Romanian Capitalism on Film

Microhistories of Hope, Anxiety and Adaptation

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by Constantin Parvulescu and Claudiu Turcuș

Type

Essays

Subject

Countries > Europe

Keywords

Romania, politics, economics

Publishing date

2025 (October 31, 2025)

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 284 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-3995-4016-2

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Book Presentation:
Romanian Capitalism on Screen examines contemporary Romanian cinema as a testimony to pivotal aspects of Romania's postsocialist economy and culture. It complements existing accounts of economic and cultural history by utilizing the perspective of socially engaged, high-quality cinema to provide enlightening insights into the country's emerging capitalist culture.

Focusing on key feature films of the New Romanian Cinema, the monograph presents a methodological framework for analyzing cinematic texts as "histories of the present." It addresses the economic imagination of emerging entrepreneurial classes, the value of human life within neoliberal contexts, the struggles of the middle and working classes during periods of radical economic and social transformation, the mental mapping of globalization from a European periphery, and emigration as a form of economic revenge.

About the authors:
Constantin Parvulescu is associate professor of film and media studies, director of the Janovics Center for Screen and Performing Arts and Head of the Master’s Program in Film and Audiovisual Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University. He has written several articles on the political cinema of Europe, film and economic history, and Eastern European film cultures. He is the author of Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject (2015) and the editor Global Finance on Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street (2017).Claudiu Turcuș is Associate Professor, and Dean of School of Theatre and Film within Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj. He published widely on topics such as the cultural memory of Socialism, the intellectual history and representations of post-1989 transition, or the aesthetics of New Romanian Cinema. His book, Norman Manea. Aesthetics as East Ethics (2016) is the very first monograph about life and oeuvre of this important Romanian-American writer.

Press Reviews:
This is a study that disrupts the patronising view of Eastern Europe as only ‘catching up’―instead, it foregrounds the advantages of the peripheral vantage with its own capacity to narrate Europe’s contradictions back to its core. Romanian Capitalism on Film is not only a major contribution to film studies and cultural history. It is, in the deepest sense, a warning and an invitation: to read the screen as testimony, to recover small truths, and to reckon with the unfinished story of Europe's essentialized "margins." ― Cornel Ban, Associate professor of inetrnational political economy, Copenhagen Business School

See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press