BIOTECNIKA BLOG

Event Date as Display String:

Sunday, May 12, 2019, 5:00pm - 6:25pm

Location:

Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge

URL:

https://library.harvard.edu/film/films/2019marmay/romanian.html#dead

Event Description:

Gazette Classification: Film Organization/Sponsor: Harvard Film
Archive Cost: Ticket prices vary, see website for details Contact
Info: bgravely@fas.harvard.edu Link:
https://library.harvard.edu/film/films/2019marmay/romanian.html#dead
The stark poetry of Radu Jude's documentary startles with an
incongruent beauty and intimate horror. As the unearthed archive of
photos from Costică Acsinte's Foto Splendid studio — depicting the
daily life of Romanians from 1937–1945 — drifts across the screen,
national anthems and politician's speeches play. Interrupting the
mysterious pleasure of these crisp, yet decaying photographs whose
subjects — despite their staging and posing — appear to exude an
unvarnished frankness, the narration of a Jewish physician's
first-hand account during those same years details the apocalyptic
reality of the vicious plague descending upon the Jewish people. "So
much darkness in this hateful century" writes Emil Dorian as only
glimpses of the pogrom — a spate of fascist salutes, for instance —
appear in Romania's stoic face for the camera. The negative
transference of Jude's discordant audio/visual history, as a nation's
outer appearance masks its inner decay, eerily reflects the division
between Christians and Jews deepening into a frighteningly grotesque
chasm. Like the photographs' decomposition which occasionally allows
only eyes or a mouth to remain visible, the doctor describes the
corrosion of humanity steadily eating away at Europe, one that also
distorted and dissolved a nation's very memory, which, for its
citizens to carry on, seems to have been extinguished even before its
formation.

UID:

http://uid.trumba.com/event/132055534

Event Start Date as Date Type:

Sunday, May 12, 2019 - 17:00 to 18:25

Thumbnail:

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Detail Image:

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Feature Image:

Featured:

No

https://www.harvard.edu/preview/featured/events/dead-nation