Frieze. Nov - Dec 07

Bert Rebhandl on the Romanian wave:

The praise these films have received is well-deserved, because their achievements constitute a striking example of a Modernist form of "national cinema": their approach to examining Romania's recent history encompasses the entire experience of European auteur cinema since Roberto Rossellini started filming in Rome in the early 40s. Narrative cinema (like any other art, but more so because of its potential to "write history" in its own way) has a threefold task in "liberated" or "revolutionary" societies: to remember and reconstruct the time before the change, because the overthrown regimes have commonly been audio-visually restrictive; to remember and re-evaluate the "revolutionary" events themselves; and to chronicle the aftermath (the new era) and measure it against what preceded it. Now, 18 years after the revolution, Romanian filmmakers assume these tasks with a confidence and a variety of formal strategies that is all the more astounding for the fact that, with the exception of the work of director Lucian Pintilie (The Afternoon of a Torturer, 2001, for instance), there is really no tradition of this kind of filmmaking in Romania.

Also in the new issue of frieze: Posted by: dwhudson    Source