The Decade of the Auteurs: The Institutional Reorganization of the Romanian Film Industry in the 1990s

Abstract

Romanian cinema in the 1990s was defined, among others, by its failed attempt at institutional reorganization, due to which fewer and fewer films were released towards the end of the decade - a process which culminated in 2000, when not a single feature film was released. However, before this virtual collapse of the Romanian film industry, sixty or so films were financed and produced. By taking a look at their opening credits, one would be perhaps surprised to notice mostly familiar names - directors and writers which were highly prominent during the communist era. In cinema, as in other cultural fields, the cultural elites managed, at the beginning of the 1990s, to use their cultural capital gained during the communist years in order to take over the industry. The films made during this transitional period were ideologically conservative, rich in anticommunist rhetoric and - paradoxically - financed and produced using a state-sponsored infrastructure developed two decades earlier, during Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime. Taking into account the long-lasting institutional transformation of the Romanian film industry and the critical reception of Romanian films before and after 1989, this article tries to offer a context for the processes taking shape in the 1990s and to suggest the main causes for the postcommunist reconfiguration of the cultural field, due to which mainly one kind of anticommunist rhetoric gained visibility during this decade.