Reflections of/on nature in late socialist Romanian press and amateur film production: absorption, marginalization, experimentation

Abstract

The present article has two main aims: on the one hand it intends to chart the emergence and the installation of an official ecological discourse in late socialist Romania – a discourse that is representative both for the growing wave of environmental concern that propagated across the Eastern Bloc and for the discursive strategies the socialist nations adopted in order to disculpate their civilizational stances and create an appropriate ideological frame for environmental preservation measures. After studying messages vehiculated principally through official press organs and defining the general cultural atmosphere that surrounded the fledgling national ecological consciousness, it will be argued that the production of the numerous amateur film clubs in activity in late socialist Romania offers an original vantage point to the issue of the type of imagery that was developed to echo the state-sanctioned ecological discourse. This will converge with the second aim of this article, which is to push amateur production into the sphere of interest of ecocritical media studies, while advocating for the necessity to adapt its methodologies to a type of material that is often poorly preserved, deprived of contextual information or even of parts of its content, and thus sometimes radically opaque. After focusing on a corpus of film club productions considered relevant for broad issues relating to representational paradigms of nature in the socialist context, the article will also scrutinize the early creations of materialist experimental film collective Kinema Ikon.