The Avant‐Garde and Experimental Film in Socialist Romania
The Avant‐Garde and Experimental Film in Socialist Romania

Summary/Abstract: Although socialist Romanian cinematography focused on commercial and artistic feature films, hundreds of short films were produced every year on the fringes of the industry, in specialised animation and documentary studios, in amateur cine-clubs, by students at the National Institute of Film and Theatre in Bucharest, and by other amateurs (some of them visual artists) who owned a personal camera. Starting from an analysis of the context that allowed for such practices to flourish in a state whose official policies did not support this typology, this essay explores the modes of production and the experimental tendencies in Romanian cinema during the socialist era, mapping the territories where the avant-garde and experimental film manifested themselves. It is a gesture of digging at the margins of the film industry in the hope of shaking up the current canon and of offering a better understanding of the peripheries of the period’s cultural production, which will reverberate in the ways we are used to approaching its centre.

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