Acasă Articole RTR Revisiting the Uses of Nostalgia in Post-socialist Cinema: Radu Jude’s Cinema and...
Revisiting the Uses of Nostalgia in Post-socialist Cinema: Radu Jude’s Cinema and Dialectical Images
Rezumat
Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, Transilvania University, Brașov
Abstract: Scholars of Romanian cinema (Parvulescu & Turcuș 2021) explored the topic of nostalgia in post-socialism, but they stopped short of analyzing why directors such as Radu Jude refuse to draw on a melancholic view of the past. Similarly, film critics (Gorzo & Lazăr 2022a; Ferencz-Flatz 2017) analyzed the importance of the Jude’s attunement to contemporary cultural forms, but they did not engage with his reluctance to discuss positive aspects of Romanian state socialism. By putting two apparent opposite readings of Radu Jude’s films in conversation, this article investigates Jude’s philosophical technique which I conceptualize as “the construction of a dialectical image”. I draw on films such as I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians (2018), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and the short film The Potemkinists (2021) to distinguish between a dialectical and a nostalgic use of the socialist past. I concentrate on three main topics: Jude’s interest in capturing the materiality of the present, which he borrows from Siegfried Kracauer’s cinematic materialism; the differences between Walter Benjamin’s dialectics and Jude’s cinema; and the use of comedy in The Potemkinists. My article adds to previous work on Jude’s cinema (Parvulescu & Turcuș 2021; Gorzo & Lazăr 2022; Ferencz-Flatz 2018) a discussion about the uses of nostalgia in Romanian film, a subject that has not been discussed in relation to experimental and avantgarde productions.
Keywords: Radu Jude; Walter Benjamin; comedy; nostalgia; dialectics; socialism; film theory; Romanian films
Bibliografie
Bardan, Alice. “Remembering Socialist Entertainment: Romanian Television, Gestures, and Intimacy.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 3 (2017): 341-358.
Benjamin, Walter. “Left-Wing Melancholy (On Erich Kästner’s new book of poems).” Screen 15, no. 2 (1974).
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” In Selected Writings, vol. 4, edited by H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, 389-401. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 [1940].
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. I, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. IV, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. III, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2006.
Bontea, Adriana. “A Project in Its Context: Walter Benjamin on Comedy.” MLN 121, no. 5 (2006): 1041–71.
Brown, Wendy. “Resisting Left Melancholy.” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 19-27.
Ferencz-Flatz, Christian. Filmul ca situație socială: Eseuri fenomenologice [Film as Social Situation: Phenomenological Essays]. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2018.
Gorzo, Andrei, and Andrei State, eds. Politicile filmului [The Politics of Film]. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2014.
Gorzo, Andrei, and Veronica Lazăr. “‘…and Gypsies get many a beating…’: On the Significance of Radu Jude’s Aferim!.” Transilvania, no. 6-7 (2022): 1-11.
Gorzo, Andrei, and Veronica Lazăr. “An Updated Political Modernism: Radu Jude’s ‘I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians’.” Close Up 3, no. 1-2 (2019): 7-21.
Gorzo, Andrei, and Veronica Lazăr. “Radu Jude’s Montage Experiments with Documents of Oppression and Mass Murder.” Transilvania, no. 9 (2022): 1-14.
Gorzo, Andrei, and Veronica Lazăr. “The New Romanian Cinema and Beyond: The Films of Radu Jude.” Transilvania, 3, 2022a: 1-9.
Hansen, Miriam. “Introduction.” In Sigfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Jameson, Frederic. Political Unconscious: Narative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Kracauer, Sigfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. London UK: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Kracauer, Sigfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Lukács, Georg. A defense of History and Class Consciousness. London and New York: Verso, 2000.
Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Introduced by Lucio Coletti. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
Mjolkeraen, Per Morten. “The Historical Gaze of Radu Jude.” Seventh Row, January 17, 2022. Online at https://seventh-row.com/2022/01/17/radu-jude-interview-bad-luck-banging-or-loony-porn/
Parvulescu, Constantin, and Claudiu Turcuș. “Afterlives of Romanian Socialist-Era Historical Film: Reruns, Story Universes, Reception.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 63, no. 1-2 (2021): 50-71.
Parvulescu, Constantin. “Faces of Nostalgia: The Performance of Dem Rădulescu in the BD Comedies as a Medium of Revisiting Romania’s Socialist Past.” In Comedy in the Balkans, edited by Marian Tutui. Bucharest: Noi, 2014.
Parvulescu, Constantin. “Anticommunism, Neoliberalism, and the Rerunning of Socialist Era Films on Romanian Television.” NYU Jordan Center, April 22, 2022. Online at https://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/anticommunism-neoliberalism-and-the-rerunning-of-socialist-era-films-on-romanian-television/#.Y-oSoexBzPY.
Țion, Lucian. Pentru Prostie: Mic îndreptar de culturologie estică și cinema (post) socialist [For Stupidity: Small Reader of Eastern Culturology and Post-socialist Cinema]. Bucharest: Tritonic, 2022.
Traverso, Enzo. Left Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Georg Lukacs as the Philosopher of Leninism.” Postface to Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic. London and New York: Verso 2000.
