The Intermedial Passions of the “New” New Romanian Cinema 1

The deliberate pause from Romanian cinema I have taken after editing the anthology The New Romanian Cinema ( 2019, Edinburgh UP) – generously presented by Offscreen (https://offscreen.com/view/new-romanian-cinema)– I saw three films, made by the three leading directors of the New Romanian Cinema – namely Radu Jude’s Berlin Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc, 2021); Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers (La Gomera, 2019), and Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog (2020) – which re-captured my imagination and compelled me to end the self-imposed pause I have taken from writing about this phenomenal national cinema. These three films confirmed yet again that the power of the New Romanian Cinema to surprise the viewer has remained as fresh and mesmerizing as it was in the mid-2000s when it first burst onto the world screens, capturing awards at the most prestigious film festivals in Europe.

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The accidental publication on the internet ‘porn hub’ of the video – featuring Emi, the young teacher in a prestigious private lyceum engaged in naughty daytime sex games with her husband – is used as a rather extravagant McGuffin, exposing the prudish hypocrisies of the teacher’s colleagues, her students and their snobbish, nouveau riche parents with regard to the video, but also the hypocrisies generated around COVID mask wearing and social distancing. Told with Jude’s uniquely sarcastic dark humor and witty knack for exposing unsavory familial entanglements – known from his feature debut The Happiest Girl in the World (Cea mai fericita fata din lume, 2009), and Everyone in Our Family (Toata lumea din familia noastra, 2012),  to mention just two of his early gems – Bad Luck Banging would have done just fine had it remained within the confines of the anecdotal story of Emi’s misfortunes. Yet the director goes further and uses it as a frame for his otherwise original middle, or second part of the film, named “short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders” – thus elevating the story of Emi to a metaphor for the general malaise of Romanian society by equating the hypocrisy and lack of responsibility in the private realm, with that in the public one, both currently and historically. Not surprisingly, the story of Emi crashes under such a burden of significations, yet the ensuing meanings are unpredictably curious.

In addition to being a textbook illustration of post-modernist aesthetic approaches – collage, parody, distanciation, self-reflexivity, the central insert “short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders” epitomizes a rather indiscriminate turn to intermediality of what Agnes Petho defines as “hands-on ‘structural mode”, whereby the cinematic flow of images is broken down into its medial components. Pethő summates that: “The structural mode thus involves either a fragmentation, a shattering of the world into pieces of media representations or the experience of some kind of juxtapositions, jumps, loops or foldings between the media representations and what we perceive as cinematic reality. This kind of intermedialization may take the form of diegetic reflexivity, or it may result in the world appearing as a media collage” (qtd. in Player, 2016, 170).

Admittedly, the story of Emi and its unpleasant consequences is neither ethically nor in magnitude commensurable to the events cited in the second part, whether those are the massive betrayal of Gypsies and Jews, exterminated by the military on the Romanian Eastern Front during WWII. Or the betrayal of Romanian dissidents by the Orthodox Church in 1989, or the insidious duplicities of Romanian state and military throughout various regimes, etc. Through mixing and matching of every kind of conceivable audio-visual media and gluing it loosely together in the spirit of Sergey Eisenstein’s associative montage, Jude enhances the shock effect of his aesthetics of kitsch and trash. The film thus becomes the flagman in a series of collage shorts (seven to be precise), Jude made between 2020 and 2022, permeated by his bitter criticism of Romanian social hypocrisies – current and historical. While I personally prefer the more subtle – and shall I say, more effective – tongue-in-cheek irony and sarcasm of his Aferim! (2015), and the sotto voce elegance of the black & white documentary collages of Dead Nation (Țara moartă, 2017), in Bad Luck Banging the hard-to-control sexual excess of the opening amateur video overshadows the inventive intermedial richesse, whose master Jude unquestionably is. 

Yet I somehow refuse to believe that such a talented director – with a keen eye for the shadowy side of his compatriots and for the crafty urgency --they project their dark side on others and then blame it on them-- has not smuggled some important message in this exquisite “intermedial bottle” (Pethő 2020, 399).

​​Could it be that Emi who seems so sure of herself – both while “tarring” with her husband for the home camera and while confronting with indignation the unexpected consequences of the accidently leaked video on Porn Hub – is actually not a product par excellence of the hypocritical society? Why would Jude otherwise shoot the steamy, borderline vulgar scene in broad daylight, and have it loudly played out against a thin wall, within earshot from Emi’s young child and mother, dwelling in the adjacent room, if not to demonstrate Emi’s total moral insensitivity… Could it be that instead of construing her as the misunderstood champion of newly-found sexual freedoms, Jude lets us see her as but a logical epitome of said hypocritical society? If so, then Emi – teacher of high-minded literature during her office hours, and moonshining as a foul-mouth, amateur Porn Hub star while at home – could easily be seen as the monstrous offspring of a people, capable of systematic betrayal of the vulnerable and the defenseless. Betrayals, catalogued by Jude with almost masochistic thoroughness in the second part of the film… I personally believe that such a reading of the film is quite in tune with The Happiest Girl in the World, Everybody in Our Family, Aferim! and Dead Nation. And am eagerly looking forward to new ‘messages in intermedial bottles’ from the director… 2

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After his successful experiments with narratives and narrativity in his fiction films and collage documentaries, Corneliu Porumboiu offers yet another experiment in what I have called “the Trickster Narrative Polyphonies”– this time around in piecing together a masterful intertextual rendition of Film Noir, adapted to contemporary Romanian reality (Stojanova 2020, 106). Indeed, it is always intriguing for the viewer to recognize the trappings of the genre – the Femme Fatale, who on top of it is called Gilda (after C. Vidor’s eponymous 1946 Noir classic with Rita Hayworth), the Detective Cristi, who has lost his ways; the hapless criminal Zsolt, and the cruel Spanish Mafiosi (who have set up the stage for it all), not to mention the staple blinds in the police office, the dark and rainy atmosphere, the smutty motel, called fittingly Opera because of its owner’s passion for famous arias, etc. Yet the tastiest part for neo-Noir aficionados – along with some unexpected twists of the otherwise staple plot – is the localization of the above-mentioned generic tropes. In the case of The Whistlers, these tropes are interwoven within the authentic reality of postcommunist Romania, jarringly juxtaposed to the exotic paysages of La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, where the ancient art of imitating bird whistling originates. Thus, on the one hand, we are made privy to the mundane facts that the Romanian Detective is paid a meager 1000 euros monthly; that his boss, the beautiful Magda, has placed him under 24/7 surveillance and is ready to sacrifice him in order to pocket the millions Zsolt has stolen from the Spanish Mafiosi from the La Gomera island. On the other hand, it is revealed that the Detective is also somehow involved with the Mafiosi, who in addition to handling the Femme Fatale Gilda, are adamant that Cristi masters the secret language of whistling. In contrast to the above-mentioned second part of Jude’s film, which ups its intermedial antes by relying mostly on static associations between a notion – racism, hypocrisy, intolerance – stated in writing across the screen, and illustrated by a shocking photographic image – Porumboiu mobilizes yet again the dynamic potential of “jarring narrative polyphonies.”

The intermedial engagement with sound as a major meaning-making device in The Whistlers could be traced back to the ideologically charged juxtaposition of the voice-over dialogue between Porumboius’ – father and son – and the original soundtrack of the match they are commenting on (The Second Game/Al doilea joc, 2014). Here, the jarring effect between the visceral art of whistling, and refined musical scores – opera arias (Bellini’s Casta Diva, Offenbach’s Barcarolle) 3 ; famous Waltzes from the Strauss Brothers, and Tchaikovsky; Carl Orff’s O, Fortuna, to name but a few – is multilayered. It could enhance the mood of a scene or could counter it. Or could provide an ironic comment, like Kurt Weill’s Death of Mikey the Knife, accompanying Zsolt’s rather unheroic death, etc.

A similarly jarring effect is produced by intermedial inserts, taken from old Hollywood films, or random found footage scenes of filmmaking. Justified by Cristi’s cinephile passion 4 – he also uses the site of cinematheque screenings as an undercover meeting place for his characters – the intermedial inserts further blur the line between verisimilitude and outrageous fabrication, both on the level of plot and film-crafting. And finally, Vlad Ivanov’s glumly romantic Detective Cristi provides a destabilizing intertextual reference to the actor’s role as the manipulative Police Boss in Police, Adjective (Politist, adjective, 2009), who destroys psychologically his underling Cristi, played by Dragoș Bucur. In fact, The Whistlers could be seen as a kind of sequel to Police, Adjective, whose victimized operative Cristi has aged as Detective Cristi, who plays both sides of the law. Undeniably, this shrewd oscillation between the scant narrative, the exquisite visuals, the intermedial inserts, and the refined soundtrack is meant – in the best Noir traditions – to further disorient the viewers by dragging them deeper into the film’s oneiric atmosphere, yet allowing them to wilfully appreciate Porumboiu’s superb craftiness. 

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The most sophisticated form of intermediality among the three films, discussed here, is certainly offered by Puiu’s Malmkrog. It is an elegant rendition of what Ágnes Petho identifies as the “sensual mode”, the second “template for reading cinematic intermediality”. In her view, this mode presents the viewer with the possibility “to be involved at ‘the proximity of entangled synesthetic sensations,’ where one intuitively absorbs the kaleidoscopic impressions generated through media signifiers, resulting in ‘a cinema that can be perceived in the terms of music, painting, architectural forms and haptic textures’” (qtd in Player, 2016, 170). The sensual mode is seamlessly interwoven within the ways the director chooses to adapt to screen the last work of the 19th-century Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, War, Progress, and the End of History (subtitled Three Conversations Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ), published in 1899. Puiu’s adaptation of this otherwise very dense text succeeds so well in capturing Solovyov’s prophetic ideas that most serious critics of the film remain humbled by its subject matter and meticulous artistry. And despite some inevitable grumbling about the film’s extraordinary length of 3 hrs and 21 minutes, additionally kindled by Puiu’s unequivocal statement that the ideas of the film could be fully grasped only after the third viewing, the opinion of international media remains consistently respectful and positive.

My interest in this film was sparked by the way it develops further two major themes – the conjunction of ethics and aesthetics, and the phenomenology of Evil – which in my view have been central to the New Romanian Cinema since the early 2000s.

Indeed, in this line of thought, the powerful ethical-aesthetic congruity of Cristi Puiu’s works has to a great extent predetermined his formative influence on the movement and its Existentialist Realist aesthetic. In his five feature films made to date – beginning in 2001 with Stuff and Dough, then moving to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005); to Aurora (2010) and Sieranevada (2016), Puiu has braved the representation of evil on screen. Along with such cinematic visionaries like Lars von Trier and Béla Tarr, Puiu is among the precious few filmmakers – and thinkers – who dare tackle the question of evil, one of the most troubling for contemporary Western thought, since the interconnectedness between the concepts of morality and God, Good and Evil, has created a growing conundrum in our predominantly atheist society (Eagleton 2014). Like “evil,” “moral” is a religious term, and the idea that morality cannot exist without a belief in God is deeply ingrained in Western culture (McKay and Whitehouse 2015, 447).

Predicated on Puiu’s demonstrated interest in the phenomenology of Evil and certainly supported by Solovyov’s original, is the role allotted to the enigmatic figure of the Anti-Christ. Thus when Nikolai – the owner of the manor house Malmkrog and host of the Three Conversations – makes his final exit a few minutes before the end of the film, he promises to soon return with the manuscript by a certain Pansophius (or the “all-wise”), which would reveal to his four interlocutors the true nature of the Anti-Christ. And although this never happens – obviously Puiu has left it up to the viewers to seek out and read for themselves the enigmatic epilogue of War, Progress, and the End of History – this closing announcement throws in high relief the main theme of Solovyov’s and Puiu’s oeuvre. Which could be summarized as the powerful enantiodromic potential of ideas about the struggle between good and evil, that is the perilous ease with which they turn into their opposite or become relativized. The film’s conclusion illuminates Puiu’s tour de force orchestration of vitally important ideas, and their evolution – from Solovyov’s time to ours – both explicitly, through the staged Three Conversations, and implicitly – through what is left unsaid, but is strongly implied.

Puiu’s “sensual mode” of intermediality hinges upon the way he marshals multiple layers of meaning through “kaleidoscopic impressions of media signifiers”, thus offering us the exceptional opportunity to partake in the life of ideas, born at the cusp of film and philosophy, words and images, mise-en-scène and the narrative world, consciousness and the unconscious, thus forcefully emphasising the fragility of everything that is on-screen and its symbolic status as restrainer of the menacing chaos, left – or rather deliberately confined! – to the off-screen space. This elaborate intermedial edifice draws us into far reaching and relevant discourses on the life of idea and their role as the sole barrier to chaos, understood not only in light of Solovyov’s religious mysticism, but also in light of political philosophy. And certainly – through the murky prism of our own chaotic times. 5

References

Eagleton, Terry. 2014. Culture and the Death of God. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.

McKay, Ryan and Harvey Whitehouse. 2015. “Religion and Morality.” Psychological Bulletin vol. 141 no. 2 (March), pp. 447-473.

Pethő, Ágnes. 2020. Cinema and Intermediality. The Passion for the In-Between (Second, Enlarged Edition). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Pethő, Ágnes. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality. The Passion for the In-Between. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Player, Mark. 2016. “Media-Morphosis. Intermediality, (Re-)Animation and the Medial Uncanny in Tsukamoto Shinya’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)” , in Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 12 (2016) 167–189

Stojanova, Christina. 2020. “Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality.” In Caught In-Between. Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema, ed. Ágnes Pethő, 109–126. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Notes

1. A version of this paper was published as part of the Festschrift Intermedial Encounters: Studies in Honour of Ágnes Pethő. Publisher: Kiadja a Scientia Kiadó / Published by: Scientia Publishing House (.pdf format only), Cluj-Napoca / Kolozsvár, Romania, 2022, pp. 243-248. ↩
2. My expectations have been amply met by Jude’s most recent films, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), and Kontinental ’25 (2025). ↩
3. The creative appropriation of opera arias is no news to Noir aficionados – in Kiss Me Deadly, R. Aldrich’s ultimate Cold War thriller (1955), for example, it was also opera that dominated the soundtrack. Along with the numerous mythological citations, it helped the film fit the bill of high art allusions, allowing the Film Noir integration within the lofty Classical Hollywood cinema. ↩
4. As stated in the official press-kit of the film, Porumboiu considers John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as an inspiration, hence the inclusion of a major excerpt in The Whistlers. ↩
5. This brief discussion of Malmkrog is part of my article “Cinema from the End of Time: Malmkrog by Cristi Puiu and Vladimir Solovyov”, published in Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 22 (2022) 39-59. ↩

Volume 29, Issue 3-5 / May 2025 Film Reviews   cristi puiu   new romanian cinema   radu jude   romanian cinema   satire