{"id":9163,"date":"2025-12-14T11:08:48","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T11:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/?p=9163"},"modified":"2025-12-14T11:08:48","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T11:08:48","slug":"tibor-durdev-silence-after-the-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/tibor-durdev-silence-after-the-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Silence After the Revolution. Yugoslavian and Romanian Cinema as Archives of Transitional Everyday Life – Tibor \u0110ur\u0111ev"},"content":{"rendered":"

Silence After the Revolution<\/h1>\n

Yugoslavian and Romanian Cinema as Archives of Transitional Everyday Life<\/h1>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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  1. INTRODUCTION\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In his influential book <\/span>Ways of Seeing <\/span><\/i>(1972), John Berger states: \u201cThe way we see things is\u00a0 affected by what we know or what we believe\u201d (Berger 2008: 8). With this seemingly simple\u00a0 observation, Berger foregrounds a critical approach that goes beyond his analysis of visual\u00a0 arts: vision is never neutral. Every act of looking and observing is shaped by ideology,\u00a0 memory and expectations, interpreted through our previous knowledge. In that context,\u00a0 cinema, as a medium and art form in one, both shows and withholds information. As the\u00a0 revered French film theorist Andr\u00e9 Bazin argues, the photographic image is the object itself,\u00a0 the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it (Bazin 2005: 14). This\u00a0 ontological quality, or rather capacity that films have to extract the everyday from the flow of\u00a0 time, grants cinema a unique archival power. Yet, Bazin (ibid.) also notes that despite any\u00a0 objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the\u00a0 object reproduced.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    These aesthetic and affective elements positions film as a potent tool for historical inscription,\u00a0 thought not necessarily in terms of traditional historiography. Here, Michel Foucault\u2019s\u00a0 distinction between <\/span>total history <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>general history <\/span><\/i>becomes especially relevant. Total\u00a0 history, he argues, seeks to reconstitute the overall form of civilization, which is the\u00a0 significance common to all the phenomena of a certain period, drawing all elements around a\u00a0 single center of meaning (Foucault 1972: 9). On the other hand, general history resists this\u00a0 centripetal pull and favors juxtaposition over unification. It deploys the space of dispersion,\u00a0 mapping discontinuities, layers, and contradictions that defy a simple synthesis (Foucault\u00a0<\/span>1972: 10). In the context of major political and historical shifts, total history seeks to impose a\u00a0 unified narrative that organizes disparate events around a singular center of logic and\u00a0 meaning, which inevitably leads to further obscuring the contradictions, silences and affective\u00a0 residues that resist, or cannot be placed within the linear understanding of these historical\u00a0 events. Cinema, in Foucault’s sense, can (or should) function as a general history of transition,\u00a0 which is as a medium that collects heterogeneous fragments rather than a single <\/span>face <\/span><\/i>of a\u00a0 period. Storytelling assembled from these fragments resists the closure of a total history,\u00a0 remaining multivocal, much like the incomplete process of social transition itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s can serve as a\u00a0 paradigmatic example of the theoretical approaches mentioned above. The end of socialist\u00a0 regimes in Yugoslavia and Romania between 1989 and 1991 were not only a political and\u00a0 economic shifts but also produced a crisis of alternative historical narratives. In many post\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Communist countries, the new system promoted what Vladimir Tismaneanu termed a\u00a0 \u201cpolitics of forgetfulness\u201d: an intentional collective amnesia about the socialist past, deemed\u00a0 necessary to move forward (Light & Young 2015: 244). In Romania, the early 1990s were\u00a0 marked by efforts to \u201cdraw a thick line\u201d separating the present from the previous Communist\u00a0 era, brushing aside a nuanced reckoning with what came before (ibid). Similarly, across the\u00a0 former Yugoslavia, as Pavle Levi observes, the once prominent ideal of multinational\u00a0 \u201cYugoslavism\u201d was retrospectively disowned and stigmatized. After the violent disintegration\u00a0 of the Socialist Federal Republic, public discourse, through revisionism and ethnic\u00a0 polarization, diminished the more complex social legacy, simultaneously rendering the\u00a0 Yugoslav wars as inevitable, thereby justifying both the conflict and the dismissal of the\u00a0 previous era’s more integrative identity (Levi 2007: 3-4). In that sense, Tismaneanu’s \u201cpolitics\u00a0 of forgetfulness\u201d implies that what was remembered through total history is as significant as\u00a0 what was forgotten. Here, cinema emerges and can function as a concepts Svetlana Boym\u00a0 calls <\/span>counter-memory <\/span><\/i>culture \u2013 an unofficial circuit of stories, jokes, images, and recollections\u00a0 through which people preserved alternative versions of history (Boym 2001: 61-62). By\u00a0 focusing on personal intimate stories and unresolved traumas, post-socialist films of\u00a0 Yugoslavian countries and Romania often implicitly ask the Foucaultian question: whose\u00a0 history is being told, and whose is being forgotten?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    To explore how post-socialist cinema constructs this affective counter-archive, the essay\u00a0 focuses on a specific use of slowness, silence, and stasis in what film studies today consider to\u00a0 be a stylistic movement called <\/span>slow cinema<\/span><\/i>. Here, Paul Schrader’s influential book\u00a0<\/span>Transcendental style in film <\/span><\/i>(1972), serves as an ideal framework for understanding how\u00a0 reductive filmic means can be used as a form of style. Many filmmakers of the Romanian\u00a0 New Wave and post-Yugoslav cinema have gravitated toward minimalist film style,\u00a0 significantly different from both Hollywood films and European mainstream cinema. Long\u00a0 takes, sparse dialogue, observational long shots, and slow pacing are only some of the stylistic choices that are dominant in films such as <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>(2006), <\/span>The Load <\/span><\/i>(2018), <\/span>Ulysses\u2019 Gaze\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    (1995), <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>(2010) and <\/span>4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days <\/span><\/i>(2007), which will serve as case\u00a0 studies of this research. In the context of major political and historical changes, institutional\u00a0 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,\u00a0 migration, gendered violence, and ethnic tension. By comparing post-Yugoslav and Romanian\u00a0 contexts, this research analyzes silence not as absence, but as a voice buried underneath the\u00a0 \u201cnew normal\u201c, drawing on the film concepts of slow cinema and Paul Schrader\u2019s\u00a0 transcendental style.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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    1. ON TRANSCENDENTAL STYLE\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The book <\/span>Transcendental Style in Film <\/span><\/i>(1972) is one of the most influential studies of the\u00a0 spiritual, the transcendent, and the sacred as elements of film style. When Paul Schrader, then\u00a0 a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in film studies at the University of California, set out\u00a0 to define what transcendental style might refer to, he found himself caught in his own\u00a0 paradox. Above all, because in looking at transcendental style in the seventh art form both\u00a0 ends of the spectrum (as a theorist and critic and later as a screenwriter and director), he could\u00a0 not help but notice that the attempt to craft a definition is a self-canceling process, grounded\u00a0 in the insurmountable contradiction of the term <\/span>transcendent <\/span><\/i>\u2013 the verbalization of the\u00a0 ineffable (Schrader 2022: 57). Indeed, the concept of <\/span>style <\/span><\/i>fares only slightly better in film\u00a0 studies in terms of a clear definition, so the entire collocation risks opening more problems\u00a0 than it solves. Schrader recognizes this himself, which is precisely why he offers a\u00a0 comprehensive analysis of three auteurs and their bodies of work as an attempt to concretize\u00a0 the characteristics of that style, in the hope that, if a crisp definition is not possible, he can at\u00a0 least asymptotically approximate for the reader\/viewer what exactly the title of his book refers\u00a0 to. Those three auteurs are Yasujir\u014d Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Given\u00a0 that, according to Schrader (2022: 53), transcendental style is used by auteurs from different\u00a0 cultures to express the exalted, the <\/span>otherworldly <\/span><\/i>and the sacred, a religious context is\u00a0<\/span>inextricably ascribed to it. However, a crucial distinction vis-\u00e0-vis the term <\/span>religious <\/span><\/i>lies in\u00a0 the fact that transcendental style is not bound exclusively to films with religious subject\u00a0 matters. In semantic terms, transcendental style is not intrinsically transcendent or religious;\u00a0 rather, it is a general representational film form that expresses the transcendent (Schrader\u00a0 2022: 58).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

      Transcendental style is neither a personal vision nor an official catechism; it is not necessarily\u00a0 characterized by Christ on the cross or Joan of Arc at the stake, just as it need not manifest\u00a0 itself in (spiritual) suffering, narrative models, or characterization \u2013 it is, strictly speaking,\u00a0 only a style (Schrader 2022: 54). So, the one indispensable thing about transcendental style is\u00a0 the fact that we are dealing with a form of style. What, then, is style? How do we recognize\u00a0 that a given film is suffused with a given style? David Bordwell, in <\/span>On the History of Film\u00a0 Style <\/span><\/i>(1997), treats this question thoroughly through a historical analysis of the art of film. In\u00a0 the narrowest sense, Bordwell takes style to be the systematic and significant use of filmic\u00a0 devices. Those devices fall into broad areas: <\/span>mise-en-sc\u00e8ne <\/span><\/i>(staging, lighting, performance,\u00a0 and setting), framing, focus, control of color values, and other expressive elements of film\u00a0 (Bordwell 1997: 4). In his study of style, Croatian film theorist Hrvoje Turkovi\u0107 identifies its\u00a0 clear determinant: Bordwell\u2019s \u201csystematic and significant use\u201d points to the fact that style is\u00a0 necessarily tied to choice, and not just any series of choices, but a systematic, persistent, and\u00a0 somehow limited series of choices that seeks a certain consistency, i.e., a selective and\u00a0 constraining criterion of the consistency of those choices (Turkovi\u0107 2005: 231). In other\u00a0 words, in the narrower sense Turkovi\u0107 defines style as the weave of traits of a given film or\u00a0 group of films by which a recognizable individuality can be determined (Turkovi\u0107 2005: 230).\u00a0 It is precisely this recognizable individuality that Schrader seeks among the films of Ozu,\u00a0 Bresson, and Dreyer, or, as he puts it, the expression of similar ideas in similar forms by\u00a0 different cultures (Schrader 2022: 53). The key lies in one of the fundamental elements of\u00a0 transcendental style \u2013 the use of <\/span>abundant means <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>sparse means<\/span><\/i>, which Schrader (2022:\u00a0 195-96) elaborates as follows. Abundant means are those characteristic expressive elements of\u00a0 film that arouse the viewer\u2019s interest in each film. Within the classical (Hollywood) style, all\u00a0 expressive means (Bordwell\u2019s filmic devices) are subordinated to the idea of audience\u00a0 participation in the actions and situations on the screen. The task of a director working in\u00a0 transcendental style is to harness that empathy as a potential to keep the audience\u2019s interest in\u00a0 the film, and then gradually discard the abundant means and replace them with sparse means \u2013 through a process of stripping down the classical style and form (ibid.). Shots grow\u00a0<\/span>unmotivated long, acting become inexpressive, camera movement minimal, and scenography\u00a0 reduced. The role of transcendental art is to stylize reality by removing those stylistic\u00a0 elements that primarily express human experience, thereby depriving conventional\u00a0 interpretations of reality of their importance and power (ibid.).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

      Thus, transcendental style is defined precisely by the gradual movement from abundant means\u00a0 toward sparse means. Even so, that transition is still too broad to discern and analyze a film of\u00a0 transcendental style more concretely. This is why Schrader introduces the three dramaturgical\u00a0 stages of every film in transcendental style, which serve as crucial points for recognizing the\u00a0 transition from abundant to sparse means: <\/span>the everyday<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>disparity<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>stasis <\/span><\/i>(Schrader 2022:\u00a0 86-93, 195-96). <\/span>The everyday <\/span><\/i>is the initial state, in which abundant means are still present. In\u00a0 other words, the everyday adheres to the \u201crealistic\u201d elements of films and begins to undermine\u00a0 them. In the stage of <\/span>disparity<\/span><\/i>, the conflict between abundant and sparse means becomes\u00a0 evident to the viewer. This stage is personified by the protagonist, a person in a realistic shape\u00a0 and environment whose behavior becomes the model of spareness. The abundant means are\u00a0 gradually converted into sparse means and culminate in <\/span>stasis <\/span><\/i>\u2013 the moment of \u201ccomplete\u00a0 otherness\u201d in which the film metaphorically stops, and the viewer surpasses (abundant and\u00a0 sparse) means, stepping outside the frame of art toward a state of transcendence. At that point\u00a0 the \u201cgradual purification of the visual\u201d is complete and the spiritual process begins (ibid.). For\u00a0 example, stasis doesn\u2019t need to be a religious \u201cmiracle.\u201d It can be achieved by a sudden\u00a0 reversal of means, as when Ozu in <\/span>Tokyo Story <\/span><\/i>(1953) surprises the viewer with Setsuko\u00a0 Hara\u2019s expressive tears (Schrader 2022: 94). This is the essence of the matrix of Schrader\u2019s\u00a0 analysis of transcendental style, which he applies to all three auteurs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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      1. TRANSCENDENTAL STYLE AND SLOW CINEMA AS MODES OF DISINTEGRATION\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        In the 2018 revised edition of <\/span>Transcendental Style in Film<\/span><\/i>, Paul Schrader revisits his analysis\u00a0 in the light of new cinematic trends that emerged since his 1972 book. Schrader\u2019s initial\u00a0 transcendental style was characterized by a deliberate reduction of narrative, non-expressive\u00a0 acting, and mise-en-sc\u00e8ne that withholds emotion, culminating in a moment of <\/span>stasis <\/span><\/i>that\u00a0 opens the door to the transcendent (Schrader 2018: 35). In a new introduction called\u00a0 \u201cRethinking Transcendental Style\u201c, he immediately points to the most prominent concept that\u00a0 developed from the transcendental style by posing a question: <\/span>\u201cWhat happened? Gilles Deleuze happened. So did Andrei Tarkovsky. And slow cinema was\u00a0 soon to follow.\u201d (Schrader 2018: 1)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

        In <\/span>rethinking <\/span><\/i>his theory decades later, Schrader observes that contemporary art cinema has elaborated the transcendental style further into what has since developed into <\/span>slow cinema<\/span><\/i>, which inherits the long, contemplative shots and sparse narrative of transcendental style, but\u00a0 often without the same overtly spiritual focus. From Schrader’s perspective, slow cinema is a\u00a0 direct descendant of transcendental style, adapted to a secular, global art cinema context\u00a0 (Schrader 2018: 16). It carries forward techniques that encourage viewers to \u201clean into the\u00a0 film\u201d and experience a meditative state (Schrader 2018: 10), but now frequently used to\u00a0 explore material and historical conditions rather than focusing on overt spiritual themes. In\u00a0 that context, Gilles Deleuze\u2019s theory of the <\/span>time-image <\/span><\/i>from his book <\/span>Cinema 2: The Time Image <\/span><\/i>(1989), provides a crucial framework for understanding the temporal and affective\u00a0 experience slow cinema creates. He argues that after World War II, many films abandoned the\u00a0 linear, action-driven logic of the classical <\/span>movement-image <\/span><\/i>and instead began to present time directly, often through disjointed narratives, idle periods, and unresolved situations (Deleuze\u00a0 1989: xv). These <\/span>time-image <\/span><\/i>films replace the clear sensory-motor links of classical cinema\u00a0 with \u201cpure optical and sound situations\u201d and ambiguous, dream-like passages that invite the\u00a0 spectator into a more contemplative, open-ended engagement with the image (Deleuze 1989:\u00a0 17). Slow cinema exemplifies this tendency. It represents cinema of <\/span>duration<\/span><\/i>, where long\u00a0 shots or static landscapes allow the viewer to <\/span>feel <\/span><\/i>the passing of time in an unmediated way.\u00a0 In the absence of fast-paced plot, the viewer\u2019s mind is encouraged to wander, associate, and\u00a0 reflect \u2013 experiencing what Schrader (via Deleuze) calls \u201ccinematic introspection\u201d (Schrader\u00a0 2018: 5).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

        Where Deleuze\u2019s theoretical framework particularly enriches Schrader\u2019s concept is in\u00a0 explaining the <\/span>affective function <\/span><\/i>of this style without recourse to mysticism. Schrader argued\u00a0 that transcendental style\u2019s final <\/span>stasis <\/span><\/i>induces a kind of spiritual contemplation in the viewer \u2013 a moment of transcendence. Deleuze (1989: 16-19) would agree that these films induce\u00a0 contemplation, but he locates the power not in a metaphysical breakthrough but in the\u00a0 <\/span>material image <\/span><\/i>itself: the <\/span>time-image <\/span><\/i>shakes up our normal sensory-motor expectations and\u00a0 forces us to think and feel in a new way. Deleuze (ibid.) argues the modern cinema\u2019s ability to\u00a0 confront us with \u201cthe intolerable\u201d \u2013 thereby awakening a thinking viewer who must confront\u00a0 time and reality directly in slow cinema \u2013 often means witnessing long stretches of \u201cdead\u00a0 time\u201d or banal activities. The viewer is then prompted into a state of reflection that can be\u00a0<\/span>profound. Thus, Deleuze\u2019s <\/span>time-image <\/span><\/i>serves as a crucial framework for understanding slow\u00a0 cinema as a concept that highlights the passage of time, as well as the thought itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

        The transcendental style and (more closely) slow cinema aesthetics finds a poignant\u00a0 resonance in in societies dealing with the collapse of utopian political imaginaries and the\u00a0 disintegration of a cohesive social narrative, for example post-socialist cinema. Filmmakers\u00a0 from these countries (in our case former Yugoslavia and Romania), have often adopted slow,\u00a0 minimalistic, and fragmentary styles to reflect the uncertainties of the post-socialist reality. Pavle Levi, in his study <\/span>Disintegration in Frames <\/span><\/i>(2007), conceptualizes this formal tendency.\u00a0 His theoretical approach, <\/span>disintegration in frames<\/span><\/i>, represents political fragmentation of the\u00a0 Yugoslav socialist regime manifested in the aesthetic strategies of regional cinema,\u00a0 particularly through narrative structure and visual austerity. Levi identifies a stylistic shift\u00a0 toward deep-focus realism and long takes, especially in films by \u017divojin Pavlovi\u0107, where an\u00a0 \u201caesthetics of the disgusting\u201d and a \u201cpoetics of viciousness\u201d replace any remnants of socialist\u00a0 idealism (Levi 2007: 36). This visual minimalism operates as both aesthetic strategy and\u00a0 ideological critique, echoing broader postwar art cinema\u2019s turn from movement to duration,\u00a0 which is to Deleuze’s <\/span>time-image<\/span><\/i>. Romanian New Wave directors like Cristi Puiu and Cristian\u00a0 Mungiu employ long, static shots and minimalistic sequences to depict the trivial textures of\u00a0 (post) Communist life in a comparable way \u2013 offering a cinema of observation that exposes\u00a0 the absence of dominant ideological frames. Such cinematic strategies reflect a critical refusal\u00a0 of binary moralism and historical closure. What is more, Levi argues that these films require\u00a0 an active and skeptical viewer who must navigate ambiguity and confront unreliable narrators\u00a0 and perspectives (Levi 2007: 145). Disintegrative aesthetics in Balkan cinema can serve as a\u00a0 counter-narrative, pulling apart mythologies of ethnic purity and ideological redemption by\u00a0 means of stillness, fragmentation, and formal ambiguity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

        To further understand how post-socialist slow cinema transforms transcendental style into a\u00a0 mode of historical reflection, we turn to Svetlana Boym\u2019s notion of cinema as a form of\u00a0 <\/span>counter-memory<\/span><\/i>. In her study, <\/span>The Future of Nostalgia <\/span><\/i>(2001), Boym describes <\/span>counter memory <\/span><\/i>as the unofficial, often subversive memory practices that flourished under Soviet and\u00a0 Eastern European Communist regimes, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s (Boym 2001:\u00a0 61). Importantly, <\/span>counter-memory <\/span><\/i>often involved pointing out the blemishes and gaps in\u00a0 official history \u2013 \u201cfinding blemishes in the official narrative of history or even in one\u2019s own\u00a0 life,\u201d (Boym 2001: 61). Furthermore, Boym notes that in the late 1980s, as censorship eased,\u00a0 there was an explosion of films and artworks that used \u201cdifferent forms of <\/span>counter-memory<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>carnival, kitsch and reflective nostalgia to perform a cultural exorcism, to shake up the\u00a0 historical myths\u201d (Boym 2001: 62). The crucial element of Boym\u2019s concept of <\/span>counter memory <\/span><\/i>is that it emphasizes the method of engaging with the past. It is not merely a\u00a0 collection of alternative facts and texts but also an alternative way of reading \u2013 one\u00a0 characterized by ambiguity, irony, and personal inflection (ibid.).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

        Slow cinema, especially in its post-socialist incarnations, can be seen as a trigger for this kind\u00a0 of <\/span>counter-memory<\/span><\/i>. This can again be connected to Deleuze’s <\/span>time-image <\/span><\/i>cinema, which\u00a0 operates not through action but through “the coexistence of sheets of past” (Deleuze 1989:\u00a0 99), requiring the spectator to think, remember and connect disparate temporalities. In that\u00a0 way, by refusing the streamlined storytelling of mainstream historical dramas and focusing\u00a0 instead on (quiet) everyday moments and marginal characters, slow cinema films effectively\u00a0 reframe history \u201cfrom below.\u201d These films thus function as what we might call an <\/span>affective\u00a0 archive<\/span><\/i>: they record not the grand historical events and leaders, but the moods, textures, and\u00a0 rhythms of lived experience during and after the major historical and political changes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

        The films we will now analyze often end on border-like moments, pauses that are both an\u00a0 ending and a suggestion that life (or history) must somehow continue past a point of no\u00a0 resolution.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

          \n
        1. DOMESTIC SILENCE AND MATERNAL <\/b>COUNTER-MEMORY <\/i><\/b>4.1. <\/b>GRBAVICA: LAND OF MY DREAMS <\/i><\/b>(2006)\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Jasmila\u202f\u017dbani\u0107\u2019s\u202f<\/span>Grbavica:\u202fLand\u202fof\u202fMy Dreams <\/span><\/i>(2006) is set in Sarajevo a decade after the\u00a0 Bosnian war, and follows Esma and her teenage daughter Sara, as they navigate their lives in\u00a0 the lingering aftermath of wartime. The film is characterized by an intimate narrative structure and style that relies visually on interior settings and \u201cloud\u201d silences to convey what is left\u00a0 unspoken: Esma\u2019s rape in a prison camp led to Sara birth. The everyday life in <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>is\u00a0 shown through mundane domestic tasks and modest living conditions and perfectly fits\u00a0 Schrader\u2019s concept of the transcendental <\/span>everyday. <\/span><\/i>Furthermore, this type of understated\u00a0 realism can be linked to a broader post-Yugoslav cinematic trend(s). Rather than\u00a0 sensationalizing war, \u017dbani\u0107 documents the everyday effects of conflict on ordinary lives\u00a0 (Levi 2007: 110). In fact, Pavle Levi notes that during the 1990s Bosnian filmmakers\u00a0 (including \u017dbani\u0107 in her early career) gravitated toward unvarnished chronicles of civilian\u00a0 suffering, committed to creating an extensive chronicle of life under the most inhuman\u00a0<\/span>circumstances (Levi 2007: 109-110). <\/span>Grbavica<\/span><\/i>\u2019s focus on everyday moments of survival thus\u00a0 aligns with this impulse to remember through the ordinary, rather than through explicit and\u00a0 dominant narratives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

          The film actively cultivates silence as a form of <\/span>counter-memory<\/span><\/i>. Esma attends a support\u00a0 group for female war survivors, but we never hear her speak in the sessions. What is more, we\u00a0 only see her sitting in silence. At home, Esma’s situation with Sara oscillates between\u00a0 tenderness and strain now that Sara is growing curious about who her father really is. \u017dbani\u0107\u00a0 chooses to show several mother and daughter exchanges in long takes with minimal dialogue.\u00a0 For example, an extended shot at the dinner table where Sara pointedly asks about her father\u00a0 and Esma deflects by barely responding, the camera observing their faces in a single two-shot.\u00a0 The tension builds up in pauses and glances. Here we see what Schrader describes as the\u00a0 disparity beneath the everyday \u2013 the unnatural density of unspoken emotion accumulating\u00a0 under mundane routine (Schrader 2018: 70). In this case, it is the growing strain between\u00a0 Esma\u2019s need to hide the past and Sara\u2019s need to know it. Notably, Esma\u2019s fabrication of a war hero father exemplifies what Svetlana Boym would call a <\/span>restorative nostalgia<\/span><\/i>: a myth that\u00a0 \u201cmends\u201d the gaps of memory with a coherent tale of recovered identity (Boym 2001: 53). By\u00a0 framing Sara\u2019s origins in terms of a fallen national hero, Esma is attempting to rebuild a\u00a0 semblance of honorable past. This personal version of the heroic national narrative, in Boym\u2019s\u00a0 terms, proposes to rebuild the lost home and make up for the memory gaps (Boym 2001: 49).\u00a0 This kind of restorative narrative resonates with what Levi (2007) observes in many post Yugoslav war films: the tendency to cast one\u2019s nation as the innocent victim-hero and create a\u00a0 comforting fiction in which suffering is given heroic meaning (Levi 2007: 128). Nevertheless,\u00a0 <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>gradually undermines this fiction through silence and restraint. Esma\u2019s inability to\u00a0 speak about the past signal what Boym terms a <\/span>reflective <\/span><\/i>approach to memory, one that does\u00a0 not think of itself as tradition or absolute truth but instead cherishes shattered fragments of\u00a0 memory and acknowledges the irreparable nature of the past (Boym 2001: 49). In other\u00a0 words, the film\u2019s quiet, uneasy domestic scenes refuse to turn trauma into a clear-cut patriotic\u00a0 story. The silence itself becomes a testament to trauma \u2013 a living counter-archive that resists\u00a0 both facile remembrance and deliberate forgetting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

          This disparity eventually leads to the decisive action of the film in form of a confrontation in\u00a0 which Sara, after finding evidence that her father was not truly a war hero, demands the truth\u00a0 from her mother at gunpoint. Only then does Esma finally break down and confesses that\u00a0 Sara\u2019s father raped her. Her, \u017dbani\u0107 does not give the characters (nor the audience) a moment\u00a0<\/span>to process this crucial information, but rather keeps the camera focused on the women\u2019s faces\u00a0 in a long, trembling take, that captures the devastating silence. In that sense, the emotional\u00a0 reaction is almost anti-climactic, which paradoxically gives it more significance \u2013 the\u00a0 audience is forced to confront the trauma without catharsis, just like the characters. In this\u00a0 painful confession, one can discern what Boym (2001: 54) \u2013 following Freud \u2013 calls the only\u00a0 true form of \u201creturning home\u201d: the analysis and acknowledgement of a repressed trauma. This\u00a0 moment is also a turning point where <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>pointedly departs from the patterns of\u00a0 nationalist war cinema. Unlike films that would use such suffering to stoke hatred or vindicate\u00a0 one side, \u017dbani\u0107\u2019s film pointedly avoids depicting the perpetrator or aligning the trauma with\u00a0 an ethnopolitical agenda. In Levi\u2019s terms, <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>rejects the \u201ckitsch\u201d of patriotic\u00a0 victimhood (the kind of narrative where a character\u2019s tragedy would be exploited to affirm\u00a0 collective national innocence) and instead aligns with the more rational, humanist strand of\u00a0 post-Yugoslav cinema that emerged in reaction to ethnic propaganda (Levi 2007: 130). The\u00a0 scene of Esma\u2019s confession is thus stripped of any signifiers of enemy or revenge. It is purely\u00a0 an intimate reckoning. By focusing on the inner toll of war violence \u2013 a mother and\u00a0 daughter\u2019s personal crisis \u2013 the film performs what Levi describes as a critical analysis of\u00a0 war\u2019s social aftermath, rather than a phobic melodrama of \u201cethnic revenge\u201d (Levi 2007: 130).\u00a0 The immediate aftermath of the confession is not triumphant resolution, but a sobering\u00a0 emptiness, leading <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>into its final phase of stasis. Here, transcending does not imply\u00a0 overcoming or forgetting the trauma. On the contrary, it means fully acknowledging a painful\u00a0 reality and yet finding a way to live with it. The silence that closes <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>is the silence of\u00a0 unspeakable history finally shared and collectively held, it is a visual <\/span>counter-memory <\/span><\/i>of all\u00a0 the overlooked stories, both personal and collective, that were left out of dominant and linear\u00a0 historical narratives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

          4.2. <\/span>4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS <\/i><\/b>(2007)\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

          Cristian Mungiu\u2019s <\/span>4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days <\/span><\/i>(2007) is set in 1987 Romania, during\u00a0 Ceau\u0219escu\u2019s regime, and focuses on the female experience under oppressive conditions. Regarding its stylistic choices, <\/span>4 Months <\/span><\/i>goes even further into the aesthetics of slow cinema\u00a0 than in <\/span>Grbavica<\/span><\/i>. Mungiu\u2019s film is a cornerstone of the Romanian New Wave, elaborating the\u00a0 cinematic movement\u2019s austere realism and focus on everyday life under Communism. The\u00a0 story follows Otilia and Gabita as they arrange an illegal abortion for Gabita, which is a\u00a0 dangerous activity, given the regime\u2019s strict ban of that right. Focusing on two young women\u00a0 caught in this situation, Mungiu uses personal narrative to highlight a socio-political system.\u00a0<\/span>Formally, <\/span>4 Months <\/span><\/i>employs a typical slow-cinema aesthetic, with Mungiu sticking to the\u00a0 minimalistic trend of static long shots, real-time pacing, hand-held camera movement and the\u00a0 absence of musical score (Nasta 2013: 186). Every scene in the film is presented through\u00a0 thoughtful scene composition and meticulous camera work, and many of them in steady\u00a0 unbroken shots, in order to generate maximum dramatic effect. In perhaps its most celebrated\u00a0 (or notorious) sequence, Mungiu places Otilia at a family dinner she cannot escape. After\u00a0 securing the abortion, she must briefly attend her boyfriend\u2019s mother\u2019s birthday gathering.\u00a0 This scene, shot in one static shot lasting about 7 minutes, creates a sense of unvarnished\u00a0 reality and sustained tension. The camera lingers beyond the point of conventional editing, a\u00a0 technique typical for transcendental style, as well as slow cinema, with the effect of\u00a0 withholding the expected relief (Schrader 2018: 12).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

          The film\u2019s temporal austerity also serves a thematic purpose, resonating with post-communist\u00a0 memory and nostalgia. Two decades after the fall of Communism, Romanian society was\u00a0 grappling with how to remember the era. Official discourse tended to repudiate the socialist\u00a0 past, yet many individuals recalled it in more ambivalent ways, sometimes even with\u00a0 nostalgia for its lost \u201ccertainties\u201d amid the chaos of transition (Light & Young 2015: 239). On\u00a0 the other hand, <\/span>4 Months <\/span><\/i>can be interpreted through Svetlana Boym’s concept of <\/span>reflective\u00a0 nostalgia<\/span><\/i>, which is less concerned with restoring a fantasized past, than with critically\u00a0 acknowledging the irrevocability of it and meditating on lost time (Boym 2001: 49). Mungiu\u00a0 indeed refuses to romanticize or skip in a fast-forward way through the past. When paired\u00a0 with historical insistence on showing how oppression invaded ordinary and everyday life <\/span>\u2013 4 months <\/span><\/i>functions as a <\/span>counter-memory <\/span><\/i>to both the country’s simplistic anti-communist\u00a0 narrative and the public\u2019s nostalgia. With the focus on the uncomfortable truths of 1987, the\u00a0 film transforms personal recollection into an experience of repression that had long been\u00a0 marginal in official histories. In that context, through the intimate story of Otilia and Gabi\u021ba,\u00a0 Mungiu brings to light Ceau\u0219escu\u2019s ban on abortion which turned Romanian women\u2019s bodies\u00a0 into systems controlled by the government. This state is articulated by the film\u2019s slow,\u00a0 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,\u00a0 fears, and acts of solidarity that defined these women\u2019s daily survival under the decree. In\u00a0 doing so, <\/span>4 Months <\/span><\/i>gives voice to those silenced by history and ensures that their suffering is\u00a0 neither sentimentalized nor forgotten. The film\u2019s final silence, even more so than in <\/span>Grbavica<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0 is in transcendental context a true moment of <\/span>stasis<\/span><\/i>. Otilia and Gabita sit together in a hotel\u00a0<\/span>restaurant. They are exhausted, traumatized, and speak only briefly. Otilia tells Gabita firmly\u00a0 that \u201cWe will never talk about this, okay?\u201d They sat in silence. Mungiu keeps the shot on\u00a0 them for a long moment, before Otilia looks directly at the camera, which is at us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

          In this way, the restrained formal style of the film becomes a means of ethical remembrance.\u00a0 Mungiu makes us witness every anxious minute and every feeling pushed down, turning a\u00a0 grim episode of the past into a quietly searing cinematic memorial. Bringing together the\u00a0 minimalist form, post-communist temporality and a sustained focus on female subjectivity, <\/span>4\u00a0 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days <\/span><\/i>shows how slow cinema lets time itself carry the meaning and\u00a0 operating, in Deleuzean terms, as a <\/span>time-image <\/span><\/i>that drives the narrative.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

            \n
          1. <\/b>THE LOAD <\/i><\/b>(2018): SILENCE AS EVIDENCE\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            Vlada is a truck driver hired to transport a mysterious load from Kosovo to Belgrade during\u00a0 the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. During his mission, the audience (and Vlada) gradually\u00a0 realize that the sealed truck contains bodies \u2013 victims of a massacre covertly moved and\u00a0 buried by Serbian authorities. Much like Jasmila \u017dbani\u0107\u2019s <\/span>Grbavica <\/span><\/i>(2006) and Cristian\u00a0 Mungiu\u2019s <\/span>4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days <\/span><\/i>(2007) use personal stories to confront war trauma\u00a0 and oppression, Ognjen Glavoni\u0107’s <\/span>The Load <\/span><\/i>uses a minimalist, slow cinema style to engage\u00a0 with the unspeakable truth of war crimes. Even though Glavoni\u0107\u2019s film is undoubtedly a road\u00a0 film, the emphasis is on the monotony and tension of the drive, the everyday life of a land at\u00a0 war, and the unseen weight of the cargo. This minimalist approach exemplifies what Hamid\u00a0 Naficy calls an <\/span>accented cinema <\/span><\/i>aesthetic \u2013 one that favors everyday non-dramatic pauses and\u00a0 long silences, de-emphasizes spectacle, and inscribes absence as a form of presence (Naficy\u00a0 2001: 24). In other words, silence and stillness are used as narrative instruments, inviting the\u00a0 viewer to actively imagine the horror left offscreen. Therefore, rather than explicitly showing\u00a0 atrocities, <\/span>The Load <\/span><\/i>builds suspense and through the <\/span>unseen <\/span><\/i>or that with remains on the\u00a0 margins. Much of the film takes place inside the truck\u2019s \u2013 a claustrophobic space where Vlada\u00a0 sits in silence, smoking and listening to the rumble of the engine. In a sense, this confining\u00a0 interior evokes the condition of internal exile. Naficy observes that life in exile is often\u00a0 marked by the narratives of waiting and pursuit that bring claustrophobia and confinement, and in that way shape the phenomenon of exilic <\/span>chronotopes <\/span><\/i>(Naficy 2001: 12). Likewise,\u00a0 Vlada\u2019s journey unfolds as a fugitive passage through his own homeland, where police\u00a0 checkpoints and shattered thoroughfares recast Serbia\u2019s landscape into a liminal zone that\u00a0 offers neither sanctuary nor certainty.<\/span><\/p>\n

            The Load <\/span><\/i>introduces subtle moments of transcendental disparity ss Vlada’s journey goes on,\u00a0 manifested in the implicit and trivial elements of the everyday life, where the suppressed\u00a0 reality pushes through. For Vlada, the disparity lies between his routine task (driving and\u00a0 following orders) and the moral horror contained in his cargo. This contradiction exemplifies\u00a0 how <\/span>The Load <\/span><\/i>uses oblique signs to indicate the absent <\/span>Others<\/span><\/i>: in this case, Kosovar Albanian\u00a0 civilians who have \u201cvanished\u201d amid war. The film thereby manifests what Trinh T. Minh-ha\u00a0 describes as the <\/span>music of alterity <\/span><\/i>in the traces of <\/span>the Other <\/span><\/i>\u2013 specters of those who have\u00a0 disappeared, intrude silently to \u201chaunt those who stay\u201d (Trinh 2011: 2). The film\u2019s quiet,\u00a0 observant style forces us to <\/span>see <\/span><\/i>what is usually ignored \u2013 the repressed trauma that hovers like\u00a0 an unseen weight over the landscape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

            Symbolically, emptiness pervades human interactions as well, which are brief and numb.\u00a0 When Vlada stops at a deserted roadside cafe, a television in the corner broadcasts news of\u00a0 Kosovo, which the few guests pointedly ignore. This apathetic silence suggests a more\u00a0 serious, collective denial, or rather an unwillingness to face the atrocity occurring in their\u00a0 name. In Trinh T. Minh-ha\u2019s terms, it is a symptom of \u201cdrawing the line between the others\u00a0 and myself\u201d in order to feel secure (Trinh 2011: 30). The Serbian characters, by refusing to\u00a0 acknowledge the suffering of the Kosovar Others, attempt to fortify a boundary of\u00a0 indifference. Yet <\/span>The Load <\/span><\/i>methodically breaks down this boundary. When Vlada picks up a\u00a0 teenage hitchhiker, Paja, the potential for conversation arises, but their exchanges remain\u00a0 sparse and halting. The generational subtext is clear: Paja represents the youth who, like many\u00a0 in the former Yugoslavia, feel out of place and dream of elsewhere (at one point Paja\u00a0 mentions an indie band in Prague, hinting at escape). Their strained dialogue, or lack thereof,\u00a0 underscores the chasm between a traumatized older generation complicit in silence and a\u00a0 restless younger generation living amid ruins. The <\/span>Other <\/span><\/i>here is not only ethnic (Serb vs\u00a0 Albanian) but also temporal \u2013 the past self that Vlada has tried to distance, and the future self\u00a0 that Paja aspires to. As Trinh writes, \u201cIf it\u2019s hard to be a stranger, it is even more so to stop\u00a0 being one\u201d (Trinh 2011: 30).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

            In that context, it can be argued that Vlada has become, in a sense, a stranger in his own land,\u00a0 carrying an invisible burden that separates him from the unknowing people around him. The\u00a0 journey has deterritorialized him. He is no table to simply return to a comfortable <\/span>inside <\/span><\/i>because he now carries the <\/span>outside <\/span><\/i>(the knowledge of the bodies) within him. The original\u00a0 home can neither be recaptured nor can its presence\/absence be entirely banished in the\u00a0 remade home. (Trinh 2011: 33). In this regard, the stasis here represents a form of cultural\u00a0<\/span>paralysis like the other films\u2019 conclusions. In <\/span>Grbavica<\/span><\/i>, a mother and daughter part ways in\u00a0 silence and mutual acceptance, and in <\/span>4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days<\/span><\/i>, two friends sit\u00a0 speechless after an ordeal. In all three examples, history has been hinted at but not fully\u00a0 reconciled, and while justice is absent, only personal conscience or solidarity stirs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

              \n
            1. THE SPECTRAL ARCHIVE AND MYTHIC TIME IN ULYSSES\u2019\u00a0 GAZE (1995)\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              Even though the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos is not in any way directly tied to Romania\u00a0 or to the countries of former Yugoslavia, his films <\/span>The Suspended Step of the Stork <\/span><\/i>(1991) and\u00a0 <\/span>Ulysses’ Gaze <\/span><\/i>(1995), make us painfully aware of the complexity, pain, and possibly an\u00a0 emerging hope that exist in the Balkans, that cross section of East and West which includes\u00a0 northern Greece, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, much of Turkey, parts\u00a0 of Hungary, and up to Austria (Horton 1997: 71). In both films, often called the \u201cBalkan\u00a0 Duo,\u201d Angelopoulos’s cinematic attempt to fulfill his personal wish for a new form of\u00a0 communication among Balkan people can be seen (ibid.).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

              Ulysses\u2019 Gaze <\/span><\/i>is a mythical journey through the fractured history of the Balkans, rendered in a\u00a0 slow, dreamlike transcendental style. The protagonist of the film is a filmmaker know only as\u00a0 \u201cA.\u201d (and starring the famous Harvey Keitel) as he travels from Greece through the former\u00a0 Yugoslavia, all the way to Sarajevo, in search of legendary lost film reels \u2013 an <\/span>archive <\/span><\/i>of the\u00a0 early 20th century Balkan images that symbolizes a lost origin for the region\u2019s collective\u00a0 memory. Angelopoulos uses both literal borders (national frontiers, checkpoints) and\u00a0 figurative borders (between past and present, myth and history) to structure A.\u2019s odyssey. In\u00a0 the opening sequence, a giant disassembled statue of Lenin is floated down the Danube on a\u00a0 barge, which serves as a striking visual of Communism\u2019s end (Horton 1997: 106). This mythic\u00a0 overture immediately situates the film at a border between eras, portraying the fall of\u00a0 Communism in the Balkans as an oneiric ceremony of passage. It also exemplifies\u00a0 Angelopoulos\u2019s celebrated use of <\/span>dead time <\/span><\/i>\u2013 extended pauses in which time itself becomes\u00a0 the story. As Angelopoulos himself concludes: \u201cThe pauses, the dead time, give the spectator\u00a0 the chance to assess the film rationally but also to create, or complete, the different meanings\u00a0 of a sequence\u201d (quoted in Schrader 2018: 9). In other words, by holding shots for an\u00a0 unusually long duration, <\/span>Ulysses\u2019 Gaze <\/span><\/i>actively invites the viewer\u2019s imaginative participation,\u00a0<\/span>which is precisely what Paul Schrader identifies as a crucial element of <\/span>slow cinema<\/span><\/i>. Even\u00a0 though it may seem counterintuitive, <\/span>slowness <\/span><\/i>demands more viewing engagement, forcing us\u00a0 to fill the temporal gaps with our own reflection (Schrader 2018: 9-10).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

              What makes Ulysses\u2019 <\/span>Gaze’s <\/span><\/i>fluid treatment of time and memory specific and distinctive, is\u00a0 that Angelopoulos often merges historical moments into present day scenes, creating a visual\u00a0 layer of past and present. In a famous long tracking shot from the film, A. walks through the\u00a0 ruins of present-day Sarajevo. As the camera follows him, the area subtly transforms into the\u00a0 1940s with partisans and villagers suddenly appearing. In this surreal moment, A. becomes a\u00a0 ghostly witness to a prior era. Angelopoulos refuses to cut, allowing multiple times to coexist\u00a0 within a single space, suggesting that the Balkan past is never truly past <\/span>haunts <\/span><\/i>the present.\u00a0 The film\u2019s slow pace and transcendental elements enhance this effect, reshaping historical\u00a0 trauma into spiritual presence. Angelopoulos\u2019s style often evokes a kind of mythic time, as if\u00a0 the Balkans were a realm where chronology loops back on itself. Indeed, the very title <\/span>Ul\u00a0 ysses\u2019 Gaze <\/span><\/i>invokes of course Homer\u2019s <\/span>Odyssey<\/span><\/i>, the archetypal journey of return. A.\u2019s journey\u00a0 across the war-time Balkans parallels Ulysses\u2019s wanderings, which can be connected to what\u00a0 Hamid Naficy observes in diasporic narratives. She states that the exilic journey often echoes\u00a0 epic myth, but the return is cathartic but not triumphant (Naficy 2001: 223). In A.\u2019s situation,\u00a0 every border he crosses brings him face to face with remnants of a shattered past, reinforcing\u00a0 an ethos of \u201cborder poetics\u201d wherein each frontier is both a separation and a point of\u00a0 connection to unheard stories.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

              The final long take of the film, with its mournful stillness, becomes a true moment of\u00a0 transcendental stasis \u2013 an image of universal sorrow and memory beyond words. As Schrader\u00a0 notes, a true stasis image functions as a second reality standing beside ordinary reality, an\u00a0 expression of the <\/span>Wholly Other <\/span><\/i>or the spiritual dimension (Schrader 2018: 76). Here that\u00a0 spiritual dimension is secularized as history itself \u2013 the weight of history gazing back. Without\u00a0 showing us the content of the recovered archive but instead showing us the act of gazing at it,\u00a0 Angelopoulos effectively makes his own film into the archive that matters, that is an archive\u00a0 of the Balkan soul in the 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n

               <\/p>\n

                \n
              1. VIOLENCE AND EVERYDAYNESS IN <\/b>AURORA <\/i><\/b>(2010)\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                If <\/span>Ulysses\u2019 Gaze <\/span><\/i>externalizes Balkan history all the way to the archetypical, grand odyssey,\u00a0 Romanian director Cristi Puiu\u2019s <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>(2010) internalizes the post-socialist condition into an\u00a0 austere, claustrophobic character study. The film is a three-hour portrait of a middle-aged,\u00a0 divorced father Viorel, whose mundane Bucharest daily routine gradually leads to multiple\u00a0 murders. This murderous agenda is only explained briefly and unsatisfactory in the final scene\u00a0 of the film in which Viorel turns himself in. Puiu stages the first double-murder in a single\u00a0 wide shot from a distance, framed in a way that we see Viorel raise his shotgun and fire, but\u00a0 the actual impact on the victims is just off-frame. <\/span>Aurora’s <\/span><\/i>violent scenes in which Viorel\u00a0 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\u00a0 starring as Viorel, so this slow-paced tragedy has Puiu directing himself as <\/span>Bressonian\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

                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).\u00a0 Deconstruction of violence and examinations of the banality of evil follow the minimalist\u00a0 approach, and so do the typical slow cinema techniques such as long takes and sparse\u00a0 dialogue \u2013 all features of a varied strain of austere cinema that favours mood over event\u00a0 (ibid.).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                In a conventional (Hollywood) film, these murders would be considered powerful narrative\u00a0 moments, if not the climaxes of the films, that either provide shock or catharsis. In <\/span>Aurora<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0 they pass almost as quietly as any other mundane errand Viorel performs, which inevitably\u00a0 guide us towards transcendental style\u2019s sparse means. As Schrader observed within the films\u00a0 of Ozu and Bresson (and sometimes Dreyer), filmmakers whose style can be called\u00a0 transcendental, summon the viewer to something deeper by denying the immediate\u00a0 satisfactions of melodrama and forcing us them to see beyond the narrative elements, rather than through them (Schrader 2018: 69).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                The title <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>(meaning dawn<\/span>) <\/span><\/i>is an Antonioni-esque oxymoron filled with irony. Most of\u00a0 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\u00a0 described disunity represents Schrader’s transcendental element of disparity <\/span>par excellence \u2013 <\/span><\/i>Viorel\u2019s outwardly ordinary environment and the inward tempest of emotion or nihilism that\u00a0<\/span>must be driving him. Furthermore, although it may seem like <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>cannot be linked to the\u00a0 concept of <\/span>the Other<\/span><\/i>, mostly because the film is very static geographically (stays in\u00a0 Bucharest), Puiu does frame Viorel as a stranger to others around him. At one point, he sits in\u00a0 a cafeteria eavesdropping on strangers, at another he stands alone watching children\u00a0 (including his own) playing behind a fence, separating him in a literal, physical way. Puiu has\u00a0 stated in an interview that he wanted to depict how Viorel is alienated in his own city, moving\u00a0 through it like a foreigner would<\/span>1<\/span>, which is very evident in the film. Viorel drifts through\u00a0 public spaces unnoticed, highlighting the breakdown of community. In one haunting shot, he\u00a0 stands in a large abandoned industrial yard (a vestige of the Communist era) before\u00a0 committing one of the murders \u2013 an image of a man lost in a wasteland that once provided\u00a0 identity (the factory) but is now just ruin. This can be connected to Naficy’s argument that\u00a0 terms the key <\/span>chronotope of homeland <\/span><\/i>is that of prison, surveillance, claustrophobia, and\u00a0 control, often present in accented\/exilic cinema and symbolizing the lost home (Naficy 2001: 181, 240). <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>is not about external migration, but it internalizes exile. Viorel is exiled\u00a0 from normal life, wandering like a ghost in familiar yet unwelcoming everyday places.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                The anti-climactic climax of <\/span>Aurora<\/span><\/i>, Viorel goes to a police station and calmly confesses his\u00a0 crimes to an indifferent police officer. This long interrogation scene is shown with a static\u00a0 understatement. Viorel lists whom he had killed and vaguely explains why, while the\u00a0 policemen type up a report and chat among themselves. In the context of transcendental\u00a0 potential of the film, <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>achieves a form of negative transcendence. It does not offer the\u00a0 comfort of redemption or the revelation of a higher plane. There is nothing even remotely\u00a0 close to transcendence for Viorel, and yet the film\u2019s trivial stillness and refusal of closure\u00a0 make the audience reflect on the social and existential conditions that have been presented. In\u00a0 this context, <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>confirms the thesis that slow cinema, by reducing and stripping away expressive narrative elements and dramatic plot points, becomes a powerful tool of witness\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                bearing. Just as <\/span>Ulysses\u2019 Gaze <\/span><\/i>turned the Balkan wars and borders into an epic spectral\u00a0 archive, Aurora turns late 2000s Bucharest into an archive of contemporary existence that\u00a0 captures the hollowing out of meaning and the extremity of isolated individuals in a post socialist context.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                1 <\/span>https:\/\/www.sensesofcinema.com\/2017\/feature-articles\/cristi-puiu\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                interview\/#:~:text=,conflict%20burns%20inside%20the<\/span><\/p>\n

                 <\/p>\n

                  \n
                1. CONCLUSION\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                  This article analyzed five films as case studies to collectively elaborate on how cinema can\u00a0 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\u00a0 how directors use minimalist approach, elements of transcendental style and slow cinema\u00a0 techniques to portray the trauma, violence and cultural paralysis left in the wake of\u00a0 socialism\u2019s collapse. The slow pace of reform and the limbo of transition (neither fully\u00a0 socialist nor successfully integrated into capitalist prosperity) created what Anca Pu\u0219ca calls\u00a0 the unfolding of change that is experienced through stop-and-start rhythms and material ruins\u00a0 (Pu\u0219ca 2015: 129-37). In this context, the slow tempo of the analyzed Balkan films can be\u00a0 seen as mimetic of an entire society\u2019s 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\u00a0 more complex theme of positioning post-Yugoslavian and Romanian cinema as counter\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                  archives of transition and post-socialist realities. <\/span>Grbavica<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0 <\/span>The Load<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Ulysses\u2019 Gaze <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>all elaborate how post-socialist cinema can use silence,\u00a0 distance and displacement and duration as instruments of historical reckoning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                  Drawing on the elements of transcendental style (namely the three phases of everyday,\u00a0 disparity and stasis), Deleuze\u2019s <\/span>time-image <\/span><\/i>and concept of slow cinema, the analysis of these\u00a0 five films as micro case studies observed how five different directors use slowness, silence\u00a0 and stasis (both as Schrader\u2019s concept and as a state of cultural paralysis) as modes of ethical\u00a0 engagement with the dominant historical narratives. Schrader (2018: 21) argues that\u00a0 filmmakers across cultures have \u201cunderstood they could slow movies down to create a new\u00a0 reality, to explore memory, to beget contemplation\u201d. In these films, the sparse and reduced\u00a0 usage of editing, music and other filmic means invites this type of contemplation with\u00a0 focusing on everyday, mundane, and often empty spaces through which the camera lingers to articulate implicitly the weight of history inside a frame. Boym\u2019s concept of <\/span>counter-memory <\/span><\/i>and embracing the ambivalence of general history opposed to \u201ccertainty\u201d of total history is\u00a0 another crucial approach for any further research. In <\/span>Grbavica, <\/span><\/i>Esma builds the myth of the\u00a0 \u201cheroic father,\u201d only for it to dissolve intro reflective mourning. <\/span>4 Months <\/span><\/i>focuses on the\u00a0 everyday reality of late socialism in Romania, simultaneously refusing both trivialization and\u00a0 revisionism in dealing with the theme of women\u2019s right over their own body.<\/span><\/p>\n

                  Equally relevant to the motifs of silence and post-socialist transitional realities in the Balkan\u00a0 area is the question of <\/span>the Other <\/span><\/i>that is not some \u201cexotic\u201d member of foreign or our society,\u00a0 but rather <\/span>the Other <\/span><\/i>within, <\/span>the domestic Other <\/span><\/i>that is displaced in its own dominant culture. In that context, Trinh Minh-ha perfectly concludes that with any attempt to blur the line\u00a0 between outsider and insider justifiably provokes anxiety (Trinh 2011: 30). This is best shown in <\/span>The Load<\/span><\/i>, where multiple checkpoints, cafes and refugees clash with a truck that composes Naficy\u2019s exilic <\/span>chronotope <\/span><\/i>within the homeland, with the protagonist Vlada becoming a\u00a0 stranger in his own land. On the other hand, <\/span>Aurora <\/span><\/i>internalizes exile. Viorel is a stranger in\u00a0 his own city, displaced in the familiar spaces that occupy his everyday life. On the opposite\u00a0 side of the motif of exile stands <\/span>Ulysses\u2019 Gaze: <\/span><\/i>a filmmaker who is both the insider and the\u00a0 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\u2019s final\u00a0 stillness asks us to accept the limit of the gaze and the irretrievability of what was seen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                  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,\u00a0 leaving a doorframe half-closed \u2013 amount to a politics of attention that resists erasure. Endings remain open: a tentative embrace, a dinner table heavy with unsaid things, a road\u00a0 receding into fog, a man under fluorescent lights. Such \u201cclosures\u201d do not resolve the past, they keep it present. While reducing or even refusing to rely on spectacle in favour of\u00a0 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 <\/span>the Other<\/span><\/i>, history\u00a0 and morality \u2013 open.<\/span><\/p>\n

                   <\/p>\n

                    \n
                  1. SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                    Bazin, A. (2004) <\/span>What Is Cinema? Volume 1<\/span><\/i>. Translated by H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Berger, J. (2008) <\/span>Ways of Seeing<\/span><\/i>. London: Penguin Books.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Bordwell, D. (1997) <\/span>On the History of Film Style<\/span><\/i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boym, S. (2001) <\/span>The Future of Nostalgia<\/span><\/i>. New York: Basic Books.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Deleuze, G. (1989) <\/span>Cinema 2: The Time-Image<\/span><\/i>. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta.\u00a0 London: The Athlone Press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Foucault, M. (1972) <\/span>The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Horton, A. (1997) <\/span>The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation<\/span><\/i>. Princeton,\u00a0 NJ: Princeton University Press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Levi, P. (2007) <\/span>Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post Yugoslav Cinema<\/span><\/i>. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Light, D. and Young, C. (2015) \u2018Local and counter-memories of socialism in post-socialist\u00a0 Romania\u2019, in Beyen, M. and Deseure, B. (eds) <\/span>Local Memories in a Nationalizing and\u00a0 Globalizing World<\/span><\/i>. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 221-43.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Naficy, H. (2001) <\/span>An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking<\/span><\/i>. Princeton, NJ:\u00a0 Princeton University Press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Pu\u0219ca, A.M. (2016) <\/span>Post-Communist Aesthetics: Revolutions, Capitalism, Violence<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Schrader, P. (2018) <\/span>Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer<\/span><\/i>. Oakland, CA:\u00a0 University of California Press. (With new introduction: Rethinking Transcendental Style\u2019, pp.\u00a0 1-35.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Schrader, P. (2022) <\/span>Transcendentalni stil na filmu: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer: s novim uvodom \u2013 \u201cPoku\u0161aji promi\u0161ljanja transcendentnog stila\u201d<\/span><\/i>. Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez. (Croatian\u00a0 edition; translation: I. Ostoj\u010di\u0107).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

                    Trinh, T. Minh-ha (2011) <\/span>Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the\u00a0 Boundary Event<\/span><\/i>. London and New York: Routledge.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                    Silence After the Revolution Yugoslavian and Romanian Cinema as Archives of Transitional Everyday Life \u00a0 INTRODUCTION\u00a0 In his influential book Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger states: \u201cThe way we see things is\u00a0 affected by what we know or what we believe\u201d (Berger 2008: 8). With this seemingly simple\u00a0 observation, Berger foregrounds a critical approach […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9164,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bursa-de-cercetare-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9165,"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9163\/revisions\/9165"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taifasfestival.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}