Suchergebnisse

This article introduces the topic of the transformation of the cultural industries in several former East European communist countries. In the first part it delivers a critical overview of the essential contributions to research in the field and outlines the historical and methodological context in relation to which the four articles in this special-themed issue have taken convergent or polemical stances. The second part offers a descriptive-correlative reading of the articles signed by Jan Hanzlík, Radu Toderici, Balász Varga, and Adriana Stan and Cosmin Borza, focusing on how they investigate the postsocialist transformations of several East European film industries and of the Romanian book industry. The answers that the four case studies try to provide to this wide phenomenon combine (1) an analytical approach to the ideological discourses that have formed the basis of the political agendas specific to the cultural field, and (2) an examination, from a cultural studies perspective, of the mechanisms of reforming the public institutions responsible for financing cultural production in Eastern Europe. The first component engages in a hermeneutic of debates (media, cultural, political) that have built a postsocialist imaginary predicated on synchronization with the socio-economic values of the West. The second part contains elements of political economy and explores, on the one hand, legislative changes in the public financing realm, and on the other hand, the way in which the capitalist reconfiguration of cultural institutions, privatizations, and the myth of the free market have created an impact on the production, promotion and distribution of films and books.

Our article examines the narrative registers and forms adopted in the 1990s by the Romanian novelists, screenwriters and film directors in order to portray the phenomenon of economic migration to the West. Our focus is on the intriguing and paradoxical employment of tragicomic, melodramatic, burlesque-grotesque and sensational narrative techniques as the Romanian collective imaginary during the 1990s witnessed the peak idealization of emigration in Western Europe and in The United States of America. This process of idealization is also fueled by the fact that, despite the political ban has been lifted after 1989, legislative and economic constraints continued to limit the actual experience of the so-called "free world." The corpus of our article comprises two cult films of the period, Asfalt tango (1996, Nae Caranfil) and Cristian Mungiu's Occident (2002), as well as two novels authored Grid Modorcea and S. Dinger, all of which share the struggle to depict the tensions between the uncritical embrace of Western story-world and the bleak, if not dramatic, reality of migration.

This article analyses the ways in which the rural – understood in its double nature, of traditional mythological space, and of degraded periphery of the urban – was both instrumentalized by the cultural and political discourses within Romanian postcommunism, and revealed as a symptomatic field in which the harsh economic realities of the post-1989 implementation of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe became evident. The first part of the article describes how misplaced public policies during 1980s' communism favoured the underdevelopment of the rural. Later, the process of transition encouraged both external migration, which depopulated Romanian villages, and the internal migration of the urban middle-class to an economically more secure rural area. The second part of the article analyses – from a materialist viewpoint – corresponding topics developed in Romanian contemporary literature and films (authored by Adrian Șchiop, Lavinia Braniște, Bogdan Mirică, and Radu Muntean). These works envision the rural/periurban as an asymmetrical geography, where violence toward the vulnerable is enacted, where the loss of community values leaves black markets flourish, and the capitalist dismantling of social ties becomes striking.