AuteurCinema during the Thaw and Stagnation

Romanian Cinema in the 1960s: Socialist Modernity vs. Cinematic Modernism

“…Auteur cinema, seen as the opposite of mainstream cinema, was thus championed as a necessary step in the evolution of socialist cinema -a phenomenon which largely mirrors similar developments in the Soviet Union, where, due to the recognition gained at Western film festivals by several Soviet films in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some directors, such as Mikhail Kalatozov, Mikhail Romm and Andrei Tarkovsky, were equally hailed as auteurs. 7 Initially, those same Soviet directors were seen as models for Romanian modernist cinema; this was a convenient strategy, since it implied that the same evolution towards a more personal and sophisticated kind of cinema was characteristic for the Soviet film industry, but it was also a reflection of the scarcity of Western modernist models available to Romanian filmmakers. Indeed, due to the cultural isolation of the 1950s, films by directors which will be frequently quoted as models for Romanian modernist cinema, such as Ingmar Bergman or Luis Buñuel, were first screened in Romania only in 1963, while many other modernist Western films, due to the deficient film distribution, were usually shown in Romanian cinemas with a delay of two or three years.…”