Un long fleuve tranquille ou l’histoire comme cauchemar : La croisière de Mircea Daneliuc
A Long Quiet River or History as Nightmare: Mircea Daneliuc’s The Cruise

Summary/Abstract: There is a real and distinct connection between anxiety and nightmare, as it had been pointed out by both Freud and Lacan. To which Joyce seems to add:“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. Moreover, the dream canbe considered as having a kind of nightmarish kernel, in the same way in whichfantasy has a kind of comical twist, and science has its truth revealed as sciencefiction.The subject is first of all the subject of the unconscious, filled with guiltwhen faced with his destiny as crushing demand of the Other. It is only within thepsychoanalytic discourse that this feeling of guilt is deconstructed and reveals thehole out of which one can say “that no” to both castration and to this totalitariandemand of the Other, source of anxiety, and thus of nightmare, be it as history ingeneral or for the individual. Mircea Daneliuc brilliantly decodes this intricate link between history and nightmare in his film The Cruise (1981), which takes place in Ceaușescu’s Romania in the 1980s.

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