Reckoning to Ceausescu's Ghost or A Remembering Attempt in Romanian New Wave Cinema: Amintiri din Epoca de Aur

Abstract

Memory and cinema are in a cooperation that feeds or shapes each other. Cinema processes recollections of individual or collective memory, likewise, memory diversities the cinematic narrative in terms of direction. This unity also comes to mind in expressing the events that have been experienced by societies or communities. Because it is thought that cinema plays an active role in narrating a data or trauma that needs to be remembered about memory sharing it by groups who have experienced similar things. Romanian New Wave Cinema, due to its structure, benefits from the traumas of Nicole Ceausescu’s period, one of the actors the Iron Curtain. Although it is known that individual and collective traumas leave serious traces in the memory of Romanian citizens, the main thing is the existence of confrontation and reckoning. Because in this period, it is revealed by various researches that the great pressures created on the citizens caused traumas in individuals and communities and that these traumas increased until the regime changed/collapsed. Based on what has been said, in this study, the first four episodes that make up the first part of the movie Amintiri din Epoca de Aur (Tales from the Golden Age, 2009), which is a representation of Romanian New Wave Cinema, are taken as an example. In addition, the concept of collective memory is discussed through these four episodes, which convey the negativities of Ceausescu’s era through black humor. For this, the discourses of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory are used and episodes are read within this framework. Starting from a holistic approach, it is desired to support the thesis that although memory is thought to have an individual quality, the group in which the individual belongs are more dominant over memory.