Visual Discourses on the Recent Past: Communism in the Romanian Post-communist Cinema

Abstract

Visual items have always played an important role in the shaping of memories and consciousness. Among them, films seem to impose themselves as the privileged way of shaping memories and modelling consciousness, inasmuch as their messages and symbols are also dispersed through posters, trailers, TV clips, newspaper reviews, theoretical articles, photographs, installations, memorabilia, etc.

The article deals with the forms of sharing and constructing memories through films pertaining to the communist regime in Romania. It focuses on both documentaries and feature films. My study aims at deconstructing ideological inputs and collective memories used in the construction of visual discourses on communism in the post-communist Romanian cinema. I argue that films played an important role in shaping the public memory of communism in Romania. Furthermore, the movies analysed in this article illustrate the different trends of collective memories which gained predominance in public space in the last twenty-five years.