The Performance of Silence in Cristian Mungiu's<i>4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days</i>

Palmer-Mehta, Valerie; Haliliuc, Alina

doi:10.1080/10462937.2010.531282

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…To begin, various meanings are associated with womanhood and motherhood in Romania, a patriarchal culture with specific gender roles and hierarchies, where heavy responsibilities are attributed to mothers, wives, and women workers. The society generally rewards men with better-paid jobs and the status of the “head of the family” (Kligman, 1998; Palmer-Mehta & Haliliuc, 2011; Verdery, 1994). Second, Romani customs directly apply to gender roles and relations (Askola, 2011).…”

Section: Romni Health Mediators In Romaniamentioning

confidence: 99%

Power, Gender, and Ethnic Spaces

Schneeweis

2015

Journal of Communication Inquiry

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This study examines the inextricable (and understudied) link between ethnicity, gender, power, and space, to assess how gender and power relations operate in, and mark, the ethnic spaces of one community of Roma in Romania. Drawing from ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with Romani women who work as health mediators, this article identifies and theorizes the negotiated meanings that arise among the mediators’ roles and spaces. I argue that perceptions of the mediators’ power roles change between institutional landscapes (spaces of hegemonic directives), Romani communities (conceived space where the women have symbolic control), and the lived space of resistance and internalized discrimination; the latter is both an active constituent of, and a challenge to, racism against the Roma.

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Section: Romni Health Mediators In Romaniamentioning

confidence: 99%

Power, Gender, and Ethnic Spaces

Schneeweis

2015

Journal of Communication Inquiry

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“…Mannerisms of wooden talk also penetrated informal and private communication, indicating various degrees of successful interpellation into a totalitarian subject position (Palmer‐Mehta and Haliliuc). While the change in political regime in 1989 was followed by changes in language, it would be hasty to expect dramatic changes from the discursive habits of the forty‐four‐year‐long regime .…”

Section: Postsocialism As An Entropic Universe Steeped In Wooden Langmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is So Funny about The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu?

Haliliuc¹

2015

The J of Popular Culture

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won prestigious prizes at major festivals and film critics hailed the emergence of a "New Wave." 1 Puiu's internationally acclaimed The Death of Mr. L az arescu (2005) is arguably the first to start this new cinematic wave with an exploration of human interactions played out in a bankrupt medical system. The film follows Dante Remus L az arescu (Ioan Fiscuteanu), a retired sexagenarian widower, who lives alone in an apartment complex where he spends his lonely days watching television, talking to his cats, and drinking a steady flow of homemade drinks. Feeling ill one evening, L az arescu calls the ambulance after attempting to self-medicate with alcohol and over-the-counter drugs. The paramedic's arrival sets off a long journey from one emergency room to the next, as doctors examine L az arescu perfunctorily, dismiss him as a drunkard, and refuse to hospitalize him. When he turns comatose in the ambulance, a medic finally checks him into a hospital. The film closes with his naked and shaved body waiting for surgery in an empty hospital room.While the plotline reveals a drama, the movie also provokes laughter and smiles, which inspired its international promotion as a dark comedy. It is a truism that humor is both universal and contextual: while we all laugh, we do not all laugh at the same things, or in the same ways. Laughter gives expression to a breadth of emotions ranging from acceptance and joy to anxiety or derision. It expresses attitudes toward the world and its challenges that run from full trust and optimism to suspicion and profound cynicism. This essay is an exploration of the film's uses of humor to dramatize anxiety and disengagement as defining attitudes in postsocialism. I argue that The Death foregrounds wooden language, a socialist idiom of submission to power born out of anxiety, as the facilitator of disengagement. It illustrates how mannerisms of socialist talk continue to shape contemporary society and provide refuge from responsibility. Puiu's film painstakingly documents the journey of "Mr. L az arescu" from the private sphere of family relations into the public one of neighborly and institutional interactions, as he repeatedly falls out of others' care into what the title of the film announces, his death. Heavy reliance on crowded medium shots, harsh low key lighting available on location, and the use of hand-held cameras realistically construct an entropic universe of wooden formulas, gestures, and emotions where death is not an abstract event, but a concrete inevitability.

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Living in the Totalitarian World

Cordali

2023

Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania

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The Performance of Silence in Cristian Mungiu's4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

Cited by 10 publications

References 25 publications

Power, Gender, and Ethnic Spaces

Power, Gender, and Ethnic Spaces

What Is So Funny about The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu?

Living in the Totalitarian World

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