The Collective as an Other: Morality Tales about the Romanian Revolution of 1989
“Were you there before 8 past noon, Mr. Manescu?”
12:08 East of Bucharest, dir. Corneliu Porumboiu
Introduction
In 1927, Walter Benjamin wrote a furious defense of Sergei Eisenstein’s recently released Battleship Potemkin as a collective work.[1] In Benjamin’s eyes, Eisenstein epitomizes cinema’s emergence as the mass medium of the 20th century. As such, it addresses audiences as what they are: a proletarian mass public yearning to see itself be depicted, if in the tragic way that Eisenstein does both in Potemkin (1925) and perhaps even more clearly in his earlier Strike (1925). Benjamin’s short text is a reply to an attack by Oscar A. H. Schmitz on Potemkin and what he calls “tendentious art” more generally, which reduces characters to their political (or to put it in more classically Marxist terms, economic) roles.[2] The main issue that Schmitz has with Potemkin, though, is the very fact that it is a collective work. As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have argued after him,[3] Early Soviet cinema downplays individuals as central causal characters. In Schmitz’s eyes, this banishes Potemkin from the realm of cinema and human interest more generally, for collectives supposedly follow mechanical causality and are thus predictable. As per Schmitz, it is but individual fates that elude our calculating logic, as best exemplified in contemporary literature from Britain and the United States, specifically works by authors such as John Galsworthy or Sinclair Lewis, who confront the socio-political transformations surrounding them through the eyes of their characters and their moral deliberations.
If discussions about depictions of the Russian Revolution back in the 1920s revolved around the rationale and function of action as inherently collective – film as a mass medium both in form and content – then one hundred years later, the question to ask is how cinema has turned into an art form of and for the individual. Much like the Anglophone novels cited by Schmitz – Babbitt or the Forsyte Saga – socio-political transformation as depicted on screen today is met by individual characters who either fulfill or frustrate the expectations of viewers eager to stand on the right side of history. The issue has thus shifted from documenting and understanding social change to playing around with viewers’ ethical vanity. And much like the individualized strata that were the primary demographic of the great novels from the early 20th century, films about socio-political transformation are now geared towards highly specialized viewer groups. A development unfairly associated with minorities, whereby commercial products geared towards them are singled out and implicitly delegitimized as being particularist, the recent Barbie film or the John Wick franchise equally feed on a predefined demographic (namely millennials on either side of the gender divide) by letting the key viewership indulge in their imagined identity onscreen.
The sub-genre in which our individualistic mood can best be gauged is revolutionary cinema. Revolution is not only a paradigmatic instantiation of socio-political transformation, but also inherently collective. Yet, as an exemplary analysis of a sample of films about the Romanian Revolution of 1989 will reveal, today’s revolutionary cinema could not be further removed from Early Soviet cinema’s concern with collective agency. The question that Romanian films about 1989 have obsessed over specifically is how individuals positioned themselves prior to the revolution. The image from 12:08 East of Bucharest (dir. Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006) of TV host Virgil Jderescu asking his guest Professor Manescu if he was already on the town square before the revolution that happened 16 years prior thus epitomizes the individualistic concern of films about the Romanian Revolution. As I will show in relation to 12:08, The Way I Spent the End of the World (dir. Cătălin Mitulescu, 2006), The Paper Will Be Blue (dir. Radu Muntean, 2006), as well as the more recent Libertate (dir. Tudor Giurgiu, 2023) and The New Year That Never Came (dir. Bogdan Mureșanu, 2024), Romanian films about the revolution of 1989 unfold as morality tales in which the protagonists are being swayed by their fellow characters to join, or resist joining, the revolution.[4]
While my article is concerned with revolutionary cinema, specifically Romanian films about the revolution of 1989, it was motivated by a wider concern for the disappearance of communal life, mutual aid, and other forms of solidarity from our cinematic imagination. The underlying thesis of my article is that filmmaking has become unable, or unwilling, to address non-atomistic agency, reflecting the individualist turn of our culture at large. Towards the conclusion of my paper, I will hint at ways that the argument presented in this article could be expanded to reflect on the way that our cinematic culture generally downplays or outright negates collective agency as an emancipatory response to economic, political, and social conflict.
- In the TV Studio: Setting the Scene
As a revolution that saw several of its key moments play out on live TV – most notably Ceaușescu’s loss of control over a crowd meant to celebrate him – the Romanian Revolution of 1989 is by many considered to have been an essentially televisual affair. As evidenced by Videograms of a Revolution (dir. Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujică, 1992) or the seminal edited collection Romanian Revolution Televised: Contributions to the Cultural History of Media,[5] the connection between television and revolution far exceeded that of documenter and documented. The inability to reproduce images of consent and compliance in times of ultimate crisis was a key failing of the late Communist regime and the final proof of the finitude of Ceaușescu and his system. It is thus no coincidence that films about the Romanian Revolution will keep returning to the television as the symbolic center of power in the Information Age.
In Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, the TV studio becomes the film’s main setting as local TV owner/host Virgil Jderescu and his guests try to determine whether the small, unnamed town that they live in participated in the revolution of 1989. Though Jderescu has invited two guests as well as phone-in viewers to debate the matter with him, the discussion is inadvertently usurped by Professor Manescu after he makes boastful comments about having taken to the streets before the title-lending, revolutionary moment at 12:08. To Manescu’s disdain, phone-in viewers challenge his account, forcing him into specifying his account until he becomes entangled in a web of lies. Cornered by the contrasting accounts of his activity on that fateful day, he begins to argue with Jderescu and the phone-in viewers, prompting them to expose their own preconceptions and shortcomings.
Jderescu’s goal of finding out whether “we, the citizens of this town, took part in this heroic day in the history of our nation” thus turns into a self-revelation of the townspeople’s lack of mutual respect and, in some cases at least, integrity. In Porumboiu’s film, Jderescu’s question answers itself through the methods deployed while posing it, and is in this sense discarded as irrelevant both on a macro level (did the unnamed that town partake in the revolutionary events of 1989) and on a micro level (did Manescu take to the streets prior to 12:08). But the question has lived on in revolutionary cinema from Romania, tempting character after character into choosing between what is right and wrong, or, read more cynically, choosing the right side of history. Like Jderescu and his interlocutors, Romanian films about the revolution of 1989 have remained married to the idea that it should be dealt with through a publicized morality tale – one that classically passes through “temptation, fall and redemption.”[6]
- Heroism (Only) as Temptation
No film about the Romanian revolution may recall the classical story arch of the morality play but in a publicized disguise clearer than Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue. In the film, Costi, the young soldier of a militia squad, decides to join the side of the people on the eve of the revolution. Being set on the night between 22nd and 23rd December 1989, it portrays a moment in time when things were unfolding so quickly that they became impossible to keep track of even for the people most intimately involved. By the time that night broke on December 22nd, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena had already fled the Central Committee building in Bucharest by helicopter, been captured in the northwest of Bucharest, and transported to a military garrison and imprisoned. It was only in the early hours of the 22nd that Ceaușescu had still hoped to be able to crush the protests by using force and getting rid of high-rank defectors. Meanwhile, the streets of Bucharest were embroiled in civil war-like fighting as the remaining fractions of power (the secret police, the regular police, and the army) were negotiating internally and with each other how to fill the power vacuum.
Aware that the powers that be are shifting, Costi’s squad seems to want to wait out the situation. But not Costi, who wrestles with his inner daemons until he finally uses a moment of confusion to run off into the darkness and join the people’s struggle. His destination is the TV station that the insurgents have taken over and that Costi wants to help defend. In keeping with the framing of Jderescu’s question, Costi’s main concern appears to be to want to be there before the metaphorical 12:08 so as to make sure that he fought on the right side. But his acting position as a military officer does not make it easy, and nor do the fellow militiamen. There is Bogdan, representing fear, who warns Costi not to get himself into trouble, Vasile, representing professionalism, who cares only about his job, the unit’s acting officer Lt. Neagu, representing power, who remembers Costi what his duty as a man in uniform is, and Dragoş, representing selfishness, who is not driven by convictions, but wants to get the best out of every position for himself and constantly thinks of the people surrounding him as competitors who could potentially wrestle an opportunity or benefit away from him.[7] Like a morality play, The Paper Will Be Blue pushes Costi into a moral landscape that is prenegotiated. Though there are risks to consider – will I be punished for disobeying my orders, will I be taken for a “terrorist”, or might I even end up on the wrong side of history after all – morally speaking, the stakes are clear. There is the revolutionary struggle that we know is justified, a fact which none of his fellow militiamen call into question. Sure, one might decide not to stay on the side of the people out of fear, as Costi ultimately does when he rejoins his unit after being kidnapped, marking his fall from grace, but there are no normative reasons not to choose the people’s struggle over the calculating machinations of the falling regime.
Secretly listening to foreign radio transmissions and expressing the hope that “they have gotten Ceaușescu,” Costi genuinely appears to believe in the cause of the people from the get-go. In this sense, his will as presented by Muntean cannot be reduced to a cynical cost-benefit trade-off. In other words, the reason he wants to join the fight at the TV station is not that he wants to pretend to be someone that he is not, but an expression of his genuine feelings about what is right and wrong. What makes his defection fall into the framework of Jderescu’s if-question is that he begins deliberating to join the people after finding out, via radio transmissions and the swarms of insurgents forming in a street where their armoured personal carrier is parked, that “things are changing.” As mentioned above, Ceaușescu had indeed been apprehended by this point, and while Costi and his fellow militiamen have no way of knowing what stage exactly the revolution is at, Muntean – like the fellow filmmakers whose films I have yet to discuss – chose to place the protagonist of his morality tale in a position where the course that revolutionary events would take had already been set. The question thus becomes whether, and why, Costi will take his last chance of switching to the people’s struggle, as he presumably should – or, metaphorically speaking, whether he, too, was there before 12:08.
Despite stretching out the center of revolutionary commotion both spatially and temporally – the story takes place on the outskirts of Bucharest rather than in its center, and over the course of the entire year of 1989 rather than in its last days – Cătălin Mitulescu’s The Way I Spent the End of the World is kin to Muntean’s Paper Will Be Blue in both spirit and substance. The film revolves around 17-year-old Eva, a high-school student who is expelled from school after horsing around with her love interest Alex and proving uncooperative vis-à-vis authority figures following the incident. She enters a technical school, where she meets Andrei, the son of a dissident. Early on, the film presents the choice between Alex and Andrei as a morally charged one. Alex is handsome, entitled, and reckless, seemingly untouchable due to his father’s connection to the Communist Party, and acting the part. Andrei, on the other hand, is a nerdy, shy boy whose advances are mediated through codes or Eva’s 7-year-old brother Lalalilu – the repressive measures facing his parents appear to have taught him to watch his back. The typical jock-vs.-nerd dynamic of high school movies thus becomes politically charged, sublating innocent teenage lust through an existential choice regarding Eva’s bearing towards the regime. Chose Alex and you chose obedience, or chose Andrei and chose revolt.
Like Costi from Paper Will Blue, Eva choses revolt, but only temporally. She agrees to join Andrei on his quest to cross the Danube River and flee Romania, taking part in his laborious and elaborate preparation scheme. But when they enter the riverbank and begin to swim towards freedom, she gets cold feet and turns back, proving unable to fulfil her promise to Andrei. Like Costi, Eva is tempted by the choice to literally “do the right thing,” but falters and thus falls from grace out of fear. Redemption is achieved on a collective scale with the fall of the Socialist Republic of Romania, which the film humorously links to Eva’s brother, who is plotting to murder Ceaușescu, but is beaten by the unfolding of revolutionary events. Though again Eva has no way of knowing that the Socialist Republic is about to crumble, as with Costi, her failure to follow through with her plan primarily speaks to her moral identity, not so much to missed opportunities or a failure to contribute to political change.
- Moral Multiperspectivity
Romania’s remembrance of the events unfolding in 1989 is so fragmented that it is difficult to survey.[8] Though no population should be thought to be well-represented by official narratives about the past, countries such as Czechia and Poland, where Communism was very much perceived as a foreign Other, and where the presidents emerging post-1989 were not closely aligned with the Party, have propagated less-contested accounts of the transition from Communism than Romania. Several reasons can be named for this fact. Romania’s Socialist Republic was not only relatively independent from the Soviet Union and thus more difficult to identify as a foreign political body. The politicians who took over after the revolution, notably first post-1989 president Ion Iliescu, had been part of the previous regime, which was thus by many thought to live on after the revolution. Furthermore, Romania’s authoritarianism was especially harsh. It involved a huge secret police apparatus and strict state propaganda, instilling great and lasting weariness in people of believing anything that official organs might tell them.
Whereas the three 2006 films that I surveyed above, especially 12:08 East of Bucharest and The Paper Will Be Blue, speak to the epistemic obscurity of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 – i.e. to the fact that it was a messy and opaque affair that one can barely recount with certainty – the two recent films that I now turn to, namely Libertate and The New Year That Never Came, both emphasize multiperspectivity. The complexity that these films focus on is thus that the very same events can be evaluated differently by different persons, including the viewers. While this emphasis on multiperspectivity involves an increase of characters, it curiously does not come with a concern for collective agency. Rather, the question now becomes how different characters position themselves in the last days of the revolution of 1989, and how this is tied to their self-understanding. Even today, Romanian films appear unable to escape Jderescu’s TV studio.
At face value, Libertate would seem like the perfect candidate for overcoming the atomistic paradigm of films about the Romanian Revolution. It deals with a militia unit, and save for Lieutenant Colonel Dragoman, who helms the imprisonment of alleged “terrorists” that is at the heart of the film, nearly all its main characters act in groups. In particular, the police unit that tries to defend its station until it is stormed by protesters, and the protesters standing on the other side of altercation – two of the factions accused of “terrorism” – each operate as teams of a few people who help one another however they can. After being imprisoned at the behest of Dragoman – in the case of the policemen, for remaining loyal to the regime, in the case of the protesters, because they are mistaken for or at any rate accused of being counter-revolutionaries – the opposed factions become ever more closely knit, with the Securitate (secret police) forming a third big group of detainees pitted against the other two groups of prisoners as well as the army that is overseeing the whole operation (unlike the police and the secret police, the army quickly sided with the insurgents once the revolution got under way). The prisoners are moved to an empty swimming pool, in which a large chunk of the story plays out.
Here, in between existential concerns like worrying about eating, drinking, where to relieve yourself, and protection from the cold, Giurgiu dwells on the contesting accounts of the situation the characters find themselves in – and, by extension, of the system that is crumbling before their eyes. Viorel Stanese, as the proto-protagonist and exemplary member of the (judicial) police force, represents duty. He is sucked into the events that unfold against his will, and develops a bad conscience after being confronted with competing views, especially that of a young protester, who refuses to accept a gift from him given his participation in the system. Though in no way idealized, Stanese represents a highly functional, “none of my business” type who tries to do his job without asking too many questions. There is cab driver Leahu, who represents opportunism, joining the revolution when it suits him, but appearing to inform on people as a side gig. He seizes every opportunity to pit people against each other, instilling fear and mutual distrust in the people surrounding him. Then there are the cold and calculating minds of the upper echelon, both of the Securitate and the police force, who appear to know no truth other than their own benefit, and who represent power. Finally, hovering over the swimming pool and overseeing the situation is Colonel Dragoman, another character who appears to genuinely side with the people, but who ultimately ends up overplaying his moral hand, thinking that his being on the right side of history justifies his every action, and thus personifies zeal.
Though Giurgiu’s characters can be mapped onto character traits in the spirit of the classical morality play, they are not in the business of swaying any of the other characters who appear on screen. Insofar as there is even a protagonist, it is most certainly Stanese, who himself embodies duty, and whose moral awakening is caused by finally being confronted with a view outside of the police force bubble. In this sense, he is not being swayed one way or the other – neither by his fellow policemen, nor by a character from another “camp” – but merely confronted with his own finitude. Once he realizes that there are people questioning what he did was wrong, he falters. The same goes for Colonel Dragoman. He is the only character who can be said to have a character arc except for Stanese, and is corrupted not through being manipulated or coerced by anyone else, but by his eager embrace of his position of power. In this sense, their respective narrative arcs move in opposite directions. Stanese is tempted by his conscience to do the right thing, and so visits the family of the protester who refused his help to tell them that their child is doing fine. Dragoman is tempted by his zeal to be unforgiving towards his prisoners, and so becomes increasingly harsh and haphazard in his treatment of them. Both fall from grace, as they must – Stanese for his past ignorance, which has the imprisoned protester’s family chastise him and chase him out, and Dragoman for his brutality, which Giurgiu unforgivingly indulges in, showing that not all were heroes even on the “right side” of history. In the end, all the main characters of Giurgiu’s story appear to have stepped on the wrong side of history one way or another by the time that the clock metaphorically struck 12:08. As in the case of The Way I Spent the End of the World, redemption only comes collectively through the story ending with the end of Communism.
The final film that I want to look at is Bogdan Mureșanu’s The New Year That Never Came. Being a portmanteau film, the piece is notoriously difficult to summarize without becoming enumerative. What can be said without turning encyclopedic is that a recurrent theme of the six intertwined episodes is the question of what to do about one’s negative feelings about the regime. At the heart of the film is a story that once formed a self-standing short film, and around which Mureșanu later constructed his feature film. It tells of factory worker Gelu, whose son sends a Christmas wish list to Santa which reveals that his dad wishes for Ceaușescu to die. This comic set-up quickly takes a dark turn as Gelu, fearing for his life, becomes loud and violent. Meanwhile, theater actress Florina is summoned to the national TV broadcaster to re-shoot a close-up shot of a poem praising Ceaușescu that was read out by a defector on a NYE show. Despite her opposition to the regime, Florina is weary of rejecting the directive for fear of losing her job and reputation. In the end, she tries to escape the job without refusing it by covering her face with a bruise and making her voice disappear. There is Margareta, an old woman who is unhappy about having to move because the regime wants to get rid of the old neighborhood she lives in, but struggles to protest her Securitate son’s compliance with the regime other than through obstinacy and denial. Finally, university student Laurentiu is set on fleeing the country after attracting the attention of the Securitate for subversive activities. But he is apprehended at the border, and coerced into ratting out his co-conspirator and friend.
Ironically, though Mureșanu’s The Way I Spent the End of the World is the most fragmented film of the corpus considered here, his is the only film that communicates why the moral choices that people made even in the final hours of the regime might matter. Ratting out your best friend is something you will have to live with your entire life, no matter how little choice you felt you had after being captured, beaten, and threatened. As for Florina and Margareta, their inability to truly stand up for their convictions is an experience that can break you and make you lose respect for yourself. While none of the acts the three characters ultimately chose are ones one can easily condone, Mureșanu does his best to present them as genuine dilemmas.[9] This is why Mureșanu comes closest to humanizing his characters and getting away from the simple identification of them with virtues or vices. True, most of the characters are driven by fear, but Mureșanu never pretends that fear was all-consuming so as to absolve characters from choosing their course of action every time anew. That said, the characters must first and foremost face the ramifications of their actions by themselves – whether they are being swayed, like Florina, who is being threatened by her boss and lover, or simply fail to act on their ideals when put in extreme situations, as Laurentiu and Margarita appear to be. This is because they act as atomistic individuals who are caught in their own thoughts and agendas. It may thus come as no surprise that while his portmanteau stories elude personified concepts of good and evil, they are still narratives of temptation (to do good), fall, and finally collective redemption. As if to mark his disinterest in collective agency, Mureșanu redresses the fall of the regime with which the film ends as resulting from a coincidence. The crowd’s turning against Ceaușescu during the famous, abovementioned rally is caused by Gelu, who spontaneously lets off firecrackers and thus sets the unrest in motion after being summoned to the event so as to feign his support.
- The Atomization of Collective Life
In his short contribution for The Nation entitled “Mass Movies” published in 1927, Sergei Eisenstein had stressed that his films were a manifestation of the “collective spirit that prevails throughout the country.”[10] As such, they are committed to depicting the masses, not actors.[11] Eisenstein further rejects any attempt at making the viewers connect with the characters on an emotional level as being ineffectual:
Nor do we ever try to arouse sympathy for the lives of the protagonists in the drama. That would be a concession to sentiment. The achievement of the cinema will be much greater and it will make a much stronger impact if it depicts things and bodies and not feelings. We photograph an echo and the ‘rat-a-tat’ of a machine gun. The effect is physiological.[12]
Cinema’s real power, Eisenstein suggests, can only be unlocked by following a method that is “utilitarian, rational and materialist.”[13] As we saw, in Schmitz’s eyes, this lack of affective rapport is precisely what makes Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin artistically uninteresting. But neither Eisenstein nor Schmitz elaborate on why they think they are entitled to reject the other’s aesthetic ideals. Why should a rational approach to cinema be more effective than an affective one, as Eisenstein claims, and why should it lack artistic merit, as Schmitz objects?
Walter Benjamin tried to bring clarity to the contrasting visions of Eisenstein and Schmitz by bringing technology into play.[14] The technical revolution constituted by the invention of film ushers in a new “region of consciousness,”[15] through which the ugly and senseless settings of urban, capitalist modernity are made beautiful. It is this ability of cinema to find meaning in the meaningless reproducibility of everyday life that sets film apart, and which is logically prior to any explanation of aesthetic merit that appeals to form and content in the abstract. Like any technical revolution, the invention of cinema too brings to the fore the very tendentiousness that Schmitz objects to. In Benjamin’s eyes, it is the embrace of tendentiousness that is key to the success of Eisenstein’s revolutionary cinema, and the lack thereof that constitutes the downfall of bourgeois cinema. The absurdity of technologized life, which US slapstick masterfully turns into comedy, becomes a deadly power in Eisenstein’s hands, allowing the audience to experience their subjection to a technologized world on the big screen. Thus technological innovation (the invention of cinema) becomes a tool for a critique of technology (specifically its alienating and deadly power). Schmitz fails to see that the new region of consciousness opened up by the invention of cinema allows the masses to both recognize themselves and see their surroundings anew, and that it is precisely films that speak to their collective existence that answer to their sensibility and self-understanding.
Looking back at the Romanian films about the revolution of 1989 analysed above, one cannot help but be reminded of Schmitz’s appeal to individual psychology and moral awakening. Would the characters wrestling with their inner and outer demons on screen not equally fit into your average Bildungsroman from the early 20th century? Isn’t the embrace of Jderescu’s if-not by these films a concerted rejection of Eisenstein’s concern with collective action? And wouldn’t this constitute a turning back of the clock, that is a falling back before the technical and by extension aesthetic revolution that Benjamin sought to analyse? It is tempting to downplay this individualistic shift with recourse to the fact that morality tales have always existed on screen. That Schmitz could so vehemently question the aesthetic value of a Potemkin was precisely a function of that film being special – in other words, of films that were not mass movies in the relevant sense existing besides Eisenstein’s Potemkin. Even if we grant Benjamin that there is a certain kinship between Early Soviet Cinema and US slapstick films, the history of cinema is full of psychologistic and oftentimes moralizing stories of moral growth, without which the history of counter-movements such as the French New Wave is impossible to understand.[16] Benjamin himself concedes that there are diverse forms of film aesthetics, and that not all follow the logic of the technological revolution that is the invention of film. Yet one must remember that we deliberately chose to contrast two cinemas of revolution qua collective action. It is the concern with a historical moment that was both brought about collectively and experienced collectively that makes the atomistic paradigm of Romanian revolutionary cinema curious.
The first thing to note in the context of trying to make sense of Romanian cinema’s individualism is that we most decidedly do not have to do with mass movies. This is especially true of the 2006 films, which were released at a time when Romania did not even have a functioning cinema infrastructure, and which were thus addressed to festival audiences (mostly international ones). Libertate and The New Year that Never Happened in particular fared much better, with the latter topping the box office in the first week of its release, and reeking in an impressive 549.439,06 USD.[17] While Mureșanu thus came as close as one possibly can to securing both critical acclaim and box office success, the viewership numbers are incomparable to the millions of people who saw Battleship Potemkin in theater.[18] Arguably, this demographic make-up translates onto the screen. While a thorough argument about the classism of Romanian films about the revolution of 1989 would demand an article of its own, the films are populated by TV hosts and TV owners, actresses, professors, and high-ranking officials. The Paper Will Be Blue even addresses class conflict by having Dragoş insinuate that, being a doctor, Costi’s father probably “gave away a lot of packs of Kent and coffee to get his son stationed in the capital,” and it is also mentioned in passing that Costi lives in a good neighbourhood. Though Libertate keeps returning to the subject of the unfair privileges that people in positions of power had under Communism, pretending to speak from the perspective of the “little man,” Giurgiu is himself obsessed with the perspective of those very people in position of power and their moral deliberations over and above those of the general population. In this sense, one could argue from a Benjaminian perspective that the mass has no way of recognizing itself on screen in the films analysed in this article because it is not being addressed in the first place.
In one sense of the word, mass movies still exist. The Avengers or Star Wars franchises reliably reek in billions of dollars, filling cinema halls – often of large groups of friends and families – and conquering streaming services and cable channels around the world. But even these films, concerned though they are with the eternal battle between good and evil, operate through narratives that constitute a patchwork of individual fates. Viewers can choose their favourite characters, who curry the audience’s favour through their looks, strength, humour, or quirks. That these characters’ diversification is partially achieved through identity politics is contingent on our times’ economic requirements, and might in another time have been achieved solely through styles, haircuts, and subcultures. In the ethical battlegrounds of post-war Westerns such as a Canyon Passage (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1946) or a Wagon Master (dir. John Ford, 1950), in which the collective – while constituted of and threatened by individuals – asserts itself qua collective against internal and external enemies, the characters are multiple and diverse because such are the needs, expectations, and instincts of any lot. There is no concern for making sure that each subgroup – the elderly, the childless, the children, the foreigners, the musicians, the youth etc. – can identify themselves with a character on screen, contrary to what even today’s animated feature films have begun to do by overlaying stories marketed to children by coded jokes and subplots that are there to be deciphered by the flattered adult viewers.
If today’s mass movies are made for masses of people, they do not address them as a mass, but as consumers, atomistic yet generic individuals with needs, desires, and views that can be modelled and monetarized according to their cultural background, ethnicity, age, gender etc. While arthouse mainstream has eluded this simple reduction of people to their statistical selves, it has not filled the void of collective spirit, but instead complicated the self-identification that mainstream cinema offers us. You may still identify yourself with the attractive actress on screen, but take into account the difficult choices that come with success, and the conflicts you may get yourself into over the course of your imagined career. The “You rock!” of consumer culture, which can today be ordered at one’s pleasure with the help of ChatGPT, becomes elliptical in highbrow consumerism: “You do rock, but don’t forget your shortcomings.”[19]
If Eisenstein’s films emerged from a “collective spirit that prevails throughout the country,” there is a sense in which Romanian films about the revolution of 1989 speak to an individualistic spirit prevailing throughout the country today. In Romania, post-89 individualism was not only fuelled by the sudden introduction of turbocapitalism, but also by the fact that the social fabric had already broken down during Communism under the weight of the (secret) police state and a spirit of mutual distrust. Perhaps due to the transition to another corrupt winner-takes-all system in which the benefiters of the old systems remained in power in the new one, as the powerful tend to do, Romanians’ laudable cynicism vis-à-vis political authority has prevailed. If the political elite is fighting any fight but for their personal gain, most of the population has no part to play in it. Where should one find a collective spirit in Romania today?
I do not want to dispute that the individualism of Romanian films about the revolution of 1989 is reflective of the current sensibility. In fact, my article was in large part motivated by addressing this sensibility and the way it informs even films that are concerned with historical instances of collective action. But a collective is what it is not in virtue of it understanding itself as one, but because social relations change the ontology of human existence. To remind us of our social existence today – outside of the existence of a great national or internationalist project that informed the great Eisenstein and Ford movies – would be a feat not only for our understanding of the Romanian revolution of 1989, but even more for our understanding of ourselves as individuals who have forgotten that there is no such thing as life outside of a society. We have not stopped being political animals – we just do not understand anymore what that entails.[20]
Conclusion
This article addressed the individualism of Romanian films about the revolution of 1989. Nominally interested in a popular uprising, they play out as morality tales in which the main question posed to the respective protagonists is whether they positioned themselves on the right side of history (just) before the revolution came to an end. In a country in which the same old people took over power after 1989, that may seem like the only meaningful question left to ask: if nothing changed in the end, perhaps the only relevant facts are one’s intentions.
Of course, it is as untrue to say that nothing changed post-1989 as it is to say that there was complete change. Not for nothing, even the students of Hegel’s who criticized him most fervently agreed that history is dialectical, and certainly not to be understood as a series of disconnected events. Still, the downfall of the social fabric brings moral questions to the fore, and it is important to concede that Romanian filmmakers capture something when they address the existential dilemmas that people faced with the revolution. What I have attempted to bring out is that these moral questions are not addressed socially, but as ones that concern individuals and which they answer before themselves, and that this atomistic outlook is not compulsory. One only needs to look to the debate regarding Eisenstein’s controversial collectivism – or the abovementioned post-WWII films from Hollywood – to realize that the ethical exists in the realm of the social. What causes our ignorance of this fact is our being trapped in an aesthetic of the individual, which caters to our consumerist wish to have all of our (read as my) needs and wishes be fulfilled, including how we would like others to think of us. That the films discussed in this article do not address our collective existence is neither to be explained by the phenomenon that it deals with (a historical event that was brought about and experienced collectively), nor by the world that we live in (which manages to atomize us through consumerism, but which is still constituted by social relations as well as personal ones), but by the inability of our culture to address it. It is in this sense that I take collective existence to be an Other to our consumerist culture.
In my article, I focused on films of the Romanian Revolution because that not only allows for the contrast with revolutionary cinemas of the past, but also because whatever a revolution is, it is a form of collective action that neither consists of atomistic individuals suddenly converging as a mass, nor promises a pre-drawn map of good and evil.[21] In this sense, I focused on the Romanian Revolution for methodological purposes: I wanted to bring out how even films that deal with collective action approach their subject matter individualistically, that is by constructing an age-old morality tale that is about good and evil. On a more general level, this simplification of reality, and the concurrent othering of collective action, can be observed across the board, especially with regard to the Other with a capital “o.” This downplays or outright negates communal life as an emancipatory response to economic, political, and social conflict. In struggles with authoritarian governments (see the current protests in Georgia); social and political challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community across Eastern Europe; or migrants’ day-to-day fight for existence, self-organization through local associations, communities, and groups is both key and prevalent.[22]
While all authoritarian structures are interested in dividing to then conquer, the human history of resistance is one of collective action. A more ambitious project than mine could delve into why it is that minorities of all kinds, be they LGBTQ+ characters or Roma, stand alone on the screen so often when they have stood up together time and again. An alternative story that we could, and perhaps should, be telling is one of organization rather than atomization. I hope that with my article, I can at least outline a framework for such a further investigation.
Bibliography
Benjamin, W. (1990). Erwiderung an Oscar A. H. Schmitz. In F. Mierau (Ed.), Russen in Berlin: Literatur, Malerei, Theater, Film, 1918–1933 (pp. 518–524). Stuttgart: Reclam.
Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (1993). Film art: An introduction (4th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
Cinemagia.ro. (2024, December 30). Box Office Romania [Webpage]. Retrieved November 8, 2025, from https://www.cinemagia.ro/boxoffice/romania/?date=30.12.2024
Eisenstein, S. M. (1927, November 9). Mass movies. The Nation, 125(3253).
King, P. M. (2008). Morality plays. In R. Beadle & A. J. Fletcher (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to medieval English theatre (2nd ed., pp. 235–262). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in ideology and society. London: Routledge.
Olkhovy, B. S. (Ed.). (1929). The roads of cinema: The first All-Union Party Conference on cinematography.
Petrovszky, K., & Ţichindeleanu, O. (Eds.). (2011). Romanian revolution televised: Contributions to the cultural history of media (Colecția Refracții). Cluj: Idea Design & Print.
Schmitz, O. A. H. (1990). Potemkinfilm und Tendenzkunst. In F. Mierau (Ed.), Russen in Berlin: Literatur, Malerei, Theater, Film, 1918–1933 (pp. 515–518). Stuttgart: Reclam.
Truffaut, F. (1954/2015). “A certain tendency in French cinema” (pp. 36–40). In S. Solecki (Ed.), A Truffaut Notebook (pp. 36–40). Montréal: McGill‑Queen’s University Press.
Young, C., & Light, D. (2016). Multiple and contested geographies of memory: Remembering the 1989 Romanian ‘revolution’. In D. Drozdzewski, S. de Nardi, & E. Waterton (Eds.), Memories, place and identity: Commemoration and remembrance of war and conflict (pp. 56–73). London: Routledge.
[1] Benjamin (1990).
[2] Schmitz (1990).
[3] Bordwell and Thompson (1993).
[4] I use the term morality tale to draw a parallel to the medieval/Tudor morality play’s concern with the individual morality of protagonists who are being swayed by characters personifying virtues and vices towards good and evil. Like medieval and Tudor morality plays, Romanian films about 1989 posit a prenegotiated moral landscape that is non-negotiable. Unlike morality plays, Romanian films about 1989 present the positioning of characters on this moral landscape as an act of virtue signalling, as it is usually done post-factum or when the revolution is already reaching its end-point, or else motivated by selfish reasons such as one’s reputation or safety.
[5] Petrovszky and Ţichindeleanu (2011).
[6] King (2008, p. 240).
[7] The analogy with morality plays survives these characters living a life of their own, for morality plays do not always reduce the characters to the virtues and vices that they embody. Cf. King (2008, p. 240).
[8] Young and Light (2016).
[9] A residual of the simplistic right-or-wrong decision-making can still be identified in the character of TV producer Stefan, who voices doubts about ratting out a former employee as things are about to change anyway (“Am I the last fool?”). Meanwhile, Gelu’s situation is a special case, as it mostly constitutes a logistical issue. It is entirely unclear why being identified as an opponent of Ceaușescu in a Christmas letter is something one should embrace out of a concern over one’s integrity.
[10] Eisenstein (1927).
[11] It is worth noting that the contrast of the masses is not to individuals, suggesting that Eisenstein is here speaking from the perspective of a filmmaker and the question “what do we show?”
[12] Eisenstein (1927).
[13] Eisenstein (1927)
[14] Benjamin (1990).
[15] My translation for “Region des Bewußtseins” (Benjamin, 1990, p. 519).
[16] See the section on Psychological Realism from François Truffaut’s notorious and iconoclastic article “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema” that criticizes French cinema and André Bazin’s editorial line in the Cahiers. Truffaut (1954/2015).
[17] Cinemagia.ro (2024).
[18] Olkhovy (1929, p. 18).
[19] Needless to say, this self-critical attitude can itself be turned into a means of self-aggrandizement at a higher level.
[20] Though I try to identify this as a generic, and thus general inability to conceptualize our collective being, Herbert Marcuse argued that this specifically pertains to our inability to conceptualize the very change that was at the heart of this article: “[t]he more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation” (Marcuse, 1964, pp. 6–7).
[21] The latter issue is overlooked only if one falls into the old dichotomy of systems. The issue is not just the one about being against something, but also one about how one is against something, and what one does in case of succeeding to overcome a given system – Tsarism and the Socialist Republic of Romania are terrible, but how do we bring those systems down, and what happens once we’ve done so?
[22] That varieties of emancipatory communal life are underrepresented is a function, on the one hand, of the towering role of international film festivals and their primary audience and thus of economic-systemic factors, and, on the other, of a redemptive style that has become prevalent both in so-called “arthouse” cinema and beyond and thus of aesthetic factors. While I have no space to explore these themes in this article, they have informed the editorial line of Moritz Pfeifer and myself in the East European Film Bulletin.