SCREEN-SOCIAL: Screening Romanian Social Transformations, 1990-2021 was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, Romania, project number PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-0141 (June 2022 – December 2024). It was implemented by the Janovics Center for Screen and Performing Arts Studies at the Faculty of Theatre and Film at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. The project leader was Constantin Parvulescu.
SCREEN-SOCIAL highlights and exploits the critical intervention of Romanian cinema and narrative television in debates relevant to the transformation of Romanian postsocialist society, 1990-2021. The analyzed texts are fiction, documentary, animation, short films, and television series. The project advances the findings of more disparate research in film and television studies on this topic and completes knowledge on Romanian culture and society disseminated by historical and social sciences research. It demonstrates that film can offer original perspectives that broaden the comprehension of the accelerated transformation of the Romanian society since 1989.
The debates tackled by SCREEN-SOCIAL have developed around the following topics:
1.The impact on the social fabric of capitalist economic relations of production
2.The cultural inheritance of socialism, and socialist nostalgia
3.Social distrust and the dysfunctional civil society
4.Social justice, inequalities, a weak state, and its deficient public services
5.The resilience of old elites and the rise of new ones
6.Corruption, delinquency, and organized crime
7.Patriarchalism, gender inequality, and gender violence
8.Human rights and the exclusion of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities
9.Youth culture and the crisis of the post socialist family
10.Emigration and population ageing.
To study film’s original participation in these debates, the project team engaged in qualitative analyses of the film text. This work produced a portfolio of situations, characters, and tropes that function as an artistic equivalent of the facts, actors, and concepts defined and employed by history and the social sciences, completing, and challenging them. The exploitation of this portfolio generated the following results:
- Research articles and book chapters – listed on this site under PUBLICATIONS.
- The monograph: Constantin Parvulescu and Claudiu Turcuș, Romanian Capitalism on Film: Microhistories of Hope, Anxiety, and Adaptation. Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming 2025).
- The journal special issue: “Screening Social Transformations in East-Central Europe” in Studies in Eastern European Cinema (forthcoming 2025).
- Conference participations and a variety of communication and outreach activities presented on the project’s BLOG.
- An Experts Workshop and an International Conference presented on this site.
- Five Teaching Packets available for exploitation on this site.
- A MSCA grant application: DRAMATISSM – The Dramatization of Cultural Pessimism through Film, Theatre, and Other Performing Arts in Eastern and Southern European Cultures.
Romanian Capitalism on Film, the flagship deliverable of SCREEN-SOCIAL, examines post-1989 Romanian cinema as a cultural and economic history archive. Forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2025, the monograph offers a comprehensive analysis of a large number of twenty-first century Romanian films, highlighting their capacity to engage dominant narratives about Romania’s economic postsocialist development. Interdisciplinary methods position cinema as an epistemological tool, offering audiovisual metaphors and cognitive maps of economic realities. By blending textual, paratextual, and reception analysis, the book provides groundbreaking insights into Romanian capitalism’s influence on daily life and cultural history. It significantly advances film studies, cultural history, and political economy through its innovative methodology.