Romanian Cinema, Then and Now.

Shining Through a Long, Dark Night: Romanian Cinema, Then and Now opens tomorrow at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, runs through April 27, and "serves up a sampling of eight recent films that helped garner worldwide attention, as well as 10 classics that were lost for years behind the Iron Curtain," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun - and he talks with Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest).

"Divided almost equally between pre- and post-revolution films, the series is nothing if not an object lesson in the habit of artistic movements to reject what has come before," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Where the Romanian films of the new New Wave have been celebrated for their documentary verisimilitude, long hand-held tracking shots, and absence of original music, their precursors - to judge by the evidence here - are deeply formalist works very much influenced (particularly in their approach to montage) by the Soviet constructivists. Yet, past or present, the films share a certain inescapable air of ironic fatalism, which might be considered something of a national temperament."

Earlier: Marina Kaceanov in POV on the "New Romanian Cinema."

Posted by dwhudson at April 16, 2008 9:07 AM