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M.A., Film Studies

Fabricating Remembrance:

Romanian Cinema and the Problem of National Identity

Lucian Tion

10391126

2013-2014

Supervisor: Dr. A.M. Geil

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Abstract

The scope of this thesis is to explore the role of the visual media, and cinema in particular, in the shaping of national identity in the multicultural, highly volatile area of Eastern Europe in the 20th

century. Departing from Benedict Anderson’s theory that linguistic identity predates the development of the nation-state in ecclesiastic Latin-dominated Western Europe, I claim that cinema acted as a tool in demarcating the boundaries between the “national self” and the “other” in what used to be a historically homogenous cultural space that came to a close with the

collapse of the multinational empires that administered the region until WWI. Suggesting that its necessity to cope with instability helped it develop a protean identity, I use Romania for

showcasing the area’s ability to face up to its not altogether acknowledged past.

In its attempt to resolve the identity crisis that followed the weakening of imperial authority, I advance the theory that Romania developed a “repression-perpetuating device” which allowed the cultural elite, and later the political power to repress the past it wished to forget, and to fabricate shifting national public memories that suited the perpetually different and sometimes contradicting political and cultural aims of each current governance.

To illustrate this process, I chose to focus on three cinematic works of the mid-twentieth, and early twenty first century, respectively. By comparing Columna (1968), a socialist historical saga meant to construct historicity and belongingness ex nihilo to Videograms of a Revolution (1992), 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), and The Autobiobraphy of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010), I claim that half a century had to pass after nationalism had established its base before a generation of young directors could start questioning the national values, foundation myths, and repressive practices of the past. While considering the role of the media in recording the 1989 revolution and the dictator’s personality cult, I consider Corneliu Porumboiu and Andrei Ujica’s claims that film acts both as a tool for questioning and simultaneously creating history. I conclude that visual media has not only profound ramifications in identity-building efforts on a national scale, but that it needs to realize its creative potential in order to access the very areas film itself, at the time of its creation sought to hide, repress, or otherwise make obsolete.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ... 3

1. From “Organized Forgetting” to Fabricated Remembering ... 9

1.1 From Cohabitation to Ethnic Cleansing ... 11

1.2 The Development of Nationalist Ideas in Enlightenment Europe ... 13

1.3 The Development of Romanian Exceptionalism ... 15

1.4 From Romanticism to Fascism ... 17

1.5 Communism ... 19

2. From Print Capitalism to Visual Socialism ... 20

2.1 Postcolonial Appropriations ... 21

2.2 Historical Film and National Education ... 22

3. Local Culture and Regional Inheritance ... 25

3.1 From Familiar Diversity to Dysfunctional Family ... 26

3.2 Shared History, National Cinemas? ... 28

4. Columna: From Manufactured Rebirth to the Sexing of the Nation ... 31

4.1 Ambivalence ... 33

4.2 Educating with Visuals ... 35

4.3 From Myth to Rebirth ... 37

4.4 The Invention of Tradition: Costumes and Backdrops ... 40

4.5 Sexing the Nation ... 42

4.6 Reverberations ... 46

5. From the ‘Father of the Nation’ to the Nation without a Father ... 47

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5.2 Paternalism and Communism ... 50

5.3 Communism and the Problem of Representation ... 52

5.4 Repositioning Guilt ... 55

5.5 Ceausescu’s “Children” and the Rethinking of the National Image ... 57

5.6 Repression, the all-too-familiar Scenario ... 59

6. New Romanian Cinema: Redemption at Last? ... 61

6.1 Absence of Expression ... 62

6.2 New Times, New Polemics………... 63

6.3 Questioning Identity at Last ... 67

6.4 Sarcasm and Identity... 68

6.5 The Other ... 73

6.6 Double Negation ... 74

7. Conclusion ... 75

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Introduction

Since its invention, film seemed destined to make history visible. It was able to portray the past and to stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Mobius strip, the side was flipped. We look on and we think: if film is possible, then history, too, is possible.

Voiceover commentary, Videograms of a Revolution

Three years after the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe, Andrei Ujica, a Romanian émigré and professor of literary theory fascinated by the tumultuous events that were transforming the eastern part of the continent at the time, decided to team up with German experimental film director Harun Farocki to make a documentary about the as of yet unsettled (and unsettling) surroundings of the 1989 Romanian revolution.1 Titled Videograms of a Revolution, their work

analyzed the interaction between political power and the media, particularly the way in which visual imagery influences political memory (Kernbauer, 73) in the legacy of one of the first revolutions that was practically ‘caught on camera’ more or less in its entirety. While documenting the revolution by editing together various home movies made by amateur cameramen as well as found footage from the archives of the Romanian television, Ujica and Farocki didn’t only make a film about history, but assisted in re-writing history itself, or, as Farocki observed, they witnessed “history itself creat[ing] its own shape” (Farochi qtd. in Kernbauer, 78).

What the two directors accomplished in this documentary was not a classical reconstruction of the past through visuals, nor a fictionalization of the past according to a predominant or ideological point of view, which is a practice that the state apparatus of the Communist party repeatedly engaged in when selling their ideology. They documented instead the delicate process through which a mass event like the Romanian revolution selected, distilled, and ultimately found its own voice from the variety of competing viewpoints recording the event

1 A 25-year old long controversy still questions the political events that saw the toppling of Communist dictatorship in Romania in 1989 in the context in which archives have not been completely declassified. The leading revisionist theories range from calling for the acknowledgement of a coup d’état by the neo-Communists who grabbed power, to their incrimination for murder. However, no juridical action has been initiated against any of the members of the post-revolutionary government to this date, and accusations remain at the level of vague, broad-phrased

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in order to pass on the totalizing, encompassing version which settled the revolution as such in public memory.

For this reason, while making Videograms, both directors became increasingly sensitive to the issue of ‘making’ as opposed to ‘recording’ history, their conclusion being that with the increasingly larger role visual imagery played in the writing of history came the challenge of discriminating between reality and construction.

In this thesis I explore the ways in which film is used for both nation-building purposes, as well as a tool to reveal its own employment in this process. Arguing that national identity crisis acts as a determinant in the shaping of the national self-imaginary, I ask whether film can personify the act of a nation’s search for identity, as well as explore ways in which it might question the validity of that search. Finally, emphasizing the strong relationship between media and political power, I investigate the degree to which film can be used as an instrument in the hands of state apparatuses to build national identity, as well as spread the seeds of this identity’s own unmaking in the same process.

Although the use of visual imagery is integral to nation-building everywhere, I focus on Romania due to the country’s particular vulnerability to propaganda. I claim this happened because Romania, unlike other countries in Eastern Europe, did not experience a political thaw during the socialist fifties. Deprived of the ability to honestly reflect on its own past, particularly after the turbulent war years, I claim that the country’s identity, which should have been shaped by self-evaluation, remained an unanswered question.

Arguing that history considerably shaped the identities of the countries in Eastern Europe, I claim that national identity in Romania was created in response to a deep-seated, unacknowledged identity crisis that plagued national consciousness since pre-modern times. In the process of creating this identity, each successive political administration appealed to the creation of a ‘national culture’ (first in the form of literature and later film) through which it attempted to prove the existence of a distinct ‘national character.’

Unlike in other places in Europe where such nationalist birthing of cultures was an easily identifiable process developed in the late 18th century, I claim that in Romania’s case, the

creation of national identity was a repetitive and cyclical process, which continued long after the Enlightenment. The Romanian pattern is one in which identity is successively re-invented by

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successive regimes; at the same time, each re-invention is based on the brutal repression of all ideologies created by the identity-shaping attempts of previous political administrations.

This mechanism of perpetual repression, I further claim, is an ongoing process which not only uses ‘national cinema’ as part of its repressive tactics, but also mirrors therein its own abusive practices. In other words, by using film to build identity, the cultural artefact created in the process becomes prima-facie evidence that exposes the spuriousness of this process. This, I claim, is an abusive practice, which makes use of history to claim political legitimacy. Using the work of directors such as Ujica, and later Porumboiu, I further claim that this practice is recorded on film at the level of the visual image.

My thesis is structured in two parts: In the first part I set up the theoretical arguments and give the historical background of the periods I later focus on. This part contains chapters one through three. In the second part I analyze the film products that support the arguments I make in the first. The second part is made up of chapters four through six.

Since I base my argumentation on the fact that Romania’s national identity has been built on cyclical repressions of successive identities, I consider it important to detail what I mean by repression, and the mechanisms which helped set repression in place. Hence, I start by giving three reasons which, I claim, justify the perpetuating of repression, namely the historical,

technological, and psychological. Structured into chapters, these reasons make up the first part of my thesis.

In the first chapter I argue that the creation of identity is based on the need for political survival in the face of ‘the other.’2 Since elimination of ‘the enemy’ proved unfeasible because of

the country’s insignificant political and military power, survival was assured through the

mechanism of repression. Every time identity was threatened, whether externally--as in the case of an invader--or internally by, for example, foreign values which threatened ‘national

character,’ instead of eliminating ‘the other,’ the national imaginary responded by attempting to adapt. Since the threatening agent didn’t allow former national identities to co-exist with its domineering influence--as in the case of imposing a foreign language--‘national culture’ was forced to repress itself--or its former self--and re-invent its identity anew.

2 Throughout this thesis I will be using “the other” to refer to the foreign, non-autochthonous elements present within a culture and a nation, or on its geographical periphery, such as a nation’s neighbors. When spelled with a capital “O,” I refer to the “Other” in a Lacanian sense, that is, the superstructure of language, morality, religion, in

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It is my claim that this repression-perpetuating device--put into place first by literary culture, later through the use of visual and cinematic propaganda--became such a staple of Romanian identity policy that Romanianness prefers a state of perpetual provisionality or impermanence. By identifying with potentialities which oscillate chaotically--following a pattern which parallels the political and historical changes experienced by the country itself--the national imaginary is thus rescued from extermination through its periodical adoption of a re-invented self. Moreover, since history can be written and rewritten by anyone in power over and over, and since the subject’s only options are to integrate or be ostracized, that subject’s personality becomes fluid, thus the character of national identity changes repeatedly to accommodate this necessity to perpetually readapt.

Aside from defining the repression mechanism, I also examine the position of

nationalism in the process. Thus, starting from an overview of the historical process of repression from Enlightenment to post-socialism, I hope to show that nationalism is not a goal in itself, but a byproduct of the perpetual search for identity discussed above.

In the second chapter I claim that there is a temporal continuity from print as a vehicle for nation-building, as theorized by Benedict Andersen in reference to the early modern period and film in the 20th century. I call this the technological argument for repression, since the process of

(re)creating identity is strongly connected to the technology used for that process; in this case print literature, and later film.

Just as the concept of the nation-state did not predate print literature in the 17th to 19th

century, film is not a product of nationalism, but an integral element thereof, in that it was used to build nationalism in answer to the challenge of perpetual identity crisis. Using cinema as such a replacement, I argue that, similar to nationalist efforts to create a linguistic identity, the 20th

century facilitated the creation of a visual one, represented by shared iconic images employable by varied ideologies. Whether film was consciously used to fight for political survival or not through this mechanics, it became an integral part of the state apparatus which raised the role of nationalism, and thus national cinemas, to previously unknown heights of popularity. In doing so, film was able to both choose the identity political power wanted to impart, and delete the one that contravened its then current intentions.

Not only was film able to create identity, but to create the history of that identity. Just as, to use Ujica and Farocki’s metaphor, in the 20th century we’re not limited to seeing Lenin on the

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train, but to actually create Lenin, we are now able to not only identify with a manufactured identity, but choose the history of the identity that suits us best. Moreover, the reverse is equally true: as Andrei Ujica found in his exploration of Ceausescu’s legacy in Romania, not only are we able to create Ceausescu, but we are able to create him out of his own (celluloid recorded) image (Ujica, Cinespect). Hence, in the use of film, particularly archival materials, ideology can be turned on its head to demonstrate its own instability and even heal the process of trauma that becomes revealed through the employment of film for building that ideology.

Finally, in the last chapter of the first part I claim that another reason for enacting repression--a psychological one--is avoidance of the fear of becoming common, or the fear of regional commonality. By this I mean that the imperial past shared in the early modern period by all the countries of Eastern Europe emphasizes their commonality rather than the distinct

national identity each sought to adopt in the wake of nationalist re-creation. The result is that the common heritage makes Eastern European countries more similar to one another than they are willing to admit, which forces the region to resemble a dysfunctional, multi-cultural family that stands united through its very disunity. In this chapter I will equally discuss the role that national cinema plays in the representation of national identity, and ask whether the debate between national authenticity and regional continuity doesn’t in fact hide the fear of both national and regional marginality.

In the second part of this thesis I am using three films to substantiate the arguments I make in the first part.

In chapter four I look at the historical Romanian epic Columna (1968)3 to illustrate the

way in which national ideology made use of the historical argument--and the foundation myth inherently contained therein--to fight for cultural superiority and further the country’s political claims to exceptionalism, which I will have described in chapter one.

Starting from the concept that representations of the past are always enterprises meant as justifications for current political actions (Grindon, 125), I see historical film as being a

constitutive part of the identity-building effort that tried to coalesce an otherwise ethnically diverse Romania inherited from imperial days into the homogenous ‘nationhood’ of fascist, and later Communist propaganda.

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Furthermore, I look at how Columna appropriated international super-productions popularized by Hollywood in the late fifties to validate Communist ideology. Looked at it from this angle, Columna became a heroic projection for the ‘New Man’ created on the scaffold of Soviet ideology and adapted to the local traditionalist landscape.

Finally, since the core of the discussion on national identity hinges on the construction of myths, and since mythification was a common and shared practice adopted in the majority of Central-Eastern European countries from the 19th century on, it is important to look at the role of myth-making in the nation-building process. My argument is that in recycling old myths,

Columna conveniently shielded the nation from facing its own reality, particularly that aspect of reality which defines the national self as superior to the contemptible ‘other.’ However, as no apparent differences between the self and the ‘other’ exist, I claim that the repression the film enacted through its recreation of history was directed at older versions of the national self that the national imaginary tried to re-invent.

After looking at the new foundation myth, I analyze the role of patriarchalism in

rebuilding national identity, as reflected in Andrei Ujica’s exploration of the personality cult of the Romanian dictator in his The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010). This will be done in chapter five. Following Ujica’s own logic, I examine the way in which film acts both as an enabler and maker of history, as well as a potential vehicle for first exposing, then questioning this very process. Related to the omnipresence of film in nation-building projects as examined in chapter two, I propose to look at Ujica’s film itself as a vehicle for dealing with the trauma created by the loss of the Freudian father figure which the dictator’s cult represented for the national imaginary.

It is the same cult, or rather the disappearance thereof, which in the early hours of the 1989 revolution leads to the sudden and traumatic resurgence of identity crisis. As identified by Farocki and Ujica in Videograms of a Revolution, I claim that this resurgence prepares the stage for the advent of New Romanian Cinema. Thus, in the last chapter I explore the degree to which the multiple historical repressions discussed in chapter one explain the emergence of a belated attempt at questioning identity in this new cultural movement.

Looking closely at the work of Corneliu Porumboiu, particularly at his iconic 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), I ask if New Romanian Cinema may be a result of the ban on expression enacted during the repressive socialist period. Continuing a preoccupation with the value of

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identity symbols, which starts to permeate his work as early as his short A Trip to the City (2003), Porumboiu uses visuals to question the nature of myth, its validity in post-Communism, and the bearing of its legacy on a national identity increasingly confronted with confusion and self-doubt.

Arguing that New Romanian Cinema breaks the repression mechanism in response to the reemergence of crisis in the context of the post-Communist quest of identity, I conclude that national identity crisis doesn’t only have tremendous power in shaping ‘national character’, but that cinema can be used to both construct and reveal the mechanism of building identity.

In closing, I claim that both Ujica’s and Porumboiu’s work (not unlike that of other directors whose films fall under the mark of New Romanian Cinema) represents the first break in a long series of repressions, that is, the first attempt to create a fissure in the mechanism of self-denial which has been nurturing the perpetuation of the national identity crisis. Similarly, I argue that just as it once played the part of an “ambassador” for each country’s claim to sovereignty in Eastern Europe, film starts to question not only the said sovereignty, but the very mechanism through which ideology used film to construct itself.

I conclude that film and visual imagery in Eastern European national identity politics continue to play a large role in shaping the protean character of this cultural space. Against some political theorists who claim that the discontinuity between the Communist and post-Communist regimes represents a significant and influential moment in the definition of future national character, I argue that Central Eastern Europe, as it has done in the past, continues to internalize political changes as part of its ongoing state of eternal provisionality, which has been shaped precisely by successive attempts to pin an ever newer identity on itself. I also claim that due to this ongoing, barely acknowledged, and deeply transformative identity crisis, cultural production continues to manifest itself in ever newer and perpetually surprising forms of expression which, instead of being crushed or defeated by new changes of political regimes, on the contrary, finds in these changes the stimulus and drive necessary to bring back both the repressed ghosts of the distant cultural pasts, and the unremitting quest for self-definition that became a staple of both national character, and regional or common East European identity.

1. From “Organized Forgetting” to Fabricated Remembering

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Benedict Anderson

In Eastern Europe the humanities have always been an avatar of the state. In the nation-building projects of late 18th and 19th century, writers and politicians alike actively employed the

humanities as tools in the manufacture of a new national identity. Media such as print, and later visual images were used not only to buttress the ideology of successive nationalist governments, but also to wipe the slate clean of the abusive practices of the past. Political and cultural

upheavals, as described in the historical timeline in this chapter, legitimated practices that re-created the nation each time such a need was dictated by external circumstances. In turn, the assertion of new political apparatuses demanded the creation of a new cultural identity to legitimate their existence. With each successive assertion of a “new” ‘national culture,’ the previous identity (invariably associated with failure) was deliberately obliterated, and rewritten in print, images, and historical record; in short, re-invented in a new collective culture.

In this chapter I argue that national identity has been intertwined with the humanities to such a degree that literature and later film were not only creations of the ideological state apparatus, but prolongations thereof. In Romania, even more so than in the wider Eastern European context, as political stratification took centuries to occur, the shaping of national identity was achieved both through and for the purpose of creating a new culture to distinguish it from the various fruitless ones that preceded it. As I show in this chapter, the inclement political situation before the 20th century didn’t allow for the affirmation of national identity. When

nationalist intellectuals of the late Enlightenment finally succeeded in setting the bases of

‘national culture,’ they did so from top down, using sometimes extreme practices of restructuring and manipulation. Moreover, in order to claim originality for this ‘national culture,’ not only did they have to erase entire periods of history which didn’t conform to their ideals, but they had to re-create history from a new angle that satisfied their new claims.

The story of Romania is thus the story of perpetual new beginnings. Birthed out of a reaction to the dominating ‘other’ against whom it countered claims to heroic greatness, the fragile Romania of late Enlightenment was forced to repudiate a past it had hitherto shared with its Eastern European neighbors in favor of an alleged superiority articulated in Romantic verse and manufactured lore. Building its modern foundation on new myths of origin, this Romantic Romania become an easy victim for fascist ideology, which in the inter-war period attempted to

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once again give new shape to the protean national self-image. Hushed into oblivion by

subsequent governments, fascism was replaced by the proletarian Romania of the 1950s. Built as an ostentatious break with its recent bourgeois past, this Romania reached its apogee in the Ceausescu era of the seventies. Having recaptured the artificial glory of imagined greatness cropped up during Enlightenment, this was lost again to the confusing reconditioning of the national self-image of the post-socialist Romania birthed on the barricades of the 1989 revolution. Finally, the transitional neurosis of the 21st century saw the birth of capitalist

Romania. Created out of the raucous privatization campaigns of the late 1990s in a radical break with its recent Communist past, this late Romania engendered yet another national image built on a misconstrued individualism of Western import, which systematically tore at the fabric that artificially held the national imaginary together heretofore.

For any of these successive new Romanias to exist, the preceding one had to be moved out of the way. Not only was this achieved through oftentimes bloody revolutions and

thunderous regime changes, but, by virtue of their frequency, these changes became a veritable modus operandi for various governments seeking legitimacy. What I claim in this chapter is that not only is the history of Romania a long line of repressions whose ultimate purpose was to bury the violent acts committed by previous generations, but that there are as many new Romanias as there are new foundation myths. In order to re-construct the identity of the nation anew, each new act of repression invariably resorted to new myths to sustain their claims to power, and purportedly link the present to an imagined past whose content most closely matched the image that regime wanted to project.

Since Romanian nation-building had its roots in the larger movement of nationalization of culture which took place in Europe during Enlightenment, it is important to place Romanian identity-seeking efforts in this context. Moreover, this overview will highlight the mode in which national culture appropriated those foundation myths on whose basis the nation could re-interpret itself. The understanding of this process is central to nation-building through historical cinema, an argument I detail in my later analysis of Columna.

1.1 From Cohabitation to Ethnic Cleansing

When Enlightenment ideas first reached Eastern Europe in the late 1700s, the region was an extended cobweb of deeply mixed ethnicities living together under three different imperial

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jurisdictions: the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian. From Odessa to Vienna and Istanbul to Riga, several Slavic populations, Turks, Romanians, and Ashkenazi Jews, to name just a few, were so many ethnicities unaware of “nationality” as the concept is understood today. Bound by the purely commercial interests of the empires under whose jurisdiction they happened to live, these ethnicities lived in the more or less harmonious multi-lingual frame of imperial dominions while allowed to practice their religion and speak their vernacular languages. To capture the feel of what life in this pre-nationalist hodge-podge must have looked like at the time, the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo offers a bit of nostalgic reminiscing:

Only an hour away from Budapest there is a small Hungarian town called Kecskemet - famous for its apricot brandy. Its main square is surrounded by six churches. The Town Hall is flanked by a Catholic, a Greek Orthodox and a Calvinist church, and a Presbyterian school and chapel. Opposite, on the other side of the square, there is a synagogue, and to the right, on the corner of a small street there is yet another Catholic church and convent. The town’s people did not build their churches away from each other, locked into small communities but all together, grouped on the main square. In the middle of the square there is a park, with one building only, a café: the only café for all the different churchgoers, where they could gather, read the papers, have coffee, play cards and billiards. (Szabo, xiii)

Needless to say, the only relics inherited from this bygone era are the churches and the synagogues. The inter-ethnic camaraderie of the colorful café culture described by Szabo is, with a few regional exceptions, lost except as a source of inspiration for nostalgic memorabilia.4 How

did a region so rooted in multiculturalism manage to shift gears so dramatically from being a veritable melting pot avant la letre to one of the most ethnically volatile areas in the world? If the churches (and for the most part synagogues) of the area are still standing, the traces of ethnic warfare that many times saw blood spilled in the main squares of these towns were long since wiped clean. However familiar with the Nazi, Armenian, and most recently, Yugoslavian genocides we may be, the reality is that these are only the heavily-mediatized peaks of icebergs standing upon a base of forgotten ethnic cleansing which emerged in the area at least since the advent of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. It was at the time of Ottoman retreat from the region that bloodbaths in which half a million people lost their lives became commonplace in the midst of the semi-primitive outburst of ethnic warfare that engaged civilian populations in acts of genocidal killing and forced expulsions.

4 The only attempt at the reconstruction of this period in film that I am aware of is that of Bulgarian director Ivan Nitchev: After the End of the World (Sled kraja na sveta), 1998.

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American war correspondent Paul Scott Mowrer captures the post-imperial age in Eastern Europe with frightening accuracy:

As a result of centuries of invasions, conquests, migrations, marchings and counter-marchings in which whole peoples often took part, eastern and southeastern Europe, including all of what used to be Austria-Hungary and a fringe of what used to be Russia, is an inextricable medley of disparate races whose identity has been fully preserved down through the centuries. This entire region has now been "Balkanized," that is, broken up into a number of nominally 'national' states, which are small, weak, jealous, afraid, economically dependent, a prey to intrigue, and pregnant with trouble of many descriptions, not to say wars. (Mowrer, 3; my emphasis)

Thus, not only did ethnic cleansing accompany the demise of empires, but as we shall further see in Romania’s case later in the 20th century, it “was often a crime of dying states and of

new and fragile governments” (Lieberman, xii) who were fighting for self-determination. A double-edged sword which turned the legitimate 19th century fight against monarchic oppression

into the bloodbaths of 20th century ethnic cleansing, self-determination itself is a concept with

strong ties to nationalism which can be traced back almost to the beginning of modern philosophical thought.

1.2 The Development of Nationalist Ideas in Enlightenment Europe

First spurred by Voltairian ideas of freedom of religion, democracy, and enlightened absolutism, the concept of self-determination which ultimately led to nationalism was developed, among others, into its modern form by Enlightenment thinker Johann Gottfried Herder. A product of 18th century German Enlightenment as well as early Romanticism, Herder was one of the first to define culture as an expression of Volksgeist. A term alternatively translated as either spirit of the people, but also national character, Volksgeist made itself manifest for Herder through the vernacular language spoken by a particular ethnic community, thus, carried the essentializing mission of modeling the national spirit through the expression of national

language.5 Inspired by ancient Greek poetry, which he saw as expressing the spirit of the age and

its people, Herder advocated for a change of language that would accommodate his essentialist

5 Vernaculars, until the 20th century only tolerated forms of expression under imperial administration were a particularly sensitive point in Eastern Europe, which, like Herder’s Germany was a conglomerate of fragmented

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view of culture, positing that “each national language forms itself in accordance with the ethics and manner of thought of its people.” (Herder, 50)

This organicist view of culture was also shared by the brothers Grimm who, having embraced Herder’s enthusiasm for vernacular as an expression of national character, advocated for the purification of language which “has become the common property and heritage of all men...” whereas “[p]oetry, music and arts are the property of favored people only.” (Grimm qtd. in Bauman& Briggs, 204) What this attitude did was help the Grimms interpret the oral tradition of their collected folklore as an expression of the people’s “childlike innocence,” “simplicity,” and “naiveté,” which undoubtedly, they reasoned, must reflect the Volk’s “eternal truths.” (Grimm qtd. in Bauman& Briggs, 218) To make it seem as though the German people were one of “the favored”, the Grimms shaped their collected folktales into what they considered artful forms of expression of “eternal truths” which reached deep into the traditional past, while also expressing the very soul of the nation. Linguists and scholars of nationalism who studied the development of nationalist thought, Bauman and Briggs give a detailed account of this nationalism-building process:

...just as peoples need novels, newspapers, histories, languages, landmarks, monuments and other features to construct the status of a nation as a modern entity that results from a rapture with the past, they also need folktales, epics legends, and other folk texts to embody continuities with the traditional base that (in theory) preceded it. Producing and consuming traditional texts became a crucial part of the process of imagining the nation and making it seem to be a real, a natural phenomenon with deep historical roots. (224)

Following the German example, post-Enlightenment national affirmation practices spawned a 19th century rush to foundational materials all over Europe. As Leerssen correctly pointed out, “[i]n order to be a nation one had to show both a separate independent language and a foundational epic” (198). To celebrate their newly acquired freedom from neighboring

oppressors, nations from Latvia to Ireland were rediscovering deeply-buried verse sagas telling of heroic deeds of national courage. Eastern European nations, scrambling to fall in line, similarly jostled to brush their folk traditions for possible unpolished jewels that could do the job. In an area where over a dozen vernaculars and ethnicities were, not unlike the fragmented German states in which nationalism was born, fighting for a different identity from that of the multicultural empires, it was essential to find anything fast. Thus, if the Ukrainians accepted the proposal of their national poet, Taras Shevchenko, and elevated the myth of the Cossaks to the

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rank of national epic (Leerssen, 198), the Romanians found renewed inspiration in their well-worn national birth saga, which saw Romanian ethnicity being born as a result of the

intermarriage between Roman colonizers and the conquered tribes of autochthonous Dacia two thousand years earlier.

1.3 The Development of Romanian Exceptionalism

The story of Romanian identity starts with a millennium-long absence. Even though cursory sources mention the temporary occupation of the ancient territory of Dacia by the Roman Empire from 106 to 274 AD, later sources are conspicuously and mysteriously silent about the intervening 1000 years. Thus, the history of the Romanians proper starts with their being mentioned (under the name of Vlachs) in various medieval sources at the onset of the 11th

century. Despite this genealogical obscurity, and possibly in order to demarcate their identity as distinct from threatening and conquering others who spoke various variants of Slavic languages, Romanian chroniclers writing in the 16th century refused to limit themselves to the found

sources, and insisted on ascribing Dacia--the ancient province vaguely corresponding to the extent of modern Romania--a distinct cultural and idealized role in the formation of the Romanian people.

While historical sources do evidence the fact that the Romans invaded Dacia and colonized it for almost 200 years, references to what happened during the time, but particularly after the retreat of the Roman cohorts in 274 AD are entirely absent. Despite the scarcity of archeological and historiographical evidence, however, proto-nationalist thought of the 17th

century began to routinely refer to Dacia as the cradle of Romanian civilization. Likewise, discontent with their otherwise obscure origins, chronicles did not hold back from assigning the Roman emperor Trajan the retroactive civilizing mission of matter-of-factly creating the

Romanian nation.

Were we to analyze the afore-mentioned historical absence from a linguistic perspective, things appear bleaker still: as no written evidence of Romanian exists until the 16th century, the

task of establishing the provenance of the language as well as that of ethnicity proves dauntingly difficult for the timidly burgeoning métier of historian. In this context it comes as no surprise that Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723), a polyglot scholar and protégé of both sultan and Tsar, driven by the genuine, if somewhat naïve attempt to write the first Romanian history, falls victim

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to the later commonplace practice of politicizing language. Betraying an overpowering desire to overcome obscurity and popularize Romanian culture which was “tres peu connu en Europe” (Lemny, 133), Cantemir lays the basis of what I refer to as ‘the Romanian exceptionalism’. Moreover, by stating that unlike most Europeans who trace their roots back to the barbarians, Romanians are the only descendants of the “illustrious Romans” (Cantemir qtd in Lemny, 133), Cantemir builds an artificial cult for the Latin language, which becomes central to Romanian political claims heretofore.

The same desire to break with anonymity resurfaces a century later with the militant Enlightenment thinkers of the so-called Transylvanian School. Driven less by naïveté than political necessity, this movement of the early 1800s paraded the Latinity argument as a centerpiece in the struggle against Hungarian domination of the disputed province of

Transylvania. Unhappy with their status as a tolerated nation under the Habsburg crown, this group of Transylvanians ecclesiasts endeavored to prove not only that Romanian is a Romance language, but that Romanian ethnicity was the upshot of the intermarriage of Roman colonizers with local Dacian tribes in the period immediately following the Roman conquest of 106. As the argument was being developed in response to the centuries-old dispute over the “historic right” of the Romanians to rule Transylvania, it came to be known as the ‘continuity theory.’ Pitted against the opposing claim of Hungarian and German scholars who maintained at various points that Romanians were a Latinized Slavic people who had migrated to sparsely-inhabited

Transylvania only at the end of the first millennium, the theory set off a veritable historiographical war which continued to rage on, in various guises, to the present day.

This drawn-out debate not only shaped the saga of nation-building for the coming two centuries, but acted as primary source for the mobilization of nationalistic sentiment around the Daco-Roman foundation myth which takes center-stage in Columna. More importantly perhaps, the controversy introduced the politicization of linguistics and the practice of manipulating history for political purposes. Consequently, the belief in Romanian exceptionalism formulated by Cantemir, and, as we shall see later, the use of self-victimization as a tool in international political disputes foreshadowed an era of politically-motivated decision-making in cultural policy. Moreover, the Latinity argument justified the Romanian claim to classical heritage by appealing to Western Europeans to “show proper reverence for their own Roman ancestors”

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(Verdery, 32). This politicization of historical heritage became so popular in Eastern Europe that Milan Kundera, as we shall see in chapter three, didn’t hesitate to employ two centuries later.

In continuation of Herderian practices, the Transylvanian School followers soon started a crusade for the rejuvenation of Romanian culture and purification of language. Non-Latin words which made up a significant chunk of the vocabulary were replaced with awkward sounding Italianisms, the alphabet purged of letters that didn’t look Latin, the Cyrillic script dropped in favor of the Latin alphabet, and finally, for appearance to be complete, the Oriental dress was replaced by Western clothing.

Similarly, in step with the routines proposed by the Grimm brothers, folklore collectors rushed to peruse local oral and ethnographic traditions in search for arguments to sustain the continuity theory. Suddenly, in the middle of the 1800s, Romanian literature (practically

nonexistent until the 19th century) saw a flurry of ballads, folksongs, and traditional lore printed

and packaged as mandatory textbook material in hundreds of newly established schools from Transylvania to Moldova. Using these literary productions to justify its existence, the state apparatus created a multitude of institutions such as schools and cultural ministries whose main raison d’etre became the preaching of emancipation from foreign domination through the miracle of Latinity.

Thus, in an ironic twist of fate publicly hailed as the greatest achievement of Romanian cultural policy--and tacitly condoned by international politics in the midst of the 19th

century--Romania shifted from being a subdued, wavering Balkan pawn caught in the cultural split between Oriental garb and Western aspirations to being a proud local player in regional politics whose voice was making itself heard in circles as remote as Paris and Moscow. And again ironically, the Romanian language, formerly considered a late-comer in the region, came to be perceived as one of the oldest languages in Eastern Europe, and a beautiful one at that, alone in a “sea of Slavs” eligible to express in colorful poetics the unique nature of the complex and exceptional Romanian soul.6

6 This rebirth is not exclusive to Romania. Slavic nations from the Serbs to the Poles similarly acted to

metamorphose vernacular literature into a vessel of nationalistic ideology. The tendency was at play even in the former Ottoman empire, where Kemalism in the new Turkish republic similarly created “a people who don’t exist” (Robins/Aksoy, 195) through the Republican elites who “started a tradition of discontinuity with the past which culminated in a state of amnesia imbued in the psyche of the “new Turks”” (Kadioğlu qtd., 194). In this state “[t]he old complexity of religions, ethnicities and languages was replaced by the modern and uniform space of the monochrome Republic (194).

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1.4 From Romanticism to Fascism

If during Enlightenment nationalism “language was at the very root of human identity, individual and collective” (Leerssen, 200), Romantic poets provided the visual wherewithal to immortalize language into poetic imagery. Mihai Eminescu, later crowned as “national poet of all Romanians,” embodied the ultimate achievement of image-driven Romantic nationalism. Born in a family of mixed heritage in the geographically peripheral province of Bukovina in 1859, he developed a semi-pathological inebriation for the Romanian language, putting in rhyme otherwise worthy of Byron, most of the histories that will later be counted as pillars in the foundation of ethnic nationalism. From over-romanticizing the primordial Dacian space to mythologizing the bravery of Romanian warlords in the Middle-Ages, Eminescu introduced in the language a never-before-encountered tenderness that sanctified the very sound of Romanian, and advocated for a return to the purity and essence of a lost peasant culture. Moreover, the poetic visuals created in his epic poetry, as we will later see in the case of Eminescu’s influence on the ethnogenesis myth in Columna, became the basis of so many paintings, drawings, and socialist realist art that was to serve as educational basis for most of the generations of the 20th

century, whether born before or during the Communist regime.

If Enlightenment humanism caused the first cracks in the European imperial structure of mid-19th century (with one direct result being the 1848 revolutions), Romanticism gave the old

imperial order the coup de grace. Not only did Romantic poets motivate masses, giving them dithyrambic tempo to publicly chant their protesting frustrations, but in some cases, they joined armed forces and laid down their lives for the revolutionary cause.13 Through its incendiary

message, whether later internalized by national cultures as anthems, revolutionary songs or visual imagery, verse translated philosophical thought into images calling for the empowerment of a grassroots, tradition-driven nationalism that was to serve as main weapon for the fight against what was locally seen as “foreign domination.”

The collapse of multi-national empires resulted in a tripling of Romania’s territory after WWI. Having finally gained ownership over Transylvania, as well as Bukovina and Transnistria in 1918, Romania now needed to justify this expansion to its own population. This population, of

13 Not content to only sing praise to the Greek cause for liberation against the Ottomans in verse, Lord Byron joined

the Greek War of Independence and died following severe illness on the battlefield, while the Hungarian national poet Sandor Petofi was killed in the revolutionary war of 1848 while supporting the Hungarian cause against the Austrian and Russian armies assembled in Transylvania.

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which foreign ethnicities made up more than 30% needed to be integrated into the new state fast. For the inexperienced Romanian political elite who only acquired its de facto independence from Ottoman control less than half a century earlier, this unprecedented situation proved to be a prelude to disaster. The common and immemorial fear of the Other suddenly became the pressing threat of the ‘enemy within.’

To cope with this threat, inter-war Romania saw a tremendous upsurge in fascism. Spurred on by the bloody ethnic wars of 1912-1913, racism became so fashionable with the Romanian intelligentsia that Emil Cioran, one of the iconic interbellum philosophers--still largely revered as one of the founders of modern Romanian thought--brashly declared that “not to be a nationalist is a crime against one’s own people” (Cioran, qtd in Petreu, 13).

With the largest bulk of its thinkers seduced by the extreme right religious nationalist movement of the Iron Guard, Romania went through World War II parading no less than four governments, two of which were fascist, while the others were royal dictatorships. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, another mixed blood Bukovina native who would soon become the harbinger of Romanian fascism, turned the purist doctrine of Eminescu into extreme ideology. In response to his impassioned calls for purification, a third of the new country scrambled to Romanianize their names, and sometimes religions, to avoid both governmental and paramilitary pogroms and intimidations. The fascists advocated for an urgent rupture with the past, invariably regarded as politically putrid and economically corrupt, and for the creation of a New Man, hailed by

Codreanu as compensating for “the vilest thing done unto us by the Jews and by the politicians,” namely, “the distortion [...] of the Dacian-Roman racial structure.” (qtd in Petreu, 40).

It is not surprising that under these circumstances WWII saw some of the most excessive massacres take place on what was at the time Romanian territory. After the war Romania didn’t only need a break with the past, but the repression of a generation of nation-wide fascist hysteria. The same repression had to be effected on the memory of the quarter million Jews killed by the Romanian administration in Transnistria and Ukraine, a genocide still unacknowledged by the Romanian government to this day.7

The Communists, eager to take on the helms of government, were prepared to administer this repression following the logic of the past. Taking their cue from the fascists themselves and 7 The numbers have been generally agreed upon among scholars. This is the number quoted by Holocaust scholar Radu Ioanid (289). The polemic of the Transnistrian genocide, while vastly important for the shaping of national identity and briefly referred to in the next chapters, unfortunately falls outside my area of research for this thesis.

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the Transylvanian school in the 19th century before them, the Communists found it safer to build

on what they considered new foundations than to recondition the ruins inherited from the abusive regimes of the past. As Cioran himself stated out of an inferiority complex which could only have been matched by that of Romanian culture in general, Romania needed to deny itself in order to save itself (Petreu, 20). This mechanism of washing shame with denial, whose cogs had been greased repeatedly over the centuries, perpetuated itself to such a degree that it gradually turned into a modus vivendi, which, as proven by the very acceptance of Cioran as paradigmatic thinker of Romanian modernity, has been legitimized and even revered.

1.5 Communism

The problem with creating identity is of course that whole chunks of reality have to be ignored, if not deleted altogether. Taking Slovakia as a case study, in her Politics Without a Past, Shari Cohen coined the term “organized forgetting” to describe what happened in the absence of a cohesive state policy that should have dealt with the heritage of the Nazi puppet state and the Jewish deportations that took place during WWII. The lack of acknowledgement of Nazi

collaboration, and the purposeful suppression thereof during the Communist years led to a grand scale falsification of public memory of the war, in lieu of which the state emphasized the anti-fascist resistance movement and the overblown role that the Soviet Union played in the liberation of the country. Similarly, in Romania, not only was repression of the past massively underway as a state-sponsored policy, but “organized forgetting” was quickly turning into a veritable practice of manufacturing the past.

Communism thus added yet another “birth” to the string of Romanian successive inceptions. To keep with their forerunners’ practices, the Communists rushed to manufacture a new ‘New Man’ and a new foundation myth to go along with him. Using recycled leftovers from fascist ideology and appropriated bits of Soviet propaganda, Communism finished off the job started by the fascists.8 Giving Codreanu’s Daco-Roman “racial structure” a fiction to stand on,

the Communists manufactured a story that could be easily swallowed whole by a people whose sense of identity had been drastically modified by each successive regime, if not obliterated altogether. During the fifties Homo Sovieticus was to meet the continuity theory in the encounter 8 Willing to repress such troubling truths as the fact that a third of the country were Iron Guard sympathizers, Communist party leaders went so far as to offer “trial membership” to former guardists, as well as “responsible positions in factories and trade unions as a reward for joining [the Communist party]” (Deletant, 58).

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between ancient and modern, a mix that could uphold exceptionalism while allowing equal breathing space for Communism.

With the new ethnogenesis myth now in tow and ready for cultural unloading onto a multitude of culture-hungry ideology consumers, Romanian cinema, better equipped for indoctrination than any other medium at the Politburo’s disposal would make its glorious entry on the scene of manufacturing legend just as poetry in the 19th century had carefully transformed

ethnocentric thought into a cry for battle.

2. From Print Capitalism to Visual Socialism

Technology did not only lead to the unprecedented militarization of the world in the 20th

century. It also made it more susceptible to propaganda. Not as much a result of the effort to nationalize ethnicity as a means at the disposal of ideology to create itself, in this chapter I claim that cinematic technology in the 20th century contributed to the development of a new way of

building that surpassed the power of print capitalism. In the same way that the nation-state developed through rather than as a result of vernacularization, I claim that instead of emerging from the nation-state, film contributed to its formation, particularly in Eastern Europe where the concept of national statehood was younger and more fragile than in other parts of the continent. Since most of Eastern Europe inherited its film industry after the First World War from the imperial administration that used to cover the area, and since technology was nationalized by the emerging Communist states only after WWII, I claim that the technology appropriated by the new states became a politicized tool for building the nation in the mid-twentieth century in the same way that language was used by Enlightenment thinkers two centuries prior.

2.1 Postcolonial Appropriations

If, as Anderson claims, print capitalism succeeded at driving out of use ecclesiastic Latin in the 16th century, this was because print capitalism gave local vernaculars a voice, thus making

them more attractive to the cumbersome language of church and administrative affairs. In the same way that print universalized an unimaginably diverse range of vernaculars, homogenized diversity, and made “these varied idiolects ... capable of being assembled, within definite limits,

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into print languages far fewer in number,” (Anderson, 43) so cinematic propaganda, by flattening out individual differences of ethnicity, political ideology, and religious creed, particularly in a territory as multi-ethnic and diverse as Eastern Europe, succeeded at “unifying” entire

communities which possessed distinct individualities, linguistic traits, and religious convictions. Similarly, to homogenize the various ethnic enclaves which suddenly found themselves living within the borders of greater Romania immediately after WWI, the new government resorted to state-sponsored indoctrination. By enforcing nation-wide reverence for (re)discovered historical figures who had retroactively been attributed grandiose roles in the nation-building effort, ideology managed to turn disparate and dispassionate individuals into some of the most obedient and gullible nationalist subjects.

Using film for nation-building purposes was a practice hardly indigenous to Eastern Europe. For young postcolonial cultures coming of age in Africa and East Asia during the more recent decolonization era, appealing to visual imagery rather than print was second nature. Compared to its earlier cousin, technological advance made film a practical miracle by the mid twentieth century, whose powers as an ‘educational’ medium made it possible to disseminate propaganda multiple times faster than print did up to that time9.

Governments seized this opportunity readily. As Martin Roberts details in Indonesia’s case, Suharto’s propaganda machine took on the challenge of birthing a new Indonesia

immediately after the departure of the state’s former colonial masters by using the very tools left in place by the Dutch to exert control and legitimize expansion: colonial films. (Roberts, 170) Moreover, as technology further enhanced the power of the visuals in the early 1990s and IMAX films became an educational must for preschoolers all over Indonesia, propaganda was striving to “present not so much a model of, as a model for the nation.” (Geetz qtd, 163) If appropriating national monuments was in the 17th century for the brothers Grimm, as well as for Anderson, a

way of “claiming ownership”, appropriating means of production and using them to depict a representation of their idealized self (171) was the postcolonial way of self-affirmation par excellence.

2.2 Historical Film and National Education

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Since glorification of a mediocre past was one of the handiest tools at the disposal of nationalist ideology to re-create the national self-image, early Communist governments labored feverishly to re-write an acceptable version of history, which would find its way into the new subjects’ collective consciousness through its appeal to their visual imaginary. In the same way that Romantic poetry inflamed individual sentiment in the name of national identity in the 19th

century by repudiating the common imperial past shared by all nations in Eastern Europe, the emergence of historical film in most Eastern European countries signified a break with the socialist realist style exported by the Soviets to all the satellites in the Stalinist block.

Since Romanian cinematography didn’t benefit from a lot of funding prior to WWII and the few films produced up to this time were dilettante attempts at creating genre entertainment, it is safe to state that Romanian cinema was born in the throes of the Communists takeover during “The Great Liberation” of 1948. Unlike Soviet film however, which was the upshot of a series of avant-garde experiments by a group of filmmakers that failed as propagandists but excelled as artists (Popescu, 35), Communist productions lacked the revolutionary mood of Battleship Potemkin (1925), or the euphoric search for new cinematic expression of Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Ideology dominated production from its inception and straying from the official line, even under the pretense of creating art, was seldom allowed. The Romanian filmmaking school was still in its infancy, struggling to find its own voice, and when they were not wartime stories of heroic Communists fighting fascist villains (The Danube Waves, 1960), Romanian films were plain propagandist vehicles documenting the ongoing class struggle while exhorting the undoubted benefits of nationalization thirty years after the Soviets first offered the model in Earth (In Our Village, 1952).

True to the spirit of departure from Russian lines, the beginning of the 1960s saw what pioneering Eastern European film scholar Mira Liehm called the “Romanianisation of Romanian Communism” (349). As history was actively being rewritten by oftentimes incompetent young cadres, this was quickly reflected in film, a depository for many of the falsifications perpetrated in the name of ideology. And in a faithful following of Cohen’s concept of “organized

forgetting,” film was also given “the task of helping to erase the complex that resulted from the role that Romania played in World War II on the side of Nazi Germany.” (Liehm, 349)

Gradually eclipsing Soviet-styled proletarian dramas, historical epics that emerged in the sixties trumpeting bygone eras of national glory were not only massive box office successes in a

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cinematography that seemed to have finally found its “voice,” but increasingly a methodology for shaping up ideology. The declared purpose of Nicolae Ceausescu, the young president of Romania since 1963 was to use art, cinema, and theatre

to present the essence, the model of the man we have to create! Even if we have to sometimes embellish a hero, it is good that he become a model, so that the youth will know, will understand that they need to follow him (qtd. in Grancea, 703). The “national odyssey,” as native film criticism of the period used to call it (Caliman, 264), was a grandiose project whose purpose was to cinematically illustrate the series of historical episodes which had recently been incorporated in the national cannon. In 1963 the recently completed Bucharest film studios produced Tudor, the first in a series of historical sagas that were to shape the cinematic landscape for the entire duration of the socialist regime. A story of rebellion against foreign domination, Tudor sought to bolster confidence in the new national self-image by telling the melodramatic story of a revolutionary hero who, after leading a revolt against the land-rich foreign oligarchy that ruled Wallachia, was betrayed and shot in the back while on horseback, only to fall and rejoin the metaphorical life-giving earth in the dramatic finale. While the historical Tudor in fact aspired to become an authoritarian oligarch himself, the film glossed over his ‘personality defects’ en masse by pumping up his purported aspirations for emancipation, all the while painting ethnic Romanians as historical victims of the

all-encompassing ‘Other’.

Self-victimization and glorification through cinema proved fruitful for the young Communists. A poll conducted in 1967 by Cinema, a progressive if ideological magazine dedicated to international film, shows that audiences plainly favored the filming of the history textbook to ‘art cinema.’

As further proof that visualization was the regime’s best friend in the implementation of its nationalist policies, it is worth taking a look at the statistics of the era: in a country where cinema attained uncontested leader status in entertainment (as TV was still in its infancy, and literature and theatre had major catching up to do), no less than 8 million spectators of the country’s 18 million went to see Tudor. A mainly agrarian, markedly religious country where a quarter of the population was still illiterate in 1940 (Janos, 167), Romania looked at its nascent nationalist cinema as not only imposed ideology but as a continuation of religious dogma so much so that, as Grancea rightly pointed out “Romanian historical films behave[d] like artefacts

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of mystical nationalism, and why not, immemorial sacrificial cult” (703). In an otherwise purely artistic account of other national cinemas in the region, Mira Liehm also notes that “[t]he pathos of [historical films] was so moving for the Romanian audience and the films’ naïveté so sincere that their success became something of a sociological phenomenon.” (350)

In the distancing of Eastern European satellites from Soviet Russia, film became a new methodology for defining identity. Briefly open to Western influences in the short thaw that followed the death of Stalin, many Eastern European cinemas attempted to borrow Hollywood’s knack for glamorizing history and throw it on top of the socialist realist mix. Thus, national cinema during Communism created its own version of what Mira Liehm appropriately calls “national realism,” a concept that owes less to its Soviet origins than to the nationalizing mission of each “national cinema.”

In the same way that language was first used as an argument for political claims, historical sagas like Tudor turned overnight not only into massive box office grossers, but also into one of the largest educational projects ever envisaged by Communist authorities. In Liehm’s words again:

The unified “nation” in Romania had always been an exceedingly foggy concept, and remained so until the new Communist establishment took control and for obvious reasons issued a call for the systematic education of the nation. (139)

If Romantic poetry was able to manufacture general visual imagery related to bravura in battle, and prepare these visuals for mass consumption, film stabilized them into the identifiable orthography of the screen image, and thus succeeded in projecting them onto the national

conscious not only as products of genre entertainment but as indispensable columns (sic!) for the constitution of the new nation.

In chapter four I analyze the production of Columna, a historical saga that discusses the ethnogenesis myth, as the defining moment in cinematic history when the continuity theory first met visual propaganda creating the irresistible ideological juggernaut which was to become the educational historical film, and which was to define the way in which Romanians saw

themselves thereafter.

Before doing so, however, I consider another reason for building Romania’s national identity as separate from the rest of the countries in the region; and I discuss to what degree national cinemas led the ideological fight for self-definition and authenticity.

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3. Local Culture and Regional Inheritance

Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary. Milan Kundera All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy

In order to break the continuum of repression that defined Romanian history one had to not only admit to its existence, but also to accept the provincialism and marginality of Romanian culture. As apparent from the previous chapters, by categorically refusing to abandon the

exceptionalist position Romania held in the national imaginary, intellectuals insisted on an exaggerated claim to authenticity that sought to hide Romania’s pedestrianism from its own national consciousness. The Romanian-born French playwright Eugene Ionesco couldn’t have put it more succinctly:

It is only because we are so obsessive about our authenticity and our specificity that we are so completely inauthentic and unspecific. But we can only rediscover ourselves by abandoning ourselves (Ionescu qtd. in Drace-Francis, 207).

It must have been easy for a man of theatre to see the spuriousness of the essentialist Romanian discourse seeping through the façade of cultural and political practices. However, it was much harder for culture itself to accept its mediocrity and marginality.

Not only the culture of Romania was marginal, but, due to their new arrival on the regional stage as independent states, so were those of the rest of the countries in the region. What I argue in this chapter is that the one thing all Eastern European countries have in common is their very claim to ‘being different.’ Born out of former imperial domination, the states of Eastern Europe share both the commonality of “minor” cultures, and the common aspiration to becoming “major”. This will be later apparent in the films produced in this area, which will function, I claim, as political weapons for national self-building on basis of an imagined independent and glorious past. This effort, even though it oftentimes led to falsification of history, was shared by all Eastern European states.

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Writing at the close of World War II, Walter Kolarz, a British scholar and journalist of Czech descent and authority on Eastern European and Russian studies warningly pointed out that each emancipatory struggle of one nation automatically meant the persecution and incrimination of another. Thus, instead of leading the French-inspired fair fight against tyrannical oppression, the “small people” of Eastern Europe, as Kolarz called them, ended up imposing their own self-styled greatness against their neighbor’s perceived unworthiness in a pattern which meant quite literally that the “life and happiness of one country and people meant death and disaster for the other.” (Kolarz, 104).

While reviewing the past from the point of view of each of the nations in the region, Kolarz discovered that there were as many versions of history as there were countries in Eastern Europe. While this fact alone isn’t blameworthy, what Kolarz further pointed out was that each of these nations harbors a deep-seated nostalgia for a time when its borders had reached the greatest territorial expanse in the past, and naturally overran their neighbors’ territory, even if that specific point in time was millennia ago. Just as the territory of ancient Dacia was used as justification for claims to expansion in Romania’s case, Kolarz concludes that “[f]or any nation in the Middle East of Europe we always find, besides the actually existing State, a shadow State shaped by the nationalist imagination” (74).

Similarly, Maria Todorova, a contemporary specialist in the cultural historiography of the Balkans sees the larger region of Ottoman-influenced Eastern Europe not only as the “other” in relation to Europe proper (Todorova, 3), but as “others” to each other. Inother words, Todorova claims that all the statelets in Eastern Europe are disparate communities laboring intensely to mythify their individual pasts using methodologies that betray their “relative parochialism” while having “little knowledge of the history of [their] neighbors in the same period.” (183) Despite having “less in common with [their] forefathers than with [their] neighbors,” Todorova claims, however, that there is no single “Balkan culture,” or Balkan identity for that matter, just as the heritage of Communism couldn’t be said to have given birth to similar cultures in East Europe and China (2010, 178).

The Czech writer Milan Kundera situates himself on the opposite side of this debate when he sees the region as a cradle of modern European thought, claiming that the cultural input of intellectuals such as Kafka, Freud, Mahler, or Musil shaped not only the region’s identity, but contributed to the heritage of the entire continent. Writing in Communism in 1984, Kundera

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