European Tribune - Romanian Film: The Romanian New Wave.
Same depressing color palate no human being with the gift of eyesight could ever wrestle joy from.
i loved that... though i think you mean 'palette'!
what comes up for me reading this is that these countries denied people their religion, and thus reduced life to pure utilitarianism, Defined by me as 'who cares the tablecloths are all from the same slovenian or estonian or georgian factory, they're official Communist tablecloths, they symbolise our glorious struggle over the corrupt capitalists, so don't envy the pretty ones of the devilishly clever evil running dogs'
whatever your beliefs about religion, i think these failed commie states prove the benefits of religion by showing what happens when people are thrown back onto their own resources. religions can't all be right, because they contradict each other, but they encourage people to believe and act in a way that is ultimately accountable, and for reasons that are circumspherical to their own narrow lives.
the glory of the communist system did not feature decadent concepts like style or beauty, they wanted standardisation for efficiency reasons.
if we had always been like that in western europe, we would have no duomo di firenze, no chartres, no beautiful, noble, follies that remind us of who we aspire to be.
aesthetics are supposed to be a fairly shallow reasons to build philosophy around, but when i see the awfulness of the communist aesthetic, its hatred of freedom in art, its persecutions of jazz musicians etc, it's hard as an artist not to hate people who can be so....soulless.
the state is made up of people after all.
what the films seem to have reminded you of is that the people who have no choice but to live under these dreary conditions have so much soul, displayed in their ways of remaining stubbornly human under the iron boot of totalitarianism.
say what you want about the slavs, their ability to stoically suck it up has a certain grim tenacity that is extremely inspiring, in its refusal to lay down and let the ghastliness just roll over them.
since childhood, i have always been aware that polish cartoons had a depth and humanity that our western ones didn't even come close to having, though i usually couldn't understand them as well as i'd like.
like the african lyrics to some great world music!
sorry for rambling, i've grown to love your diaries. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
(I feel so much less self-conscious about my profoundly terrible spelling since I've begun reading Sean Guillory, whose terrible spelling is really in a league of its own.)
I don't know what religion has to do with anything in this diary. Furthermore, I am very sensitive to the whole "Communism = Complete criminalization of all religion and complete censorship of the arts." As with everything in life, it was never so simple. The extent to which these spheres of life were repressed varied from regime to regime, from region to region, and depending upon the the perceived motivations of the participants. I've read countless stories of people allowed to practice religion or do their art in the privacy of their own homes so long as they kept it to themselves and otherwise followed the rules, or people who were allowed to do so publicly under close scrutiny to make the regime appear "tolerant," a kind of tokenism. Of course, the moment you fell out of favor or offended the wrong person, you could wind up dead, imprisoned or hospitalized. Anyway I've never gotten the impression that the lives of most people living in Communist Europe for most of the 20th century were depressing because they were devoid of the intangibles that give our lives depth and meaning.
These films are "depressing" because they deal with situations not peculiar to Romania or the former Eastern Bloc - abortion, painful death. And they are dealt with without any of the pretty packaging or comforting ideologies peddled by the predominant regimes of our lives...
Also, beauty is subjective - the in the eye of the beholder, and takes an infinite number of forms, and is too often a pawn in cultural chauvinism. "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
Some interesting reading.
I wish I knew more about the system of censorship in Romania to comment on it. "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
