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Cold War, hot stuff. The official critical discourse and the desirability of film stars in socialist Romania

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Date
2022
Author
Gadalean, Andrei
Keywords
Film stars
Romanian cinema
Eastern Europe
Transnational stardom
Film criticism
State socialism
PN1993 Motion Pictures
T-NDAS
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Abstract
This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘60s represented a decade of political and ideological semi-relaxation in socialist Romania. Film audiences retained some access to Western productions, and foreign film stars carried significant erotic appeal to viewers. The state-funded Cinema magazine aimed to disrupt these tendencies either by arguing that the objects of desire were representative of lower quality cinema, or, in full-on Cold War style, by building the case for the decline of Western capitalism through pinpointing all manifestations of sexuality as a symptom of it. This article looks at the ways in which ideological arguments to “redact” film sexuality, while failing to repurpose it, managed to redirect it and reposition it as alien to socialist culture. The article also explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party.
Citation
Gadalean , A 2022 , ' Cold War, hot stuff. The official critical discourse and the desirability of film stars in socialist Romania ' , Studies in Eastern European Cinema , vol. 13 , no. 2 , pp. 180-195 . https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.1999619
Publication
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2021.1999619
ISSN
2040-350X
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/24469

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