Suchergebnisse

This two-part article attempts to decipher four different critical strategiesfor decentering Eurocentrist narratives that promoted "the West"simultaneously as an agent, as a goal and as a yardstick for evaluatingmodernization processes across the globe: in the first part, it will examineJack Goody's interrogation of the alleged European preeminence andexceptionalism and its imposition of value-laden temporal categorieson the non-Western world, as well as Eric Wolff 's reconstruction ofthe so-called invention of "Eastern Europe" by the Western mindduring the Enlightenment; in the second part, it will take on DipeshChakrabarty's notion of "provincializing" Western epistemology andJohannes Fabian's focus on the "denial of coevalness" for non-Westerntemporalities. The article will focus on the analysis these four authorsprovided for the emergence of specific temporal and geographicalsystems that backed the epistemic hegemony of the "West" andreinforced, therefore, its already established political domination. It willalso examine the practice of translating spacial distance in historicaltime and its reverse, both at the core of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment understanding and construction of the cultural andhistorical "other".

This article reviews a new Romanian translation of Rousseau's Social contract. While attempting to grasp some of the challenges of translating Rousseau's works, it also points towards the market-driven dynamics of the Romanian publishing landscape of translations from the classics of political thought.

"Jean Mabillon and Richard Simon were both eminent seventeenth-century scholars who practiced contextualizing critical philology in order to forge unbeatable scientifical instruments against the skeptics and reinforce the authority of historical documents. But Simon's work produced a mutation of the meaning of authenticity that would prove subversive and would generate outrage. His sociological and institutionalist understanding of the history of sacred texts not only merged both their production and their transmission into a common, ontologically homogenous historical process, but also included a survey of the sociological and cultural circumstances that transformed the text into a real authority. Furthermore, this anti-essentialist understanding of the gradual formation of the text allowed a positive reevaluation of the tradition as a continuous practice aiming at keeping alive an already historical truth.

Key words: historical criticism, biblical hermeneutics, Richard Simon, Jean Mabillon, Spinoza "

The article discusses the aesthetics and the politics of the so-called New Romanian Cinema (a major post-2005 sensation on the international art-cinema circuit), succintly assessing its novelty in both a national and an international cinematic context. It then proceeds to discuss Radu Jude's debut feature, The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), as a NRC film, typical in some ways, atypical in others. The paper highlights the film's critique of advertising and the nuclear family.

The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) which became an international film-festival sensation in the mid-2000s. It maps the main lines of disagreement among the various scholars who have attempted to define this phenomenon. The paper argues that the Romanian cinema that had made its dazzling debut on the international scene some 15 years ago has gradually turned into something else – something harder to pin down to an aesthetic paradigm, to a core generational group of ten or so filmmakers, or to a limited set of ideological coordinates. Finally, the paper proposes that the evolving body of work of director Radu Jude (who has established himself in recent years as a major innovator) provides a good lens through which to take the measure of those aesthetic and political changes.

The article discusses four Radu Jude films – the shorts Alexandra (2008) and It Can Pass Through the Wall (2014), the never released, 60-minute long A Film for Friends (2011), and Jude's official second feature, Everybody in Our Family (2012) – grouping them together as satirical studies of male rage and self-pity, with elements of psychodrama.

The article discusses critically the following films—short and feature-length—by Radu Jude: The Dead Nation (2017), The Marshal's Two Executions (2018), Punish and Discipline (2019), Uppercase Print (2020), The Exit of the Trains (2020), Caricaturana (2021), Memories from the Eastern Front (2021), and The Potemkinists (2022). In four of them—The Dead Nation, The Marshal's Two Executions, The Exit of the Trains and Memories from the Eastern Front (the last two co-directed with historian Adrian Cioflâncă)—Jude cinematically curates Holocaustrelated archives, exposing Romanian antisemitic atrocities. Uppercase Print and Punish and Discipline explore state apparatuses of repression from other periods in Romanian history, while The Marshal's Two Executions and The Potemkinists interrogate the relation between art and historical memory. A number of these films work by juxaposing two different sets of documents, using one set to tease out a narrative that the other set represses. Jude himself has described these works "as timid explorations" into the possibilities of montage (possibilities that the New Romanian Cinema of the 2000s had largely neglected), presided over by the spirit of Sergei Eisenstein. That spirit is explicitly (and playfully) conjured in Caricaturana and The Potemkinists

The article offers an in-depth analysis of Radu Jude's 2015 film Aferim!. It considers the film as a revisionist take on the Romanian tradition of historical cinema. It discusses Aferim!'s originality as a depiction of the origins of contemporary Romanian anti-Roma racism. It analyzes Jude's artistic strategies—for instance, his lavish and playful deployment of literary and cinematic quotation. The paper also addresses the film's reception in Romania. It goes on to discuss two stage productions in which Jude has further explored issues of racism.

The article offers an in-depth discussion of Radu Jude's 2016 film Scarred Hearts, adapted from Max Blecher's autobiographical novel with the same title (1937), as well as other of his writings. The article is structured in four parts. The first references André Bazin's celebrated essay on Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, bringing it to bear on a discussion of the unorthodox relation between Jude's film and its literary sources. The second section of the article discusses Jude's decision to foreground the protagonist's—and the novelist's—Jewish identity. Set far from home, in France, in an isolated sanatorium for tuberculosis, Blecher's novel was unconcerned with public events such as the rise of the anti-Semitic far right all over Europe; they didn't intrude—not even as background noise. Transposing the story to a Romanian sanatorium, Jude decided to have the young Jewish protagonist go through his experiences with terminal sickness and literature, with love and friendship, against an implied background of rising anti-Semitism, of increasingly widespread support for the local Iron Guard, as well as for Hitler. In its third section, the article discusses Radu Jude's approach to period drama, analyzing his mix of period detail and anachronism. The fourth section discusses Jude's intermedial game-playing and general artistic playfulness.

The article explores Radu Jude's 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, considering it as a summation of the aesthetic and thematic concerns pursued by the Romanian director in his earlier films. The article also includes a discussion of Jude's short film Semiotic Plastic, which was shot at the same time as Bad Luck Banging.