Silence After the Revolution

Yugoslavian and Romanian Cinema as Archives of Transitional Everyday Life

 

1. INTRODUCTION 

In his influential book Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger states: “The way we see things is  affected by what we know or what we believe” (Berger 2008: 8). With this seemingly simple  observation, Berger foregrounds a critical approach that goes beyond his analysis of visual  arts: vision is never neutral. Every act of looking and observing is shaped by ideology,  memory and expectations, interpreted through our previous knowledge. In that context,  cinema, as a medium and art form in one, both shows and withholds information. As the  revered French film theorist André Bazin argues, the photographic image is the object itself,  the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it (Bazin 2005: 14). This  ontological quality, or rather capacity that films have to extract the everyday from the flow of  time, grants cinema a unique archival power. Yet, Bazin (ibid.) also notes that despite any  objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the  object reproduced. 

These aesthetic and affective elements positions film as a potent tool for historical inscription,  thought not necessarily in terms of traditional historiography. Here, Michel Foucault’s  distinction between total history and general history becomes especially relevant. Total  history, he argues, seeks to reconstitute the overall form of civilization, which is the  significance common to all the phenomena of a certain period, drawing all elements around a  single center of meaning (Foucault 1972: 9). On the other hand, general history resists this  centripetal pull and favors juxtaposition over unification. It deploys the space of dispersion,  mapping discontinuities, layers, and contradictions that defy a simple synthesis (Foucault 1972: 10). In the context of major political and historical shifts, total history seeks to impose a  unified narrative that organizes disparate events around a singular center of logic and  meaning, which inevitably leads to further obscuring the contradictions, silences and affective  residues that resist, or cannot be placed within the linear understanding of these historical  events. Cinema, in Foucault’s sense, can (or should) function as a general history of transition,  which is as a medium that collects heterogeneous fragments rather than a single face of a  period. Storytelling assembled from these fragments resists the closure of a total history,  remaining multivocal, much like the incomplete process of social transition itself. 

The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s can serve as a  paradigmatic example of the theoretical approaches mentioned above. The end of socialist  regimes in Yugoslavia and Romania between 1989 and 1991 were not only a political and  economic shifts but also produced a crisis of alternative historical narratives. In many post 

Communist countries, the new system promoted what Vladimir Tismaneanu termed a  “politics of forgetfulness”: an intentional collective amnesia about the socialist past, deemed  necessary to move forward (Light & Young 2015: 244). In Romania, the early 1990s were  marked by efforts to “draw a thick line” separating the present from the previous Communist  era, brushing aside a nuanced reckoning with what came before (ibid). Similarly, across the  former Yugoslavia, as Pavle Levi observes, the once prominent ideal of multinational  “Yugoslavism” was retrospectively disowned and stigmatized. After the violent disintegration  of the Socialist Federal Republic, public discourse, through revisionism and ethnic  polarization, diminished the more complex social legacy, simultaneously rendering the  Yugoslav wars as inevitable, thereby justifying both the conflict and the dismissal of the  previous era’s more integrative identity (Levi 2007: 3-4). In that sense, Tismaneanu’s “politics  of forgetfulness” implies that what was remembered through total history is as significant as  what was forgotten. Here, cinema emerges and can function as a concepts Svetlana Boym  calls counter-memory culture – an unofficial circuit of stories, jokes, images, and recollections  through which people preserved alternative versions of history (Boym 2001: 61-62). By  focusing on personal intimate stories and unresolved traumas, post-socialist films of  Yugoslavian countries and Romania often implicitly ask the Foucaultian question: whose  history is being told, and whose is being forgotten? 

To explore how post-socialist cinema constructs this affective counter-archive, the essay  focuses on a specific use of slowness, silence, and stasis in what film studies today consider to  be a stylistic movement called slow cinema. Here, Paul Schrader’s influential book Transcendental style in film (1972), serves as an ideal framework for understanding how  reductive filmic means can be used as a form of style. Many filmmakers of the Romanian  New Wave and post-Yugoslav cinema have gravitated toward minimalist film style,  significantly different from both Hollywood films and European mainstream cinema. Long  takes, sparse dialogue, observational long shots, and slow pacing are only some of the stylistic choices that are dominant in films such as Grbavica (2006), The Load (2018), Ulysses’ Gaze 

(1995), Aurora (2010) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), which will serve as case  studies of this research. In the context of major political and historical changes, institutional  breakdown and exhausted ideologies, cinema functions as a form of independent archive and a medium that preserves what public discourse cannot or will not articulate: trauma,  migration, gendered violence, and ethnic tension. By comparing post-Yugoslav and Romanian  contexts, this research analyzes silence not as absence, but as a voice buried underneath the  “new normal“, drawing on the film concepts of slow cinema and Paul Schrader’s  transcendental style. 

2. ON TRANSCENDENTAL STYLE 

The book Transcendental Style in Film (1972) is one of the most influential studies of the  spiritual, the transcendent, and the sacred as elements of film style. When Paul Schrader, then  a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in film studies at the University of California, set out  to define what transcendental style might refer to, he found himself caught in his own  paradox. Above all, because in looking at transcendental style in the seventh art form both  ends of the spectrum (as a theorist and critic and later as a screenwriter and director), he could  not help but notice that the attempt to craft a definition is a self-canceling process, grounded  in the insurmountable contradiction of the term transcendent – the verbalization of the  ineffable (Schrader 2022: 57). Indeed, the concept of style fares only slightly better in film  studies in terms of a clear definition, so the entire collocation risks opening more problems  than it solves. Schrader recognizes this himself, which is precisely why he offers a  comprehensive analysis of three auteurs and their bodies of work as an attempt to concretize  the characteristics of that style, in the hope that, if a crisp definition is not possible, he can at  least asymptotically approximate for the reader/viewer what exactly the title of his book refers  to. Those three auteurs are Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Given  that, according to Schrader (2022: 53), transcendental style is used by auteurs from different  cultures to express the exalted, the otherworldly and the sacred, a religious context is inextricably ascribed to it. However, a crucial distinction vis-à-vis the term religious lies in  the fact that transcendental style is not bound exclusively to films with religious subject  matters. In semantic terms, transcendental style is not intrinsically transcendent or religious;  rather, it is a general representational film form that expresses the transcendent (Schrader  2022: 58).  

Transcendental style is neither a personal vision nor an official catechism; it is not necessarily  characterized by Christ on the cross or Joan of Arc at the stake, just as it need not manifest  itself in (spiritual) suffering, narrative models, or characterization – it is, strictly speaking,  only a style (Schrader 2022: 54). So, the one indispensable thing about transcendental style is  the fact that we are dealing with a form of style. What, then, is style? How do we recognize  that a given film is suffused with a given style? David Bordwell, in On the History of Film  Style (1997), treats this question thoroughly through a historical analysis of the art of film. In  the narrowest sense, Bordwell takes style to be the systematic and significant use of filmic  devices. Those devices fall into broad areas: mise-en-scène (staging, lighting, performance,  and setting), framing, focus, control of color values, and other expressive elements of film  (Bordwell 1997: 4). In his study of style, Croatian film theorist Hrvoje Turković identifies its  clear determinant: Bordwell’s “systematic and significant use” points to the fact that style is  necessarily tied to choice, and not just any series of choices, but a systematic, persistent, and  somehow limited series of choices that seeks a certain consistency, i.e., a selective and  constraining criterion of the consistency of those choices (Turković 2005: 231). In other  words, in the narrower sense Turković defines style as the weave of traits of a given film or  group of films by which a recognizable individuality can be determined (Turković 2005: 230).  It is precisely this recognizable individuality that Schrader seeks among the films of Ozu,  Bresson, and Dreyer, or, as he puts it, the expression of similar ideas in similar forms by  different cultures (Schrader 2022: 53). The key lies in one of the fundamental elements of  transcendental style – the use of abundant means and sparse means, which Schrader (2022:  195-96) elaborates as follows. Abundant means are those characteristic expressive elements of  film that arouse the viewer’s interest in each film. Within the classical (Hollywood) style, all  expressive means (Bordwell’s filmic devices) are subordinated to the idea of audience  participation in the actions and situations on the screen. The task of a director working in  transcendental style is to harness that empathy as a potential to keep the audience’s interest in  the film, and then gradually discard the abundant means and replace them with sparse means – through a process of stripping down the classical style and form (ibid.). Shots grow unmotivated long, acting become inexpressive, camera movement minimal, and scenography  reduced. The role of transcendental art is to stylize reality by removing those stylistic  elements that primarily express human experience, thereby depriving conventional  interpretations of reality of their importance and power (ibid.).  

Thus, transcendental style is defined precisely by the gradual movement from abundant means  toward sparse means. Even so, that transition is still too broad to discern and analyze a film of  transcendental style more concretely. This is why Schrader introduces the three dramaturgical  stages of every film in transcendental style, which serve as crucial points for recognizing the  transition from abundant to sparse means: the everyday, disparity, and stasis (Schrader 2022:  86-93, 195-96). The everyday is the initial state, in which abundant means are still present. In  other words, the everyday adheres to the “realistic” elements of films and begins to undermine  them. In the stage of disparity, the conflict between abundant and sparse means becomes  evident to the viewer. This stage is personified by the protagonist, a person in a realistic shape  and environment whose behavior becomes the model of spareness. The abundant means are  gradually converted into sparse means and culminate in stasis – the moment of “complete  otherness” in which the film metaphorically stops, and the viewer surpasses (abundant and  sparse) means, stepping outside the frame of art toward a state of transcendence. At that point  the “gradual purification of the visual” is complete and the spiritual process begins (ibid.). For  example, stasis doesn’t need to be a religious “miracle.” It can be achieved by a sudden  reversal of means, as when Ozu in Tokyo Story (1953) surprises the viewer with Setsuko  Hara’s expressive tears (Schrader 2022: 94). This is the essence of the matrix of Schrader’s  analysis of transcendental style, which he applies to all three auteurs. 

3. TRANSCENDENTAL STYLE AND SLOW CINEMA AS MODES OF DISINTEGRATION 

In the 2018 revised edition of Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader revisits his analysis  in the light of new cinematic trends that emerged since his 1972 book. Schrader’s initial  transcendental style was characterized by a deliberate reduction of narrative, non-expressive  acting, and mise-en-scène that withholds emotion, culminating in a moment of stasis that  opens the door to the transcendent (Schrader 2018: 35). In a new introduction called  “Rethinking Transcendental Style“, he immediately points to the most prominent concept that  developed from the transcendental style by posing a question: “What happened? Gilles Deleuze happened. So did Andrei Tarkovsky. And slow cinema was  soon to follow.” (Schrader 2018: 1) 

In rethinking his theory decades later, Schrader observes that contemporary art cinema has elaborated the transcendental style further into what has since developed into slow cinema, which inherits the long, contemplative shots and sparse narrative of transcendental style, but  often without the same overtly spiritual focus. From Schrader’s perspective, slow cinema is a  direct descendant of transcendental style, adapted to a secular, global art cinema context  (Schrader 2018: 16). It carries forward techniques that encourage viewers to “lean into the  film” and experience a meditative state (Schrader 2018: 10), but now frequently used to  explore material and historical conditions rather than focusing on overt spiritual themes. In  that context, Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image from his book Cinema 2: The Time Image (1989), provides a crucial framework for understanding the temporal and affective  experience slow cinema creates. He argues that after World War II, many films abandoned the  linear, action-driven logic of the classical movement-image and instead began to present time directly, often through disjointed narratives, idle periods, and unresolved situations (Deleuze  1989: xv). These time-image films replace the clear sensory-motor links of classical cinema  with “pure optical and sound situations” and ambiguous, dream-like passages that invite the  spectator into a more contemplative, open-ended engagement with the image (Deleuze 1989:  17). Slow cinema exemplifies this tendency. It represents cinema of duration, where long  shots or static landscapes allow the viewer to feel the passing of time in an unmediated way.  In the absence of fast-paced plot, the viewer’s mind is encouraged to wander, associate, and  reflect – experiencing what Schrader (via Deleuze) calls “cinematic introspection” (Schrader  2018: 5). 

Where Deleuze’s theoretical framework particularly enriches Schrader’s concept is in  explaining the affective function of this style without recourse to mysticism. Schrader argued  that transcendental style’s final stasis induces a kind of spiritual contemplation in the viewer – a moment of transcendence. Deleuze (1989: 16-19) would agree that these films induce  contemplation, but he locates the power not in a metaphysical breakthrough but in the  material image itself: the time-image shakes up our normal sensory-motor expectations and  forces us to think and feel in a new way. Deleuze (ibid.) argues the modern cinema’s ability to  confront us with “the intolerable” – thereby awakening a thinking viewer who must confront  time and reality directly in slow cinema – often means witnessing long stretches of “dead  time” or banal activities. The viewer is then prompted into a state of reflection that can be profound. Thus, Deleuze’s time-image serves as a crucial framework for understanding slow  cinema as a concept that highlights the passage of time, as well as the thought itself. 

The transcendental style and (more closely) slow cinema aesthetics finds a poignant  resonance in in societies dealing with the collapse of utopian political imaginaries and the  disintegration of a cohesive social narrative, for example post-socialist cinema. Filmmakers  from these countries (in our case former Yugoslavia and Romania), have often adopted slow,  minimalistic, and fragmentary styles to reflect the uncertainties of the post-socialist reality. Pavle Levi, in his study Disintegration in Frames (2007), conceptualizes this formal tendency.  His theoretical approach, disintegration in frames, represents political fragmentation of the  Yugoslav socialist regime manifested in the aesthetic strategies of regional cinema,  particularly through narrative structure and visual austerity. Levi identifies a stylistic shift  toward deep-focus realism and long takes, especially in films by Živojin Pavlović, where an  “aesthetics of the disgusting” and a “poetics of viciousness” replace any remnants of socialist  idealism (Levi 2007: 36). This visual minimalism operates as both aesthetic strategy and  ideological critique, echoing broader postwar art cinema’s turn from movement to duration,  which is to Deleuze’s time-image. Romanian New Wave directors like Cristi Puiu and Cristian  Mungiu employ long, static shots and minimalistic sequences to depict the trivial textures of  (post) Communist life in a comparable way – offering a cinema of observation that exposes  the absence of dominant ideological frames. Such cinematic strategies reflect a critical refusal  of binary moralism and historical closure. What is more, Levi argues that these films require  an active and skeptical viewer who must navigate ambiguity and confront unreliable narrators  and perspectives (Levi 2007: 145). Disintegrative aesthetics in Balkan cinema can serve as a  counter-narrative, pulling apart mythologies of ethnic purity and ideological redemption by  means of stillness, fragmentation, and formal ambiguity. 

To further understand how post-socialist slow cinema transforms transcendental style into a  mode of historical reflection, we turn to Svetlana Boym’s notion of cinema as a form of  counter-memory. In her study, The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Boym describes counter memory as the unofficial, often subversive memory practices that flourished under Soviet and  Eastern European Communist regimes, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s (Boym 2001:  61). Importantly, counter-memory often involved pointing out the blemishes and gaps in  official history – “finding blemishes in the official narrative of history or even in one’s own  life,” (Boym 2001: 61). Furthermore, Boym notes that in the late 1980s, as censorship eased,  there was an explosion of films and artworks that used “different forms of counter-memory, carnival, kitsch and reflective nostalgia to perform a cultural exorcism, to shake up the  historical myths” (Boym 2001: 62). The crucial element of Boym’s concept of counter memory is that it emphasizes the method of engaging with the past. It is not merely a  collection of alternative facts and texts but also an alternative way of reading – one  characterized by ambiguity, irony, and personal inflection (ibid.). 

Slow cinema, especially in its post-socialist incarnations, can be seen as a trigger for this kind  of counter-memory. This can again be connected to Deleuze’s time-image cinema, which  operates not through action but through “the coexistence of sheets of past” (Deleuze 1989:  99), requiring the spectator to think, remember and connect disparate temporalities. In that  way, by refusing the streamlined storytelling of mainstream historical dramas and focusing  instead on (quiet) everyday moments and marginal characters, slow cinema films effectively  reframe history “from below.” These films thus function as what we might call an affective  archive: they record not the grand historical events and leaders, but the moods, textures, and  rhythms of lived experience during and after the major historical and political changes. 

The films we will now analyze often end on border-like moments, pauses that are both an  ending and a suggestion that life (or history) must somehow continue past a point of no  resolution. 

4. DOMESTIC SILENCE AND MATERNAL COUNTER-MEMORY 4.1. GRBAVICA: LAND OF MY DREAMS (2006) 

Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica: Land of My Dreams (2006) is set in Sarajevo a decade after the  Bosnian war, and follows Esma and her teenage daughter Sara, as they navigate their lives in  the lingering aftermath of wartime. The film is characterized by an intimate narrative structure and style that relies visually on interior settings and “loud” silences to convey what is left  unspoken: Esma’s rape in a prison camp led to Sara birth. The everyday life in Grbavica is  shown through mundane domestic tasks and modest living conditions and perfectly fits  Schrader’s concept of the transcendental everyday. Furthermore, this type of understated  realism can be linked to a broader post-Yugoslav cinematic trend(s). Rather than  sensationalizing war, Žbanić documents the everyday effects of conflict on ordinary lives  (Levi 2007: 110). In fact, Pavle Levi notes that during the 1990s Bosnian filmmakers  (including Žbanić in her early career) gravitated toward unvarnished chronicles of civilian  suffering, committed to creating an extensive chronicle of life under the most inhuman circumstances (Levi 2007: 109-110). Grbavica’s focus on everyday moments of survival thus  aligns with this impulse to remember through the ordinary, rather than through explicit and  dominant narratives. 

The film actively cultivates silence as a form of counter-memory. Esma attends a support  group for female war survivors, but we never hear her speak in the sessions. What is more, we  only see her sitting in silence. At home, Esma’s situation with Sara oscillates between  tenderness and strain now that Sara is growing curious about who her father really is. Žbanić  chooses to show several mother and daughter exchanges in long takes with minimal dialogue.  For example, an extended shot at the dinner table where Sara pointedly asks about her father  and Esma deflects by barely responding, the camera observing their faces in a single two-shot.  The tension builds up in pauses and glances. Here we see what Schrader describes as the  disparity beneath the everyday – the unnatural density of unspoken emotion accumulating  under mundane routine (Schrader 2018: 70). In this case, it is the growing strain between  Esma’s need to hide the past and Sara’s need to know it. Notably, Esma’s fabrication of a war hero father exemplifies what Svetlana Boym would call a restorative nostalgia: a myth that  “mends” the gaps of memory with a coherent tale of recovered identity (Boym 2001: 53). By  framing Sara’s origins in terms of a fallen national hero, Esma is attempting to rebuild a  semblance of honorable past. This personal version of the heroic national narrative, in Boym’s  terms, proposes to rebuild the lost home and make up for the memory gaps (Boym 2001: 49).  This kind of restorative narrative resonates with what Levi (2007) observes in many post Yugoslav war films: the tendency to cast one’s nation as the innocent victim-hero and create a  comforting fiction in which suffering is given heroic meaning (Levi 2007: 128). Nevertheless,  Grbavica gradually undermines this fiction through silence and restraint. Esma’s inability to  speak about the past signal what Boym terms a reflective approach to memory, one that does  not think of itself as tradition or absolute truth but instead cherishes shattered fragments of  memory and acknowledges the irreparable nature of the past (Boym 2001: 49). In other  words, the film’s quiet, uneasy domestic scenes refuse to turn trauma into a clear-cut patriotic  story. The silence itself becomes a testament to trauma – a living counter-archive that resists  both facile remembrance and deliberate forgetting. 

This disparity eventually leads to the decisive action of the film in form of a confrontation in  which Sara, after finding evidence that her father was not truly a war hero, demands the truth  from her mother at gunpoint. Only then does Esma finally break down and confesses that  Sara’s father raped her. Her, Žbanić does not give the characters (nor the audience) a moment to process this crucial information, but rather keeps the camera focused on the women’s faces  in a long, trembling take, that captures the devastating silence. In that sense, the emotional  reaction is almost anti-climactic, which paradoxically gives it more significance – the  audience is forced to confront the trauma without catharsis, just like the characters. In this  painful confession, one can discern what Boym (2001: 54) – following Freud – calls the only  true form of “returning home”: the analysis and acknowledgement of a repressed trauma. This  moment is also a turning point where Grbavica pointedly departs from the patterns of  nationalist war cinema. Unlike films that would use such suffering to stoke hatred or vindicate  one side, Žbanić’s film pointedly avoids depicting the perpetrator or aligning the trauma with  an ethnopolitical agenda. In Levi’s terms, Grbavica rejects the “kitsch” of patriotic  victimhood (the kind of narrative where a character’s tragedy would be exploited to affirm  collective national innocence) and instead aligns with the more rational, humanist strand of  post-Yugoslav cinema that emerged in reaction to ethnic propaganda (Levi 2007: 130). The  scene of Esma’s confession is thus stripped of any signifiers of enemy or revenge. It is purely  an intimate reckoning. By focusing on the inner toll of war violence – a mother and  daughter’s personal crisis – the film performs what Levi describes as a critical analysis of  war’s social aftermath, rather than a phobic melodrama of “ethnic revenge” (Levi 2007: 130).  The immediate aftermath of the confession is not triumphant resolution, but a sobering  emptiness, leading Grbavica into its final phase of stasis. Here, transcending does not imply  overcoming or forgetting the trauma. On the contrary, it means fully acknowledging a painful  reality and yet finding a way to live with it. The silence that closes Grbavica is the silence of  unspeakable history finally shared and collectively held, it is a visual counter-memory of all  the overlooked stories, both personal and collective, that were left out of dominant and linear  historical narratives. 

4.2. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (2007) 

Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) is set in 1987 Romania, during  Ceaușescu’s regime, and focuses on the female experience under oppressive conditions. Regarding its stylistic choices, 4 Months goes even further into the aesthetics of slow cinema  than in Grbavica. Mungiu’s film is a cornerstone of the Romanian New Wave, elaborating the  cinematic movement’s austere realism and focus on everyday life under Communism. The  story follows Otilia and Gabita as they arrange an illegal abortion for Gabita, which is a  dangerous activity, given the regime’s strict ban of that right. Focusing on two young women  caught in this situation, Mungiu uses personal narrative to highlight a socio-political system. Formally, 4 Months employs a typical slow-cinema aesthetic, with Mungiu sticking to the  minimalistic trend of static long shots, real-time pacing, hand-held camera movement and the  absence of musical score (Nasta 2013: 186). Every scene in the film is presented through  thoughtful scene composition and meticulous camera work, and many of them in steady  unbroken shots, in order to generate maximum dramatic effect. In perhaps its most celebrated  (or notorious) sequence, Mungiu places Otilia at a family dinner she cannot escape. After  securing the abortion, she must briefly attend her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday gathering.  This scene, shot in one static shot lasting about 7 minutes, creates a sense of unvarnished  reality and sustained tension. The camera lingers beyond the point of conventional editing, a  technique typical for transcendental style, as well as slow cinema, with the effect of  withholding the expected relief (Schrader 2018: 12).  

The film’s temporal austerity also serves a thematic purpose, resonating with post-communist  memory and nostalgia. Two decades after the fall of Communism, Romanian society was  grappling with how to remember the era. Official discourse tended to repudiate the socialist  past, yet many individuals recalled it in more ambivalent ways, sometimes even with  nostalgia for its lost “certainties” amid the chaos of transition (Light & Young 2015: 239). On  the other hand, 4 Months can be interpreted through Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective  nostalgia, which is less concerned with restoring a fantasized past, than with critically  acknowledging the irrevocability of it and meditating on lost time (Boym 2001: 49). Mungiu  indeed refuses to romanticize or skip in a fast-forward way through the past. When paired  with historical insistence on showing how oppression invaded ordinary and everyday life – 4 months functions as a counter-memory to both the country’s simplistic anti-communist  narrative and the public’s nostalgia. With the focus on the uncomfortable truths of 1987, the  film transforms personal recollection into an experience of repression that had long been  marginal in official histories. In that context, through the intimate story of Otilia and Gabița,  Mungiu brings to light Ceaușescu’s ban on abortion which turned Romanian women’s bodies  into systems controlled by the government. This state is articulated by the film’s slow,  observational style that shapes a narrative structure that does not fall into the path of sensationalism. In place of overt political rhetoric, Mungiu shows the small negotiations,  fears, and acts of solidarity that defined these women’s daily survival under the decree. In  doing so, 4 Months gives voice to those silenced by history and ensures that their suffering is  neither sentimentalized nor forgotten. The film’s final silence, even more so than in Grbavica,  is in transcendental context a true moment of stasis. Otilia and Gabita sit together in a hotel restaurant. They are exhausted, traumatized, and speak only briefly. Otilia tells Gabita firmly  that “We will never talk about this, okay?” They sat in silence. Mungiu keeps the shot on  them for a long moment, before Otilia looks directly at the camera, which is at us. 

In this way, the restrained formal style of the film becomes a means of ethical remembrance.  Mungiu makes us witness every anxious minute and every feeling pushed down, turning a  grim episode of the past into a quietly searing cinematic memorial. Bringing together the  minimalist form, post-communist temporality and a sustained focus on female subjectivity, 4  Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days shows how slow cinema lets time itself carry the meaning and  operating, in Deleuzean terms, as a time-image that drives the narrative. 

5. THE LOAD (2018): SILENCE AS EVIDENCE 

Vlada is a truck driver hired to transport a mysterious load from Kosovo to Belgrade during  the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. During his mission, the audience (and Vlada) gradually  realize that the sealed truck contains bodies – victims of a massacre covertly moved and  buried by Serbian authorities. Much like Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica (2006) and Cristian  Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) use personal stories to confront war trauma  and oppression, Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load uses a minimalist, slow cinema style to engage  with the unspeakable truth of war crimes. Even though Glavonić’s film is undoubtedly a road  film, the emphasis is on the monotony and tension of the drive, the everyday life of a land at  war, and the unseen weight of the cargo. This minimalist approach exemplifies what Hamid  Naficy calls an accented cinema aesthetic – one that favors everyday non-dramatic pauses and  long silences, de-emphasizes spectacle, and inscribes absence as a form of presence (Naficy  2001: 24). In other words, silence and stillness are used as narrative instruments, inviting the  viewer to actively imagine the horror left offscreen. Therefore, rather than explicitly showing  atrocities, The Load builds suspense and through the unseen or that with remains on the  margins. Much of the film takes place inside the truck’s – a claustrophobic space where Vlada  sits in silence, smoking and listening to the rumble of the engine. In a sense, this confining  interior evokes the condition of internal exile. Naficy observes that life in exile is often  marked by the narratives of waiting and pursuit that bring claustrophobia and confinement, and in that way shape the phenomenon of exilic chronotopes (Naficy 2001: 12). Likewise,  Vlada’s journey unfolds as a fugitive passage through his own homeland, where police  checkpoints and shattered thoroughfares recast Serbia’s landscape into a liminal zone that  offers neither sanctuary nor certainty.

The Load introduces subtle moments of transcendental disparity ss Vlada’s journey goes on,  manifested in the implicit and trivial elements of the everyday life, where the suppressed  reality pushes through. For Vlada, the disparity lies between his routine task (driving and  following orders) and the moral horror contained in his cargo. This contradiction exemplifies  how The Load uses oblique signs to indicate the absent Others: in this case, Kosovar Albanian  civilians who have “vanished” amid war. The film thereby manifests what Trinh T. Minh-ha  describes as the music of alterity in the traces of the Other – specters of those who have  disappeared, intrude silently to “haunt those who stay” (Trinh 2011: 2). The film’s quiet,  observant style forces us to see what is usually ignored – the repressed trauma that hovers like  an unseen weight over the landscape. 

Symbolically, emptiness pervades human interactions as well, which are brief and numb.  When Vlada stops at a deserted roadside cafe, a television in the corner broadcasts news of  Kosovo, which the few guests pointedly ignore. This apathetic silence suggests a more  serious, collective denial, or rather an unwillingness to face the atrocity occurring in their  name. In Trinh T. Minh-ha’s terms, it is a symptom of “drawing the line between the others  and myself” in order to feel secure (Trinh 2011: 30). The Serbian characters, by refusing to  acknowledge the suffering of the Kosovar Others, attempt to fortify a boundary of  indifference. Yet The Load methodically breaks down this boundary. When Vlada picks up a  teenage hitchhiker, Paja, the potential for conversation arises, but their exchanges remain  sparse and halting. The generational subtext is clear: Paja represents the youth who, like many  in the former Yugoslavia, feel out of place and dream of elsewhere (at one point Paja  mentions an indie band in Prague, hinting at escape). Their strained dialogue, or lack thereof,  underscores the chasm between a traumatized older generation complicit in silence and a  restless younger generation living amid ruins. The Other here is not only ethnic (Serb vs  Albanian) but also temporal – the past self that Vlada has tried to distance, and the future self  that Paja aspires to. As Trinh writes, “If it’s hard to be a stranger, it is even more so to stop  being one” (Trinh 2011: 30).  

In that context, it can be argued that Vlada has become, in a sense, a stranger in his own land,  carrying an invisible burden that separates him from the unknowing people around him. The  journey has deterritorialized him. He is no table to simply return to a comfortable inside because he now carries the outside (the knowledge of the bodies) within him. The original  home can neither be recaptured nor can its presence/absence be entirely banished in the  remade home. (Trinh 2011: 33). In this regard, the stasis here represents a form of cultural paralysis like the other films’ conclusions. In Grbavica, a mother and daughter part ways in  silence and mutual acceptance, and in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, two friends sit  speechless after an ordeal. In all three examples, history has been hinted at but not fully  reconciled, and while justice is absent, only personal conscience or solidarity stirs. 

6. THE SPECTRAL ARCHIVE AND MYTHIC TIME IN ULYSSES’  GAZE (1995) 

Even though the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos is not in any way directly tied to Romania  or to the countries of former Yugoslavia, his films The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) and  Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), make us painfully aware of the complexity, pain, and possibly an  emerging hope that exist in the Balkans, that cross section of East and West which includes  northern Greece, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, much of Turkey, parts  of Hungary, and up to Austria (Horton 1997: 71). In both films, often called the “Balkan  Duo,” Angelopoulos’s cinematic attempt to fulfill his personal wish for a new form of  communication among Balkan people can be seen (ibid.). 

Ulysses’ Gaze is a mythical journey through the fractured history of the Balkans, rendered in a  slow, dreamlike transcendental style. The protagonist of the film is a filmmaker know only as  “A.” (and starring the famous Harvey Keitel) as he travels from Greece through the former  Yugoslavia, all the way to Sarajevo, in search of legendary lost film reels – an archive of the  early 20th century Balkan images that symbolizes a lost origin for the region’s collective  memory. Angelopoulos uses both literal borders (national frontiers, checkpoints) and  figurative borders (between past and present, myth and history) to structure A.’s odyssey. In  the opening sequence, a giant disassembled statue of Lenin is floated down the Danube on a  barge, which serves as a striking visual of Communism’s end (Horton 1997: 106). This mythic  overture immediately situates the film at a border between eras, portraying the fall of  Communism in the Balkans as an oneiric ceremony of passage. It also exemplifies  Angelopoulos’s celebrated use of dead time – extended pauses in which time itself becomes  the story. As Angelopoulos himself concludes: “The pauses, the dead time, give the spectator  the chance to assess the film rationally but also to create, or complete, the different meanings  of a sequence” (quoted in Schrader 2018: 9). In other words, by holding shots for an  unusually long duration, Ulysses’ Gaze actively invites the viewer’s imaginative participation, which is precisely what Paul Schrader identifies as a crucial element of slow cinema. Even  though it may seem counterintuitive, slowness demands more viewing engagement, forcing us  to fill the temporal gaps with our own reflection (Schrader 2018: 9-10). 

What makes Ulysses’ Gaze’s fluid treatment of time and memory specific and distinctive, is  that Angelopoulos often merges historical moments into present day scenes, creating a visual  layer of past and present. In a famous long tracking shot from the film, A. walks through the  ruins of present-day Sarajevo. As the camera follows him, the area subtly transforms into the  1940s with partisans and villagers suddenly appearing. In this surreal moment, A. becomes a  ghostly witness to a prior era. Angelopoulos refuses to cut, allowing multiple times to coexist  within a single space, suggesting that the Balkan past is never truly past haunts the present.  The film’s slow pace and transcendental elements enhance this effect, reshaping historical  trauma into spiritual presence. Angelopoulos’s style often evokes a kind of mythic time, as if  the Balkans were a realm where chronology loops back on itself. Indeed, the very title Ul  ysses’ Gaze invokes of course Homer’s Odyssey, the archetypal journey of return. A.’s journey  across the war-time Balkans parallels Ulysses’s wanderings, which can be connected to what  Hamid Naficy observes in diasporic narratives. She states that the exilic journey often echoes  epic myth, but the return is cathartic but not triumphant (Naficy 2001: 223). In A.’s situation,  every border he crosses brings him face to face with remnants of a shattered past, reinforcing  an ethos of “border poetics” wherein each frontier is both a separation and a point of  connection to unheard stories. 

The final long take of the film, with its mournful stillness, becomes a true moment of  transcendental stasis – an image of universal sorrow and memory beyond words. As Schrader  notes, a true stasis image functions as a second reality standing beside ordinary reality, an  expression of the Wholly Other or the spiritual dimension (Schrader 2018: 76). Here that  spiritual dimension is secularized as history itself – the weight of history gazing back. Without  showing us the content of the recovered archive but instead showing us the act of gazing at it,  Angelopoulos effectively makes his own film into the archive that matters, that is an archive  of the Balkan soul in the 1990s.

 

7. VIOLENCE AND EVERYDAYNESS IN AURORA (2010) 

If Ulysses’ Gaze externalizes Balkan history all the way to the archetypical, grand odyssey,  Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s Aurora (2010) internalizes the post-socialist condition into an  austere, claustrophobic character study. The film is a three-hour portrait of a middle-aged,  divorced father Viorel, whose mundane Bucharest daily routine gradually leads to multiple  murders. This murderous agenda is only explained briefly and unsatisfactory in the final scene  of the film in which Viorel turns himself in. Puiu stages the first double-murder in a single  wide shot from a distance, framed in a way that we see Viorel raise his shotgun and fire, but  the actual impact on the victims is just off-frame. Aurora’s violent scenes in which Viorel  shoots and kills people are visually presented with the same deadpan, uneventful tone as every other narrative moment in the film. Puiu’s formal choices underline that visual style. There is no musical score, the editing is minimalistic and acting nonexpressive. What is more, Puiu is  starring as Viorel, so this slow-paced tragedy has Puiu directing himself as Bressonian 

protagonist with a deliberately expressionless demeanor in the first part of the film, and with sarcasm about his gradual downfall in the second part of the film (Nasta 2013: 163).  Deconstruction of violence and examinations of the banality of evil follow the minimalist  approach, and so do the typical slow cinema techniques such as long takes and sparse  dialogue – all features of a varied strain of austere cinema that favours mood over event  (ibid.).  

In a conventional (Hollywood) film, these murders would be considered powerful narrative  moments, if not the climaxes of the films, that either provide shock or catharsis. In Aurora,  they pass almost as quietly as any other mundane errand Viorel performs, which inevitably  guide us towards transcendental style’s sparse means. As Schrader observed within the films  of Ozu and Bresson (and sometimes Dreyer), filmmakers whose style can be called  transcendental, summon the viewer to something deeper by denying the immediate  satisfactions of melodrama and forcing us them to see beyond the narrative elements, rather than through them (Schrader 2018: 69). 

The title Aurora (meaning dawn) is an Antonioni-esque oxymoron filled with irony. Most of  the narrative unfolds at night or in barely lit environments, while the day Viorel kills his in laws and goes to the police to confess it is a bright summer day (Nasta 2013: 164). All the  described disunity represents Schrader’s transcendental element of disparity par excellence – Viorel’s outwardly ordinary environment and the inward tempest of emotion or nihilism that must be driving him. Furthermore, although it may seem like Aurora cannot be linked to the  concept of the Other, mostly because the film is very static geographically (stays in  Bucharest), Puiu does frame Viorel as a stranger to others around him. At one point, he sits in  a cafeteria eavesdropping on strangers, at another he stands alone watching children  (including his own) playing behind a fence, separating him in a literal, physical way. Puiu has  stated in an interview that he wanted to depict how Viorel is alienated in his own city, moving  through it like a foreigner would1, which is very evident in the film. Viorel drifts through  public spaces unnoticed, highlighting the breakdown of community. In one haunting shot, he  stands in a large abandoned industrial yard (a vestige of the Communist era) before  committing one of the murders – an image of a man lost in a wasteland that once provided  identity (the factory) but is now just ruin. This can be connected to Naficy’s argument that  terms the key chronotope of homeland is that of prison, surveillance, claustrophobia, and  control, often present in accented/exilic cinema and symbolizing the lost home (Naficy 2001: 181, 240). Aurora is not about external migration, but it internalizes exile. Viorel is exiled  from normal life, wandering like a ghost in familiar yet unwelcoming everyday places. 

The anti-climactic climax of Aurora, Viorel goes to a police station and calmly confesses his  crimes to an indifferent police officer. This long interrogation scene is shown with a static  understatement. Viorel lists whom he had killed and vaguely explains why, while the  policemen type up a report and chat among themselves. In the context of transcendental  potential of the film, Aurora achieves a form of negative transcendence. It does not offer the  comfort of redemption or the revelation of a higher plane. There is nothing even remotely  close to transcendence for Viorel, and yet the film’s trivial stillness and refusal of closure  make the audience reflect on the social and existential conditions that have been presented. In  this context, Aurora confirms the thesis that slow cinema, by reducing and stripping away expressive narrative elements and dramatic plot points, becomes a powerful tool of witness 

bearing. Just as Ulysses’ Gaze turned the Balkan wars and borders into an epic spectral  archive, Aurora turns late 2000s Bucharest into an archive of contemporary existence that  captures the hollowing out of meaning and the extremity of isolated individuals in a post socialist context. 

1 https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/feature-articles/cristi-puiu 

interview/#:~:text=,conflict%20burns%20inside%20the

 

8. CONCLUSION 

This article analyzed five films as case studies to collectively elaborate on how cinema can  confront neglected historical narratives and unresolved political past in the post-socialist Romania and in the countries of former Yugoslavia. Each film served as a unique example on  how directors use minimalist approach, elements of transcendental style and slow cinema  techniques to portray the trauma, violence and cultural paralysis left in the wake of  socialism’s collapse. The slow pace of reform and the limbo of transition (neither fully  socialist nor successfully integrated into capitalist prosperity) created what Anca Pușca calls  the unfolding of change that is experienced through stop-and-start rhythms and material ruins  (Pușca 2015: 129-37). In this context, the slow tempo of the analyzed Balkan films can be  seen as mimetic of an entire society’s liminality, which is its feeling of being stuck in in between time. To conclude this research is to state that this can serve as an opening to a much  more complex theme of positioning post-Yugoslavian and Romanian cinema as counter 

archives of transition and post-socialist realities. Grbavica, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,  The Load, Ulysses’ Gaze and Aurora all elaborate how post-socialist cinema can use silence,  distance and displacement and duration as instruments of historical reckoning. 

Drawing on the elements of transcendental style (namely the three phases of everyday,  disparity and stasis), Deleuze’s time-image and concept of slow cinema, the analysis of these  five films as micro case studies observed how five different directors use slowness, silence  and stasis (both as Schrader’s concept and as a state of cultural paralysis) as modes of ethical  engagement with the dominant historical narratives. Schrader (2018: 21) argues that  filmmakers across cultures have “understood they could slow movies down to create a new  reality, to explore memory, to beget contemplation”. In these films, the sparse and reduced  usage of editing, music and other filmic means invites this type of contemplation with  focusing on everyday, mundane, and often empty spaces through which the camera lingers to articulate implicitly the weight of history inside a frame. Boym’s concept of counter-memory and embracing the ambivalence of general history opposed to “certainty” of total history is  another crucial approach for any further research. In Grbavica, Esma builds the myth of the  “heroic father,” only for it to dissolve intro reflective mourning. 4 Months focuses on the  everyday reality of late socialism in Romania, simultaneously refusing both trivialization and  revisionism in dealing with the theme of women’s right over their own body.

Equally relevant to the motifs of silence and post-socialist transitional realities in the Balkan  area is the question of the Other that is not some “exotic” member of foreign or our society,  but rather the Other within, the domestic Other that is displaced in its own dominant culture. In that context, Trinh Minh-ha perfectly concludes that with any attempt to blur the line  between outsider and insider justifiably provokes anxiety (Trinh 2011: 30). This is best shown in The Load, where multiple checkpoints, cafes and refugees clash with a truck that composes Naficy’s exilic chronotope within the homeland, with the protagonist Vlada becoming a  stranger in his own land. On the other hand, Aurora internalizes exile. Viorel is a stranger in  his own city, displaced in the familiar spaces that occupy his everyday life. On the opposite  side of the motif of exile stands Ulysses’ Gaze: a filmmaker who is both the insider and the  foreigner and whose search for undeveloped films reels articulates the literal and metaphorical archive as a lost origin that is manifested in the culmination of the film. Angelopoulos’s final  stillness asks us to accept the limit of the gaze and the irretrievability of what was seen. 

To conclude, chosen films show that cinema of former Yugoslavia and Romania stylistically and formaly unite to the certain extent, in order to articulate a similar post-socialist transitional reality. The slow rhythm, long shots, minimalistic editing, letting a pause endure,  leaving a doorframe half-closed – amount to a politics of attention that resists erasure. Endings remain open: a tentative embrace, a dinner table heavy with unsaid things, a road  receding into fog, a man under fluorescent lights. Such “closures” do not resolve the past, they keep it present. While reducing or even refusing to rely on spectacle in favour of  patience, empathy, and stylistic austerity, these films ask audiences not simply to look back with new eyes, but to keep the dialogue between past and present, self and the Other, history  and morality – open.

 

9. SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bazin, A. (2004) What Is Cinema? Volume 1. Translated by H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Berger, J. (2008) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books. 

Bordwell, D. (1997) On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. 

Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta.  London: The Athlone Press. 

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language.  Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. 

Horton, A. (1997) The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation. Princeton,  NJ: Princeton University Press. 

Levi, P. (2007) Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post Yugoslav Cinema. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 

Light, D. and Young, C. (2015) ‘Local and counter-memories of socialism in post-socialist  Romania’, in Beyen, M. and Deseure, B. (eds) Local Memories in a Nationalizing and  Globalizing World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 221-43. 

Naficy, H. (2001) An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. 

Pușca, A.M. (2016) Post-Communist Aesthetics: Revolutions, Capitalism, Violence.  Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. 

Schrader, P. (2018) Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Oakland, CA:  University of California Press. (With new introduction: Rethinking Transcendental Style’, pp.  1-35.) 

Schrader, P. (2022) Transcendentalni stil na filmu: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer: s novim uvodom – “Pokušaji promišljanja transcendentnog stila”. Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez. (Croatian  edition; translation: I. Ostojčić). 

Trinh, T. Minh-ha (2011) Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the  Boundary Event. London and New York: Routledge.