Romania as the New Barbaric Periphery of Europe in Lucian Pintilie’s post-1990 Films
Romania as the New Barbaric Periphery of Europe in Lucian Pintilie’s post-1990 Films

Summary/Abstract: The fall of the Ceausescu regime found Romania in a state of poverty and isolation from the West, a condition generated by the communist government”s social, economic, and cultural policies. With newly gained artistic freedom, local filmmakers rapidly tackled the issue of Europeanization and of the Romanians” place in the European project, as part of the endemic anti-communist discourse after 1990. Along with Mircea Daneliuc and Dan Pița, Lucian Pintilie”s works illustrated the tensions between the real Romania and the West, rendering a more pessimistic image on Romanians as the new European barbarians – an image strongly contrasting with the one that the communist regime had obsessively engineered in the earlier decades. His 1996 statement “Romania is an orangutan preserve” shocked the journalists and critics who attended the press-conference that launched his mining thriller “Too Late”, but encompasses optimally his view on the Romania”s striking liminality [that] he pictures best in “An Unforgettable Summer”, and also approaches in “The Oak”, and “Next Stop Paradise”. We are focusing on how Pintilie worked out this new miserabilist brutality and how it reshaped former views on national identity; we also ask whether his films are a pure reflection of disappointment with the young democracy after 1990.

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