The historical and social background against which American viewers consumed this story of an illegal abortion during communism shaped its meaning (and perceptions about its political relevance), plugging a rather obscure art-house Romanian film into the larger national debate over reproductive rights in contemporary United States. This overinterpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the story through the lens of their own cultural and political predispositions. The article focuses on the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. Thus, in its transition from the domestic to global marketplace, 432 was transformed from an act of amoral probing of the Romanian individual and collective memory about communism into a film about the controversial nature of particular individual choices, within the liberal capitalist paradigm. The article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. The article offers a particular reading of these films as inspired by Walter Benjamin's writings on history and film, a reading that seeks to understand the careful temporal and spatial renegotiation of the revolutionary moment of December 1989, the key role that the technology of film has played throughout the course of the Romanian revolution and its aftermath, as well as the critical importance that the revolutionary moment continues to have for the way in which Romania imagines itself and is seen from abroad.

This article seeks to establish some of the contributions that the New Wave is making to the reconstruction of the 1989 revolutionary moment, but also, and more importantly, to the renegotiation of Romania's present role in the local and global imaginary. Almost 20 years after the 1989 Romanian revolution, the subject is experiencing a powerful comeback in a number of cinematic reflections that are at the forefront of the so-called Romanian New Wave, including Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest, Radu Muntean's The paper will be blue and Catalin Mitulescu's How I spent the end of the world.

Supravietuitorul film subtitrat romana