Kitchen Encounters: Scenes of Face to Face Dialogues in Films of

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1 Kitchen Encounters: Scenes of Face to Face Dialogues in Films of Romanian New Wave Directors Mircea Valeriu Deaca University of Bucharest, CESI Doctoral School The cognitive model A setting in film can be constructed by the audience as the recovery of a model of the designed space that will be called a scene. One such model is the diegetic space where characters have a conversation that allows the drama to move forward. The kitchen has a descriptive function concerning the general kind of diegesis, privileging certain aspects of the scene and ignoring others. The dialogue features most prominently, and David Bordwell dedicates long passages to the face to face dialogue (Bordwell 2005, 2008). The kitchen space has a schematic aspect and, as a cognitive model, it evokes a cultural body of knowledge that defines the expectancy of typical actions to be performed. A particular cinematographic construal renders prominence to certain aspects of the scene. This kind of cultural analysis is not new since in a relevant manner Hans Robert Jauss studied the transmission of cultural norms and the model of social interaction in literature using the motif of the nursing home (in his study La douceur du foyer ) (Jauss1978). Doru Pop proposed in his essay What s Eating the Romanian New Wave? (2012) an inquiry on the motivations and the techniques of how Romanian movie makers are dealing with the issue of taste, and food and food consumption as social practice in scenes with characters sitting around a table. For our approach, following Grodal s theoretical investigations (2009: ), realism is generated by the use of typical gestures of characters that are nearly schematic and caricature combined with realism produced by agglomeration of particular minimal actions and gestures. Perceptual complexity generated by the particular and unique produces also the sentiment of realism. On the other hand several features of the cinematographic construal give raise to realism: the use of canonical perspective on the objects represented, the emotional appraisal of the situation, and the quality of imperfect perception 1 (subjective filters). This realist style is, for us, also a definitory feature of the minimalist New

2 Romanian wave. One has to note that, in addition, excess of schematicity invites an allegorical reading. In film the kitchen scene has a twofold advantage. It allows the dramatic unfolding of face to face dialogue and gives the opportunity for the audience to access the characters intimate world. In short, analysis can glean aspects of a specific cultural anthropology. This prototype evokes the cultural values invested: the eros and the agape. Agape is understood as gathering together, tying social bonds with internal and external human beings. Agape facilitates the manifestation of Eros. Love relationships are established between the couple and children. Around the table scenes are prototypical to the discursive evaluation of values that tie the extended family circle and the judgment of what can be incorporated in the family the guest or not the stranger or intruder. Thus the motif of gathering around the table in the kitchen reveals the intimate space of a more affective, tighter and isolated (insulated) relationship. Here members of the family manifest a true face and isolate themselves from role playing that is exerted with external human beings, the guest in the office or in the dining room or lounge. An example of a typical construal of the scene appears in Marţi, după Crăciun/Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, Romania, 2010). Muntean uses a classical wide aspect ratio of 2.35:1 with a medium shot framing of the three members of the family at table: the daughter, the wife, and husband - father figure in the middle of the composition since he is the main character of the narrative. Starting from this schema of a model scene labeled the kitchen we can compare several occurrences of the motif in Romanian films released between Children viewpoints In Amintiri din epoca de aur / Tales from the Golden Age (2009) Cristian Mungiu (as a screenwriter) replays a series of anecdotes that were part of the underground urban legends of the communist era that unfold in the kitchen setting. In a theatrical comedy fashion the child is the reference point for the use of an innocent narrative approach on the family s misfortunes during socialist era Christmas time. The cinematographic construal is barely different from socialist films done before The 2

3 parodic aspect is discernible for the audience that easily perceives the repetition of a socialist style and the incongruity that brings forth the fact that such a content would have been impossible to view during communist era. As any postmodern pastiche the film gives rise to an ironical stance supported by children s point of view towards an absurd life lived by dumb characters narrated with an inadequate cinematography. In Periferic / Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri, Romania, 2010) brother and sister dispute in the kitchen. The kitchen is here the locus of emotional unmasking where the protagonists can isolate from outside witnesses and affective conflict can flare-up when the parental couple is absent. In Cum miam petrecut sfârşitul lumii / The Way I Spent the End of the World (Cătălin Mitulescu, Romania/France, 2006) the director contrasts the day to day relationships between children with the background of the historical change of the 1989 Revolution. By using a close proximity to the child s point of view the director can stage the difference between History and family life. Kitchen is the ground where History can be experienced and witnessed. Serial kitchen(s) An anonymous character leaves each morning his apartment on the 4 th floor of a grey communist building in order to carry the garbage to an outdoor bin in Constantin Popescu Jr. s short film, Apartamentul / The Apartment (Romania, 2004). During this time his wife prepares morning breakfast in the kitchen. The man dresses for a business trip, but, in fact, returns by the backdoor of the building to the 8 th floor where his mistress lives. Next morning the character repeats the garbage carrying ritual while his mistress prepares the meal. He takes once again the elevator but mistakenly he rings the doorbell at his wife s apartment. Their final encounter is underlined by a series of shot / counter-shot singles of their astounded faces. The camera frames the ridiculous slippers borrowed from the mistress the character wears. This short minimalist film proves to be a universal, prototypical tale of an adulterous episode with a tragicomic conclusion (Nasta 2013: 146). Nasta indicates the schematic structure of the film: being totally devoid of dialogue, the film s entire meaning needs to be decoded by way of recurring 3

4 visual elements but also with the help of a very effective soundscape. Nasta concludes that, due to the musical message, the tragicomic conclusion further creates a purely aesthetic, albeit universal kind of film emotion. Minimalist style imposes an allegorical reading. The film is to be a fable of a certain human condition. Scarcity of details schematizes the content represented. Sound cues appeal to such a reading. The anonimity of the character indicates the fact that anyone can be in his position. He is the unknown antihero that lives a ritualized and repetitive life. His home is embedded in a series of identical grey flats that compose an urban landscape. The establishing shot of the scenic kitchen-cube is split into two adjacent views by a dark pillar situated in the forefront of the frame. The view is obstructed by an interdictive bar. Jean Baudrillard once talked about the symbolic role of this interdictive bar that emasculates desire. In a similar fashion the dark pillar in the kitchen that obstructs the view emasculates the scopic desire of the spectator. The gaze is under obstruction, transparence is interdicted and desire is under cut. The spectator is formally positioned in front of the image as the character is inside the diegesis. The protagonist is profiled in a dorsal posture as a shadow in contre-jour against the light coming from the frame of the window. We can see that the character looks outside but we won t see what he sees. We guess that the blurred image of the serial apartments that compose the dull urban scape is all there is to see. No dialogue occurs between the couple seated at table. They are framed in a medium lateral shot which emphasizes the symmetrical line drawn between the silent characters. Eating here is not a feast, but gestures and postures indicate the burden of the effort. No tasty food but just feeding oneself. Agape is absent. Popescu s cinematographic construal avoids editing and narrative evolution of the dramatic event. Absence of dialogue indicates an absence of eros. Sharing and feasting are absent in a leaden agape. The frame is either inside the container, but keeps a distance from the opaque composition, either avoids the best view the most informative vantage point - on the scene. Either close-ups or extreme close-ups enhance autonomous objects in an alienating Bressonian vein, either the camera, inside the scene, is adopting point of views that are impeded by obstacles and obstructers. Typical situations invite for concomitant alternative readings: an allegorical and a realist interpretation. The event depicted in the movie is not marked as today life in Romania or as life in 4

5 yesterday communist Romania. We know that the anecdote was urban legend before But in a sense today is like yesterday. Human condition in 2004 is the same as human condition before So one could say that Popescu s film is a socialist film depicting life in an Orwellian dwelling of a universal communist landscape. This rhetoric is, for us, based on ambivalence between a documentary realist style and a fable / allegorical stance towards the subject matter. Pharmakon thriller In Moartea Domnului Lăzărescu / The Death of Mr Lăzărescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2005), the antihero is victim of an obscure malady and the carelessness of the medical system. The camera, in the first shots of the film, avoids entering the untidy kitchen where the protagonist dwells. No shot reveals the details of the kitchen where the character tries to communicate unsuccessfully with exterior human beings. Lazarescu is trapped in a dimly lit kitchen, alone. A curtain stands behind his back and one can see through it the dark frame of a closed window that provides no access towards the exterior. The character is framed at the end of the episode dorsally in the doorstep, surrounded by dark walls contemplating the interior of a kitchen and then reframed as he advances in the darkness of the corridor. The kitchen is an intimate space full of traces of the past that gives admission to only one exit: towards the dark hallway, a passage to darkness and finally death. The minimal and schematic setting cues a symbolic reading: the character is trapped in a room that gives him admittance just to a passageway towards a journey into death. Those initial shots reveal the film-work and the narration that will be unfolded during the two hours to come. Once again there is no agape, no eros, no dialogue, no passion and no movement. Kichen is the antechamber of an infernal journey and the hero is from the beginning a walking dead driven by under the constraints of a prescripted fate. In Aurora (Romania, 2010) Cristi Puiu, using a shaky handheld camera, heightens the subjective aspect of the camera that avoids the best view of the kitchen. The audience has no access to the intimate space of the protagonist. The masking frame of the door situated in the foreground permanently obscures the view. Viorel, the psychotic killer, takes refuge in a kitchen that is never fully revealed. He does not eat there, and communicates with the exterior world scarcely with the use 5

6 of a telephone. His intimate kitchen space reveals his reluctance to be seen and his kitchen represents a hidden inner mental life. In most kitchen scenes Viorel is depicted in a dorsal position; his inner feelings, expression or mental life are hidden from view. In a mirror fashion the camera is accomplice of this mental positioning. It is ambiguous if Viorel turns his back on the camera or if the camera avoids profiling his face. I labelled in a previous essay on Puiu s films this cinematographic figure as a psychotic camera (Deaca 2013). It is a camera involved in the event (an imperfect perception) that nearly misses the point of narrative interest of the evolving situation; a camera that has difficulties coping with reality. Viorel is trapped in his own mental processes inaccessible to the audience. Identification of the spectator with the point of view of the camera does give access to a kind of mental point of view of the character manifested as an unsuccessful desire to see. Nevertheless the frame, by this partial display, constantly keeps the spectator alert and teases scopic interest. We, like the protagonist of the movie, are under the spell of scopic and guilty desire to see the crime. We are in a state of regression as the Freudian child that peeps through the key hole at the primitive sexual scene of the parents. We want to see violence and murder. For the audience a moral dilemma is set up by the dissociation between the perverse voyeuristic compulsion and the requisite of avoiding passive contemplation of crime and violence. Attraction and repulsion are the two drives of the cognitive dissonance generated by a psychotic camera. The camera is in the other room (like in Moartea Domnului Lazarescu), the dark and deep room of the psyche. It incites desire to see and at the same time keeps a discrete distance that teases our moral involvement in the scene. What is eluded by an ellipsis (the crime) is what is not remembered by the psychopath that keeps reality at a comfortable distance since his mind state is in another room. The audience is formally positioned in this psychotic stance, and it has to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the thriller by a rationale. The audience is imperiously attracted by the violent diegesis and has to construct, in order to obtain a moral alibi, a rationale narrative justifying the guilty act of seeing. A psychotic gap is opened between what one does I see a crime - and what one says I see a film about crime. The coexistence of two mutually incompatible behaviours generate a mechanism aimed at reducing cognitive dissonance and hence create a reflective distance. We remember that Michael Haneke generated a similar reaction in his audience 6

7 (Benny s Video, 1992; Funny Games, 1997). It is not a verfremdungs effect of the kind Brecht theorized but more a kind of awakening spectatorial attitude towards the film. Puiu like Haneke can be argued refuse to offer a solution to this tension created by the film / frame / camera and irritates the spectator s moral and aesthetic judgment without offering any answers (Metelmann 2010: 169). In Marfa și banii / Stuff and Dough (Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2001) characters are cramped in a small kitchen. Each character in the scene is occupied with some action: moving objects, eating, talking, and changing postures with an alert pace. The frenzy human activity evolves around a mute grandmother that has to be fed and, in contrast with all the movements of the bodies surrounding, seems to be inert. The nervousness of the camera is further translated in the subsequent events as the confusion and lack of information the characters will have to live with. Uncertainty and mystery is what the characters will live during their journey: they do not know what is in the parcel they have to deliver in the capital, they do not know the intentions of their commendatory (is he a foe or a protector?), they have only sparse clues concerning the identity of their assailants during the voyage. The camera and the protagonist are not in an optimally informative position. Both try to cope with a scene that is constantly changing and that can be grasped only by fragments that raise more questions than answer. One relevant character s POV depicts the corpses of the assailants. The hero will witness inexplicable violence and opaque death in order to become an adult. One hour into the film the protagonist is back in the kitchen. This time there is just him and his mother. The epilogue focuses on the confusion of the protagonist that, silent and opaque, will not answer to questions raised by his mother about the trip. A change is visible: a slower rhythm and the eyeline of the character that is directed in frame underline his detachment from the action. In the epilogue the hero is an adult that has gathered a single position out of a magma of cramped characters occupied by a continuous and unclear movement. Cristi Puiu s protagonist suffers from an aggression from the villain (mental disorder, malady, incompetent medical corpus, the drug dealer) that is ubicuously inside him (his accomplice to murder, killer or already ill) and outside him; he cannot talk about since he is an accomplice and he can neither act since he is trapped inside the event - like Haneke s characters in Cache (2005) or Amour (2012). Evil is pervasive and the enemy is dwelling outside and inside the hero. We, as spectators, are 7

8 trapped in a similar condition, that is we are accomplices to the deed and misdemeanors of the characters, we are eye witnesses to the evil s actions, but, since we are trapped in the other room, we can t act and restore the situation. One could say that Puiu, as Haneke in the European cinema, tries a thaumaturgical operation by perfusing into our audience-body the poison and the cure of self reflective distance provoked by encounters with violence. Such is the benefit of the pharmakon, the consciousness of tragic in a parable mode. The father figure: home alone The kitchen is the privileged dwelling of the derelict founder of family and social order the old age. A symbolic father figure worn out as the values of the past he metaphorically represents occupies the scene of the kitchen in Loverboy (Cătălin Mitulescu, Romania, 2011). On the other hand, in full existential and creative crisis, the protagonist of Corneliu Porumboiu s film, Când se lasă seara peste București sau metabolism / When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2013) experiences lack of a mother figure in proximity. In this film the hero occupies the place of the father in frame / setting, but is unable to cope with the new situation of suffering and creative lack. Another character that is profiled alone inside his kitchen appears in Corneliu Porumboiu s Polițist, adjectiv (Police, Adjective, 2009) (Nasta 2013: 171). The hero is confronted with a moral dilemma: to apply as a police officer strictly an absurd law and convict a young boy for a minor crime or to disobey police rules and let him go for a while. The decision and free will are belonging to him. His boss patronizes him and menaces him in order to get the arrest. The protagonist, an anti-hero, will abandon in the end the moral judgment and will get done the office he is assigned. He won t murder his oedipal father. He will be re-inscribed in the symbolic order (a line or an adjective in a dictionary, that is the book of procedures), and from human he will be reduced to the order of an insignificant adjective in a symbolic order. In one scene he is profiled alone in his kitchen in a frontal close medium shot. Eating alone is the attribute of the father figure. In traditional society there is no dialogue of equals at table. The 8

9 father figure eats and women and offsprings sit obediently around him. The introverted character is posing and pondering at table without any dialogue partner in front of him. Towards the end of the movie the audience can see him in a brief sequence at table with his wife. They are together cramped in the close medium shot, but the female figure can t give neither advice nor support him for a moral decision. She is just a passive eye witness. The infant takes here the place of the absent father in ironical circumstance and, in contrast with the sacrificed father, the old Rule of Law, he is unable to be a hero. Pop also remarks the fact that the father figure is absent or derelict merely simulacra of their authority - in the New Wave Romanian cinema and that his avatars appear in circumstances that void them of relevance and representativeness (Pop 2010: 29). In Lucian Pintilie s film Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezervă / Niki and Flo (Romania, 2003) two protagonists confront: the ex-colonel Niki : An old-fashioned patriot [...]. He represents the alienated subject, pathetic and marginalized, highly paradoxical because he is nostalgic, like many others, for the Communist times and Flo a pure product of a certain category of post-communist Romanians: vulgar, eccentric, aggressive, seizing any opportunity, any small upstart job to make money and have fun (Nasta 2013: ). Their battleground is Niki s family kitchen stage that Flo is insistently intruding. Niki s kitchen represents the ultimate repair of his intimate life long values and reference points in a world that has suddenly changed its landmarks. Al throughout the film the protagonist is allowed just a portion of the diegetic space of the familial kitchen usually lateral in the forefront or in the background. In the final scene Niki makes a sudden appearance in the middle ground of the kitchen of his counterpart Flo in a medium long shot and, by killing with a hammer the false friend that annoyed him all along, occupies the foreground close up of the image. A subsequent shot of the blank frame of the window gathers metaphoric momentum. Finally the hero gets the upper hand and the front ground of the frame but will end with a gaze into nowhere. The kitchen and the cinematographic frame have become a battle ground between conflicting mentalities. The old father will kill here the impostor, but he will strand in a dead end. Pintilie prepares the terrain for the future alienated protagonists that will be the stars of the Romanian New Wave. Agape and eros melt into agone. 9

10 Terminus paradis Lucian Pintilie, a director of a generation of directors educated long before the turn of the century, in Duminică la ora sase/ Sunday at Six (Romania, 1965) makes a romance plot between Radu and Anca in an action of clandestine resistance movement. The double classical narrative plot (romance and social theme) enmeshes in a modernist vein the dilemmas of passion and social activism, the opposition of desire of freedom, dream and romance and the appeal for the comfort of one s family (Nasta 2013: 86). Kitchen is seen here from the standpoint of the standard understanding of the kitchen cultural model, as the intimate space of family values and paternal / maternal comfort. After this classical illustration of the kitchen as a stage of moral intimate life Lucian Pintilie reuses thirty years later the setting in a modern drama, Terminus Paradis/ Next Stop Paradise (Romania, 1998), (Nasta 2013: 107). The kitchen is here the scenic container where the couple, Norica and Mitu, lives its moments of bliss and love. Singles profile their close dialogue which is in stark contrast with the emptiness of the kitchen. A contrast is established between the pauper setting quite abstract dirty white, the distant outside and the closeness of the intimate dialogue of the couple. A secondary element opens the way for a metaphoric interpretation: a poster on the wall of the kitchen of a rural landscape vividly colored that represents a diegetic poster and a flash-forward subjective moving image. The desolation of the kitchen setting is contrasted to an image of a different kind belonging to the more bright spectacular territory of film imaginary: the successful entertainment industry. The kitchen can be read as the analogue of the camera lucida; a mental image processing data that bridges moments in time. Mental processes or cinematographic procedures are, for Pintilie, alike. The metaphoric setting is the intimate container labeled the kitchen. For Pintilie agape and eros are qualia of this human theater where the couple takes refuge in. It is not the place here to develop here the rhetoric of the repressed Hollywood entertainment imaginary that comes back in the Romanian new wave films as displaced desire. Sooner or later a repressed cinematographic style that was consciously de-negated (in a Freudian sense) comes back as an imaginary subjective image of the paradise lost. 10

11 Kitch warzone Radu Jude in Toată lumea din familia noastră / Everybody In Our Family (Romania / Netherlands, 2012) chooses the kitchen setting in order to emphasize a conflict that spirals out of control, eventually into absurd violence (Nasta 2013: 148). Family bonds literally become in a histerical episode a meticulous depiction of dissolution of affection, dialogue, agape and eros. The stage of the drama is an apartment with many rooms but no coherence since the camera just follows the passages from one room to another of the protagonist and his assailants. Framing prefers slight canted angles (higher or lower the human vantage point) and following / tracking the fragmented body of the hero through the congested space. Mise en scene mirrors mental confusion and cinematographic disturbances. The audience, submerged by a plenitude of details and shapes that are in constant move and differentiate poorly is at pains at focusing. Attentional stress is obtained by repeated disorder. The audience is, as the hero of the film, under constant visual aggression. Continuity editing is disfigured in order to get access to a dismembered family. Quick reframings in close proximity give more attentional emphasis to swift changes of tone and mood. On the other hand handheld camera and proximity cue here an enhanced perceptual realism. The mother figure In Cristian Nemescu s film Marilena de la P7 / Marilena from P7 (Romania, 2006) the plot involves derelict underground Bucharest milieu, where an intolerant pimp (Andi Văsluianu) indulges in youth exploitation and corrupt money dealing. (Nasta 2013: 214). Here kitchen is once again a family s container lacking any outside aperture (window closed and no profiling of the door since it is occupied by the camera). As in other similar filmic scenes, the same feminine figure does the kitchen work (cooking, washing) inside the narrow space of the room. Nemescu replays once again the topos of the nurturing mother caring, advising, and confident that allows the hero to confess or discharge his erotic / identity crisis. Realism is generated here by stereotype actions in a typical setting. Camera insists by successive pans between the accusing mother and the guilty father and son but doesn t change its fixed position from the door. Father and son are in childlike pose in front of the furious 11

12 nurturing mother-wife. Analytical cuts keep the pace with an analytical descriptive attitude of poverty and family comedy of nerves. In Moartea Domnului Lăzărescu / The Death of Mr Lăzărescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2005), even if it is not profiled inside the kitchen, the feminine character, the medical assistant that escort and guide the infernal journey towards death of the dantesque protagonist, Marius Dante Lazarescu, is his intertextual virgilian counterpart. The mother and wife figure have features that are often fusioned. In the cultural orthodox context of the Romanian culture the dantesque intertext transfers the features of the ideal feminine, the Virgin Mary wife and mother -, into the mother figure. Thus the hero s spiritual guide through a post mortem initiation journey will be a feminine figure in Cristi Puiu s film. The domestic mother The mother figure, be it wife or biological mother, takes two dramatic functions. She represents the comforting mother that witnesses the male crisis accomplice participant - or has the role of the supporting mother that feeds, washes and irons clothes. The choice is not ingenuous but repeats a motif that reveals an ironic attitude towards masculine ideology characteristic of a patriarchal society. The audience can t avoid perceiving the ambiguity. Domestic mother as maid servant is a cue of realism and a cue of ironic intent. The packed oblong space of the kitchen is profiled in Corneliu Porumboiu s film, A fost sau n-a fost / 12:08 East of Bucharest (Romania, 2006) that seems to copy mute film comedy stereotypes. Through inappropriate gesture match and posture, husband and wife co-habit back to back this dimly lit container. Each one is confined to his own domestic actions, and, once again, eros and agape are absent. The other couple of the film the TV channel director and its wife - puts in place another comical posture. The husband, seated, is intensely attentive to his conversation on the telephone while his wife, standing, serves him the meal. No exchange of eyelines between them. The woman looks like a (hotel) servant taking care of her master. Similarly Viorel s mother in law in Aurora is adopting the maid-servant role a woman talking and peeling potatoes - that is viewed by the psychopath as an expendable asset. 12

13 The mother figure occupies the kitchen scenes in Marfa şi Banii/Stuff and Dough (CristiPuiu, Romania, 2001). She is here more to comfort and assist the crisis of her son. In Toată lumea din familia noastră / Everybody In Our Family (Radu Jude, Romania/ Netherlands, 2012) the mother figure tries unsuccessfully to alleviate the conflict between father and son. All she manages in the end is to repeat the comportamental typical scheme of cooking. She will stuff the characters in conflict with some cookies. In Pintilie s Duminică la ora 6 she was doing exactly the same inefficient action. Stuffing cakes and being conservative are closely related. All she can produce is a debilitated father and son couple. The cultural model of the domestic mother has stereotyped ways of dealing with family affairs. She is confined and allowed only a reduced set of typical actions which appear displaced in modern life contexts and, as a consequence, she is either ironically depicted or eliminated altogether from the drama (as in Mungiu s films) A change of paradigm: Muter Courage The mother figure takes the foreground in Calin Peter Netzer s film, Poziția copilului / Child s Pose (Calin Peter Netzer, Romania, 2013). The movie profiles with more clarity the dramatic query and dilemmas faced by an active and voluntary mother confronted with a family in dissolution and incapable to cope with realities. The mother figure becomes the hero of the movie and shifts from the more traditional role as supporting (actor) Virgin Mary figure like to a more agentive role. In order to achieve this goal she has to recover the position of the axis of the family by changing her type of activities and by inserting herself in another type of cinematographic depiction. In the scene where the setting is in the kitchen she is alone, moving around and figuring some plan of action. In this episode she is no more the passive character, and neither the typical mama that serves the purpose of moral and emotional comfort and meal serving when needed by the male hero (usually depicted with an ironic twist as an anti-hero). This change of paradigm is reflected in Netzer s cinematographic construal. The woman capable of making decisions and implement action conquers the masculine reclusion and nurturing space, the kitchen. As a continuation of this conquest of the cinematographic foreground she engages and has the initiative of face to face conversations with other characters. 13

14 Subsequently a change of cinematographic style follows. Her conversations are no more shot in static frames, medium and long medium (as iconic tableaux figés that look like old family photos), the axis drawn between the lyrical symbolic window-door (outside vs. inside), but in a clear Hollywood classical narrative style the continuity style. She is associated with a cinematographic style more international, more Hollywood and capitalist style of cinema. Her dialogues are framed in a rigorous over the shoulder and singles that profile intensity of the engagement in dialogues conducted by this strong feminine figure. Minimalist new wave cinema is abandoned for a new cinematographic ideology that abandons the mythology the father figure. In Netzer s film conventional ideological form and content are both discarded. A new cinematographic paradigm is adopted and a feminine approach to conflict and reconciliation is embraced. The film can be read as an allegory of the Romanian society conciliation with the political past, cultural identity, traditional rural society in which the mediator is a new franchised woman that can intermediate forgiveness. Settling the scores becomes a feminine attribute. Conclusion The kitchen stage reveals the cultural model where the moral and social drama can unfold impersonated by the inner family members. In this product of the inner urban alienating space film can develop the excruciating moral dilemmas of the anti-hero, the crisis of the sacrificed father and the debilitating nurturing of the domestic mother. Here directors can operate irony and parody of social and textual clichés that define a constant apprehension of national (?) cinema. Realism conceived as typical characters in typical situations or settings allow for an equivocal allegorical and realist reading. This kind of socialist film in disguise has an educational plan to achieve. The audience is thus invited to reflect on values and principles governing not only the past Romanian history but contemporary life. Thriller like films of Cristian Mungiu - 4 luni, 3 săptămânişi 2 zile/4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and După dealuri/ Beyond the Hills, (2012) - and Cristi Puiu Moartea Domnului Lăzărescu / The Death of Mr Lăzărescu (2005) and Aurora (2010) - make a difference by exploiting a more dense relationship between camera / frame and the diegetic world depicted. 14

15 Separately Calin Netzer s film, Poziția copilului / Child s Pose (Calin Peter Netzer, Romania, 2013), proposes a radical breakup with the traditional cinematographic paradigm dependent on a constant reference to the past Romanian medium and social realities experienced during the communist era. The minimalist (realist) style purposefully produced for the festivals (see Pop 2010: 29sq) was a successful tactic used by a local cinema in order to generate the interest of cinema critics and to differentiate itself as an exotic artifact, art cinema about an alien reality opposed to the dominant cinema mode of fiction narratives (Hollywood universalistic style). The goal has been achieved and Netzer as a member of a new generation abandons altogether minimalism and initiates a change of cinematographic construal and hero role playing that is more consistent with international classical narrative film. References Bordwell, David (2005), Figures Traced in Light. On cinematic staging, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin (8 e ed.) (2008), Film Art: An Introduction, New York: McGraw Hill. Deaca, Mircea (2013), Postfilmic Cinema. Notes and Readings about Contemporary Film, Timisoara: Editura Brumar. Grodal,Torben (2009), Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jauss, Hans Robert [1975] (1978), La douceur du foyer, in Hans Robert Jauss, Pour une esthétique de la reception, Paris: NRF, Gallimard, pp Metelmann, Jörg (2010), Fighting the Melodramatic Condition. Haneke s Polemics, in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke, Wiley-Blackwell, pp Nasta, Dominique (2013), Contemporary Romanian Cinema. The History of an Unexpected Miracle, New York: Wallflower Press - Columbia University Press. 15

16 Pop, Doru (2010), The Grammar of the New Romanian Cinema, Acta Univ Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 3, pp Pop, Doru (2012), What s Eating the Romanian New Wave?, Ekphrasis, 1/2012, pp