Romanian Cinema: Thinking Outside the Screen

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This volume explores the philosophical and metaphysical manifestations of contemporary cinema. Starting with the hypothesis that movies provide an experience that is both a pathway into the thinking mechanisms of modern humans and into our collective psyche, this study focuses on the elements that form the Romanian cinematic mind as part of the European cinema-thinking. While this book is based on specific case studies provided by recent productions in Romanian filmmaking, such as Proroca (2017) and Touch me Not (2018), it also contextualises the national cinema within the larger, European art of making movies. Offering close interpretations of the works of world-renowned directors like Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu or more recently Adina Pintilie and Constantin Popescu, this book questions the Romanianess of their cinematic techniques, and places their philosophical roots both in a particular mode of thinking and within continental philosophy.

Reviews

Doru Pop's bold and erudite work conjures philosophers from Plato to Bergson to the newest inquiries into cinema's relationship with philosophy, examining how "thinking space" is created through the "evacuation" of elements usually considered constitutive of cinema. What is left - or what is created - when filmmakers renounce the concrete and the explicit Using his unique cultural expertise, Doru Pop explores his country's celebrated recent cinema and its kinship with Dada, the other great aesthetic movement indebted to the Romanian fascination with the absurd and the incongruous. As Pop helps us understand how Romanian filmmakers unleash cinema's power and reveal its essence and capability, he also reminds us that experiencing cinema is ultimately meant to be a philosophical endeavor, an aesthetic form of struggle for meaning. * Ioana Uricaru, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture, Middlebury College, USA *
Doru Pop's book is subtle, astute, and precise, revealing how the cinematic and the metaphysical rely on the non-cinematic and the post-cinematic and the post-metaphysical to facilitate deep thinking and understanding. Pop offers a generous overview of the main questions and points of debate about how movies facilitate thinking. He not only sharpens the existing theoretical and conceptual toolbox in film studies about the epistemic functions of cinema, but also reveals Romanian New Wave films as inexhausted objects for theorizing and criticism. * Alina Haliliuc, Associate Professor, Communication Department, Denison University, USA *

Author Bio

Doru Pop is a professor of film and media studies at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. He taught courses at Bard College, US and Columbus State University, US. He has written on visual culture, media, and politics, and essays on film studies. His publications include The Age of Promiscuity: Narrative and Mythological Meme Mutations in Contemporary Cinema and Popular Culture (2018) and Romanian New Wave Cinema: An Introduction (2014).