywood romance and melodrama is inserted into the story of the relationship blossoming between two political prisoners. (...) Another interesting frequently commented manifestation of postmodernism in the film is the deletion of previously existing borders between elevated culture and mass culture, postmodern films can evoke complex problems of an elevated theory, but this is at odds with its apparent accessibility and the box office of so flawless postmodern films like Blade Runner, True Stories, Diva and the Draughtman's Contract. (Steven Connor – Cultura postmodernă)

Revisiting the subject "From the postmodern perspective, as

the extension and complexity of modern societies accelerate, identity becomes more and more unstable, more and more fragile. Within this situation, the discourses of postmodernity problematize the very notion of identity, claiming that it is a myth and an illusion. One reads both in modern theorists like the Frankfurt School, and in Baudrillard and other postmodern theorists, that the autonomous, self-constituting

subject that was the achievement of modern individuals, of a culture of individualism, is fragmenting and disappearing, due to social processes which produce the leveling of individuality in a rationalized, bureaucratized and consumerized mass society, and media culture." (Douglas Kellner, Cultura media)

Zelig (1983) "Ten years of a 'human chameleon'

(1920-1930) life. To such an extent a conformist that, to be approved, he is able to acquire the traits of anyone who sits around, either black or Asian, Pope or Hitler. [...] Very original narrative technique, collage-film more chameleonic than Zelig himself, a masterpiece of inventiveness and humor, simulating cinematographic journalism rhetoric, combining frames of the news of the '20s with simulations of interviews and footages from the set." (Tudor Caranfil – Dicţionar universal de filme, 2002)

“Zelig (directed by Woody Allen) is ‘about’ the formation of subjectivity, both the subjectivity of the spectator, and that created by the spectator – the Star.” (Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism)

Marlene (1984) “But a film like Maximilian Schell’s

Marlene can also parody the documentary genre in a postmodern cinematic way. It opens asking ‘Who is Dietrich?’, and the question is revealed as unanswerable. The postmodernist investigation of the formation of postmodern subject is combined here with one of the forms the challenge of postmodern historical knowledge has taken: one that operates in the private history that is the biography. Novels such as Banville's Kepler or Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear or Kennedy’s Legs aim to portray an individual and at the same time, to undermine any stability or certainty in knowing – or representing – that subject. This is what Marlene is about. Dietrich is offstage, never represented visually. She is merely a plaintive voice, a feisty presence of absence. Schell reverses this situation to postmodernism advantage: his film talks about trying to make a documentary about a subject that is intentionally absent, a topic that refuses to be subject to discourses and representations of the others. (...) Marlene is the kind of movie I would label as postmodern: a parody, metacinematic, challenging. Its double speech, constantly contradictory brings to our attention the question of ideological construction


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– of subjectivity and how we know history, both the personal history and the public history." (Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) In this film by Peter Greenaway

everything is duplicated, from characters to parodies. The main intertext is the realistic ('photographic') representation of Vermeer’s paintings. But even this explicit intertext becomes problematic. In the narrative of the film there is a surgeon named Van Meergeren. This is the name of the most famous of Vermeer’s works counterfeiters, the man who persuaded Goebbels (and the entire world) that there were more works than the twenty-six paintings authenticated. (...) A Zed and Two Noughts seems to me to be a border case of postmodern film. [...] Although its contradictions are not really solved, they are highly stylized. The postmodern film, as I see it, should be more compromised than that. Its tensions should be even more deliberately left unresolved, the contradictions – even more deliberately manifest." (Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

Revisiting the past Zelig, Carmen, The French Lieutenant's

Woman, and other postmodern films really dealing with history, ironically, but not on entirely frivolous. (...) On the contrary, these films suggest that there is a past 'real' directly and naturally accessible to us today: we can not know – and build – the past but by his tracks, by its representations. (...) Whether they are documents, eyewitness accounts, long-/short-films, documentaries or other works of art, they remain, however, representations and they are our only means of access to the past. (...) The film and postmodern fiction are primarily obsessed with history and how we can know the past today.(Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

Brazil (1985) A strange film by Terry Gilliam that

Linda Hutcheon considers postmodern because "it ironically rethinks history ' by a parody of other movies like Star Wars and Battleship Potemkin, with the reevaluation of different periods of the past that can not be identified precisely, futuristic decors mixed with monotonous costumes in the '30s and presenting a world dominated by computers and advanced

automation with an archaic design and a lack of safety, suggesting that they also belong to the '30s. Perhaps Brazil is another example of the 'retro' style because what it is evoked here is not a real machine phase, but rather, an imaginary technology of that mid-century science fiction. These forms of temporal discontinuity correspond to the generic heterogeneity of the film with his erratic swings between comedy and tragedy, utopia and dystopia, tales of adventure and satire. (Steven Connor, Cultura postmodernă)

"Brazil belongs, out of grounds and even recipe to A Clockwork Orange, '1984 ', Fahrenheit and other political-fiction film. The film, equivocal alloy of black comedy, burlesque and dramatic baroque is cerebral even into its lyrical parts and the abundance of final twists is more tiresome than surprised. To be noted the delusional scenography, characteristic to Gilliam." (Tudor Caranfil – Universal Dictionary of movies, 2002)

Terry Gilliam is "the author of a new baroque theater built on postmodern elements: spacing, demystifying, eclectism, pastiche cult, imitation, parody, and metafiction. The result of this option is a flamboyant opera, full of fantasy and a remarkable plasticity, which puts forward the dehumanization of society." (Dictionary of Cinema, 1997)

Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991) The movie Robin Hood, Prince of

Thieves introduces the medieval outlaw who suffers from PTSD after the Crusades. Accompanied by a cheerful band of multicultural homeless victims, he and the feminist Marian fight against the multinational corporation of the sheriff of Nottingham and save the Sherwood Forest area. Therefore postmodernism has history, but not a 'sense of history', since all historical moments are minimized, swallowed by present and context." (Gene Edward Veith, Guide to Contemporary Culture)

Intertextuality Last Tango in Paris (1972) The Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci

creates an intertextual love story based both on the history of the cinema after 1950 and fiction. It uses Marlon Brando remarkably, in the main role, mixing elements from his real life, his career and the life character in order to create a fourth person who rises above the three. For


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example, the description of the history of Brando's character career as "a boxer, a singer from bongos, a revolutionary' are references to the characters' businesses, interpreted by Brando in films such as On the Waterfront and Viva Zapata!"

(http://lifegoesoff.blogspot.com/2005/05/essay-title-re-postmodernism-in-film.html)

Carmen (1983) The complex transcoding from Carlos

Saura’s film Carmen, of the high French art (opera by Bizet and the literary text of Mérrimée) under the conventions of the Spanish flamenco provide a good illustration of the type of political critics the parodic representation is indeed capable. (...) Saura's film concerns the relationship of the present to the traditions of the past, of the Spanish popular, and the culture of the high European art (with its fascination for the exotic stereotype). [...] The somewhat reminiscent of Fellini's The Orchestra Rehersal, this "show" is also both a documentary about a particular form of music, and the repetition of a fiction. Add to this the reflectivity of the plot structure, manifested in that the dancers begin to play – in their private life – the jealousy and passion of fiction. The fact that often, as spectators, we can not say if we have to face life fiction or dancers in the ‘real’ life action, highlights the play of dual boundaries in the film. (Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

Pulp Fiction (1994) "Like ‘Citizen Kane’,’Pulp Fiction’ is

constructed in such a nonlinear way that you could see it a dozen times and not be able to remember what comes next. It doubles back on itself, telling several interlocking stories about characters who inhabit a world of crime and intrigue, triple-crosses, a world where there are no normal people and no ordinary days." (Roger Ebert, Cinema… un secol şi ceva, 2002).

Fight Club (1999) "In the complex postmodern

construction, clip-like, of the filmmaker one can identify multiple narrative techniques: from flashback to anticipations of the action, open stage confessions, oneiric delirium, episodes resumed from another angle, even subliminal images. The challenging masterpiece 'pop' is part of the joint anarchic current of films that mark

the arrival of the XXIth century." (Tudor Caranfil – Dicţionar universal de filme, 2002)

Memento (2000) ‘Memento is a new challenge, this time

of the narrative concepts – not so much because it starts with the end (Citizen Kane, made in 1941, also started with the end), but because we witness a reverse, unnatural chronology, where every scene is paradoxically the continuation of the next scene! Perhaps the film noir has never been so labyrinthine – it is a puzzle where each 'answer' raises a new question, where the actions, the images, the stereotypes are repeated endlessly, resulting in a feeling of stagnation of the investigation and the film itself.’ (Corina Marculescu, Observator Cultural, no. 192, 28.10-03.11.2003)

Collage/Polistilism Pierrot le fou (1965) ‘Everything is backwards. (...) Pierrot ...

is undoubtedly an antifilm, and this status can be detected at all levels. (...) The film with gangsters, the touristic film, the romance movie, the parody, the mime, the exotic film, the art film, the television reportage, the filmed theater, the compilation carried out at dialogue level, as well as by imagistic, painting quoting, are the disparate elements falling within this general hotchpotch named Pierrot the fool.’ (John Lazar, Teme şi stiluri cinematografice)

Blue Velvet (1986) "The film parodies 1940s American

films – ‘small town’ films, film noir and films of other genres. A mixture of different genres and different times are seen in this film which is an example of pastiche."

(Asim Ratan Ghosh, www.geocities.com-postmodernismandcinema/ pmincin.html)

Norman Denzin sees Blue Velvet as a

postmodern film out of a number of reasons. First, the film offers an unlikely and disturbing juxtaposition of different genres and related expectations. [...] Denzin argues that Blue Velvet combines in a postmodern manner the tradition of the small town (illustrated by Frank Capra's works in the '40s) with cult pornographic films. Also postmodern, in Denzin's opinion, is the way the film combines the "non-presentable' (rotting ears, sexual excesses, brutality, dementia) with cliché existence, thereby challenging the boundaries that separate them.


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(...) If Blue Velvet seeks new ways 'to present the non- presentable in order to destroy the barriers that hinder the mixture of profane in everyday life', in equal measure, especially when presenting male and female sexuality, he reproduces without mercy and apparently without irony the narrowest cultural stereotypes. (...) Denzin concludes that 'postmodern individuals want movies like their violence and politics, all at the same time. (Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture)

Ghost Dog (2000) "Far from being the most elaborate film

by Jim Jarmusch, Ghost Dog is probably one of the major cinematic creations of 'post-postmodern' cinema, integrating into its narrative thread senile gangsters, cartoons, code of conduct Hagakure of the samurai, messenger-pigeons, overcoming barriers of language and race, the ghost of a dog, a man who builds a boat on the roof and, of course, rap. But the importance of the film does not come from the abundance of narrative elements, but from the author's attitude towards them. Jarmusch breaks down New York reality which in itself is a hodge-podge (the boat on the roof an the gangsters who love rap are inspired by reality) and recomposes it as a modern fairy tale (...) in order to be able to penetrate its meaning, the story must be read carefully, each element is a symbol awaiting to be interpreted." (Carina Tăutu)

Parody On the whole, the parody is

characteristic of a multilayered society, enjoying a cultural tradition that can make significant references, universally recognizable.

The parody delivered simultaneously to and beyond the cinematic textuality, ideological formation of the subject by our various cultural representations. (...) Parody – often called ironic quotation, pastiche, closeness intertextuality – is usually considered central to postmodernism, both by detractors and its defenders. For the artists, the postmodern seems to imply ransacking the image reserves of the past in order to reveal the history of representations on which their parody draws our attention. In terms of happily chosen by Abigail Solomon-Gode (1984), the modernist 'ready mades' of Duchamp became 'already mades' in postmodernism. But this parodic replay of the past of the art is not nostalgic, but always critical, it is not ahistorical

or unhistorical, but do not draw out the art of the past in its historical original context to reassemble it in a presentation show. (...) Parody, of course, is omnipresent in the contemporary film, although its method is not always challenging. (...) Paradoxically the postmodern film wants to challenge the external boundaries of cinema and wants to question (though rarely provides responses) on the role played by ideology in shaping the subject and historical knowledge. Perhaps parody is a particularly appropriate representational strategy of postmodernism, a strategy once described as the use of a parallel scenario rather than an original writing." (Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

Take the money and run (1969) Along with Pierrot the fool, Take the

money and run is part of the category of avant-la-lettre postmodernist films, the writer and director Woody Allen parodies here the film noir as well as the conventionalism in treating documentaries Discovery Channel type. Take the money and run fits perfectly the typology of mockumentary, where the protagonist is analyzed impersonally by the documentary, the comic feature arises, apparently involuntarily, from the absurd situations that, the whole seemingly trivial scheme of characters is bound to enter at some point.

Bananas (1971) The film directed by Woody Allen is a

carefully constructed parody of political films and also war films that are based on romance. Satire and absurd humor, specific to Allen, imbue the development of apparently dramatic action, with a subtle but irresistible comic.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) Based on excerpts of the book by David

Reuben that interrelate, the screenplay of the film by the same Woody Allen parodies here the idea of counseling, highlighting the absurdity of the solutions pushed to potential limitations.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) Postmodern parody evokes what

promoters of the reception theory call expectation horizon of the spectator consisting of recognizable conventions of genre, style or form of representation. This horizon of expectation is then destabilized and dismantled


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step by step. It is no accident, of course, that irony was often rhetorical vehicle of satire. Even a parody relatively ' light' such as Brian De Palma's film Phantom of the Paradise, gives a version of irony working with satire and selecting anything as target from sexism of Hugh Hefner harems type (Swan's – ironic echoes perhaps of Du côté chez Swann) to the interpellation movie star by the public and his taste for the extremes. This vehicle of this satire is the multiple parody: from The Bird Man of Alcatraz – is transported to Sing Sing , to Psycho – the knife is replaced by a waterpipe plunger and the female victim by a male, to The Portrait Dorian Gray – the portrait is upgraded as video tape. Despite the obvious entertainment, we are dealing with a film (...) about the representation of the original subject and originary as artist, about the dangers, the victims, the consequences. Its major intertexts are Faust and the previous film, The Phantom of the Opera, here transcoded in terms of rock music. This latter parodied text can explain the details, otherwise unmotivated like organ notes of the piano interpretation of the protagonist from the beginning of the film. Faust parody is as declared, because the ghost writes rock inspired by the subject of the dramatic poem. And, of course, the pact with the demonic Swann is signed in blood. (Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

Spaceballs (1987) "A new prank by which Brooks (in the

double role as king and wizard) strokes against the hair, this time, the habits of interplanetary SF aiming openly in the Space Wars and George Lucas routine. The stereotypes of the fairytale for children are added to the modern technological jargon and...the SF masterpiece is ready! In addition, the garlands of allusions for moviegoers’use from Snow White, where hooded dwarves sing in the choir of the Bridge on the River Kwai, spectres from the Planet of the Apes, references to Lawrence of Arabia in the desert planet. "(Tudor Caranfil – Dicţionar universal de filme, 2002)

The Big Lebowski (1997) "The Coen Brothers invent extravagant

situations, distort waggishly any situation no matter how dramatic, coating everything with political allusions and references to cinematographic myths cinema." (Tudor Caranfil – Dicţionar universal de filme, 2002)

Simulacrum In an article entitled 'The precession of

simulacra', Baudrillard argued that reality had been subsequently neutralized by the media who first reflected it, then masked and distorted it, and then it had to hide its absence, and finally produced instead the simulacrum of reality, destroying meaning and any relationship with reality. (Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

"The fact that the simulacrum became the emblematic figure of postmodern culture is largely a consequence of the increasing instability of fronteers between formerly distinct areas. The simulacrum is significant for the postmodern culture also because ambiguities and issues associated with it have become relevant in the contemporary cultural situation. The Fundamental questions to which the narrative and visual art in contemporary culture of the simulacrum must answer no longer deal with the old metaphysical problems related to the origin, the legitimacy and the identity. Once with the advent of the show society, the focus moves to the pragmatical or 'existential' questions aiming the relationship of the images with the audience." (...) "The media is now a vital element of our ability to interpret and reinvent our world. In Whillock's opinion, the film (along with the TV set and the computer) amended the contemporary discourse, changing completely the concept of reality. The same position is reinforced also by postmodernists constantly stating that we live in a world where images proliferate independently of the existence of references to the "real" world. One of the primary effects of the fact that the film insinuates easily in the minds of viewers is its ability to convince them of the 'reality' of the images produced artificially. The illusory quality of the film facilitates the identification of the viewer with the images on the screen: in these images, the viewers perceive alternative 'realities', including identities that can be adopted temporarily or possibilities to project desires." (Mihaela Constantinescu Post/postmodernismul: Cultura divertismentului)

Sex, lies and videotape (1989) "A remarkable picture of mores

depicting an obsessed world, invaded by lies, which contemplates itself on the video. The video man is not a mere maniac of voyeurism, but a therapist, a psychoanalyst who frees


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women from their sexual anxieties." (Tudor Caranfil – Dicţionar universal de filme, 2002)

"All characters of the film are

postmodern simulacra. They have become sexual objects and images." (Asim Ratan Ghosh, www.geocities.com-postmodernism-andcinema/pmincin.html)

Wag the Dog (1997) "Wag the Dog confirms that we live in

an age where the simulacrum undermined permanently the reality. The character played by Robert De Niro has to make a story to divert media attention from the sex scandal involving the U.S. President. He decides to ooze out information that denies the existence of serious problems in Albania (a country chosen arbitrarily, relying on the total lack of knowledge of the American public about the Balkans) and the possibility that U.S. troops be sent there.[...] He has to hire a successful producer from Hollywood to stage the war: he knows what it is catchy and what it is not, who can write the script the best, direct pictures, compose the distribution, when and what kind of hero is needed to win the hearts of the public. [...] The film provides an interesting contact point between the 'realm of television' and the postmodern theory on television textuality; it is about a 'fictional' artefact commenting a phenomenon of the 'real' world which in its turn was literally dramatized in the end on the American political scene. And the fact that in Albania there was no war but the one produced in Hollywood proves to match our post/postmodern suspicions: there is nothing outside the house we live, the office building where we work, the street that leads to the station subway or the car we drive each day, there is nothing beyond the orbit of our own planet or our own reality." (Mihaela Constantinescu Post / postmodernismul: Cultura divertismentului)

The Truman Show (1998) "The film – a parable of the power of

television to counterfeit the real world – shows that 'live' entertainment can successfully replace reality, and the boundary between the two is not even necessary. The main character of the film, Truman Burbank, is adopted at birth by a media conglomerate that employs two actors to be his parents. Thus Truman lives his whole life without knowing, watched day and night by

thousands of cameras hidden everywhere. Life is a television series broadcast live – a series that, as the producer says, 'gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions of viewers.' This is because the audience got bored watching actors interpreting false emotions. The simulacrum of a cruel reality, not staged, is a much more interesting entertainment. The symbolic order is already established: the reality is a construction, and Truman, at first innocent, suddenly becomes aware that he is the subject of a conspiracy which is recorded and consumes life live. Afterwards, inflamed with paranoia and having confirmation of the storyline that determines his existence, Truman escapes from the symbolic order of the film, in the 'more real' reality beyond the movie set, of the imaginary and real public of the film 'The Truman Show' – a virtual construction as the one he left. [...]" (Mihaela Constantinescu Post/postmodernismul: Cultura divertismentului)

Metacinema It brings out not only the formation

process of subjectivity, but also of the narration and the visual representation became the raw matter of metacinema today. The postmodernist version of this kind of self-reflexivity draws attention to the very act of production and reception of the film. (Linda Hutcheon, Politica postmodernismului)

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1984) The fate of the characters of this film

cross sensibly with the whole development of universal cinema, on which the film opens new perspectives for interpretation.

The nostalgic painting of splendor and decay of the cinema show. A youth film, of a young man who shows he knew how to look at Fellini and Monicelli. From traditional Italian melodrama and comedy he extracts a live film, full of ideas and excitement." (Tudor Caranfil – Dicţionar universal de filme, 2002)

The Purple Rose from Cairo (1985) "Who has not dreamed that the

characters of a movie come down the screen and join him alive? Woody Allen develops here this wonderful idea with a funny, human, poetic result, with a moving Mia Farrow. The denouement, the double detente, allows the author to save both lucidity and taste for dreaming." (Bernard Rapp, Dictionnaire du Cinema – Larousse)


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The Player (1992) "A captivating exercise of lucidity on

contemporary Hollywood theme. The false dilemma 'entertainment or trade' is solved by Altman in the natural context of trade. (...) The director creates at the same time, suspense and comedy, (...) parable and political film, tragedy and happy end, playing the industry at its own game." (Tudor Caranfil – Dicţionar universal de filme, 2002)

Deconstructing Harry (1997) Introducing deconstructivist work tools

in the postmodern equation (such as unpredictability and "controlled" chaos), on the border with the fantastic, Woody Allen brings to the forefront of this film, against a creative jam of the character-writer Harry Block, the mixture of fiction and reality. Waiting for his writings to be rewarded, Harry remembers events from his past but also from his best-sellers, coming to be invaded by the characters created joining the ones in his past. The film speculates this very moment of breaking the boundary between reality and illusion, a meta-vision of the creative process itself.

Techno-culture/Cyborg postmodernism Blade Runner (1982) Blade Runner is a utopia that combines

futurism and decay, computer technology and fetishism, urbanism and retro-styling, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Its 'tech-noir' quality was repeated in countless novels, films, computer games and other cultural objects, but none able to match the impact of 'Blade Runner' in conceptualizing the future. (Mihaela Constantinescu Post/postmodernismul: Cultura divertismentului)

Matrix (1999) "A combination, almost surreal, of

western, comic book, Kafka, Mortal Kombat, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, John Woo, manga cartoons and, why not, 'Alice in Wonderland'." (Michael Chirilov Cinema… un secol şi ceva, 2002)

Very few films that respect the Hollywood canons make direct references to postmodernist theory such as Matrix. In the first

scene that sets up the protagonist, Neo, we discover he hid the haking programme in a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, a work which, despite its difficulties (both in terms of linguistics and rationale) had a major impact on the understanding of the era we live in, an age that – for better or worse – has been baptized 'postmodernism'." (...) What the Wachowski brothers undoubtedly manage to do is to urge the public to think, which is quite unusual for a typical Hollywood product. They allow the public to engage in a dialogue with some of our era elite theorists of our postmodernist era, and it resists the desire to investigate through the film a mimetic and easy 'reality' (as Cypher is able to see not codes, but ' blonde, brunettes and redheads'). The Wachowski brothers oblige us to identify matrices that structure, manipulate and they reproduce this reality, feeding our fantasies. They always remind us of their always censoring presence and the ability of the technology to create new perceptions of reality (the innovative footage when he avoids the bullets). They insist on the cinematographic art and highlight the manipulative technology – we are addicted to – which show their vision: not only the role of reality, but also the reel becomes tangible. (Dino Felluga, Matrix: Ştiinţă, filozofie şi religie)

As a conclusion, can we imagine how postmodernism could end? And what it would become? It does not even have a well defined beginning, always "entangled" in modernism, as some features seem new but in reality they are just taking over the advanced ideas of earlier styles, with changed meanings. Although the absence of a consensus on the general characteristics of postmodernism is easy to note, we are dealing with a stable paradoxical element in its structure: the dissemination of speech in an amount of fragments that fight against coherent meanings! Furthermore postmodernism accepts unconditionally the transience, the discontinuity and the chaos; these are the signs of an ongoing metamorphosis of the epoch it successfully represents. Currently, the researcher has no other choice but to adopt himself the same postmodernist attitude, of acceptance...

Trans. Zenovia Popa

References Steven Connor (1999): Cultura postmodernă. O introducere în cultura contemporană, București: Ed. Meridiane Linda Hutcheon (1997): Politica postmodernismului, București: Ed. Univers.


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Jeffrey C. Alexander, Steven Seidman (coord.), 2001: Cultură şi societate. Dezbateri contemporane, Iaşi: Institutul European. Douglas Kellner (2001): Cultura media, Iaşi: Institutul European. Glenn Yeffeth (ed.2003): Matrix: Ştiinţă, filozofie şi religie, București: Ed. Amaltea. Gene Edward Veith (1996): Guide to Contemporary Culture, Crossway Books, Leicester. Mihaela Constantinescu (1999): Forme în mişcare: Postmodernismul, București: Ed. Univers Enciclopedic. Ion Manolescu (2003): Videologia. O teorie tehno-culturală a imaginii globale, Iaşi: Ed. Polirom Tudor Caranfil (2002): Dicţionar universal de filme, București/Chişinău: Ed. Litera Internaţional Cristina Corciovescu, Bujor T. Rîpeanu (2002): Cinema…un secol şi ceva, București: Ed. Curtea Veche. Ştefan Oprea, Anca-Maria Rusu (2002): Stelele Oscarului, vol. II, Iaşi: Ed. Junimea. Ioan Lazăr (1987): Teme şi stiluri cinematografice, București: Ed. Meridiane.

Cinematographic Art & Documentation Journal, No. 9(13)/2014

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Transcript of Cinematographic Art & Documentation Journal, No. 9(13)/2014