Of all art forms, why is cinema frequently at the heart of the Romanian “culture wars”?

Ilustrations by Noemi Fabra.

A few weeks ago, a handful of parents protested in front of the Central School in Bucharest – armed with placards condemning “pederasts”, the “corruption of children” and other serious accusations against the educational institution. Their call to protest is echoed by the far-right publication ActiveNews. The object of the protest? That a handful of pupils had watched Lukas Dhont’s film Close as an extracurricular activity – a film in which it is suggested that one of the film’s two protagonists, whose suicide by bullying constitutes the film’s climax, is gay. The conclusion that the parents arrived at – who, according to their own statements, had not actually seen the film before riling against it – already sounds familiar: it was “gay propaganda”.

The event at the Bucharest Central School was not singular – neither in terms of public protest nor of its espoused discursive values. It comes in a larger context of radicalization against the representation of minorities of any kind, and of clear slippages on the part of some prominent opinion leaders in this regard – see, for example, the absurd comments of Romanian Orthodox Church spokesman Vasile Bănescu on the subject of progressivism and inclusiveness – which, put together, create a widespread moral panic against the representation (and even mention) of any kind of minority or Otherness that deviates from the norms of the majority. A quick scroll through the “We, Cinephiles” Facebook group brings up dozens of jokes with misogynistic and racist overtones, mostly related to casting decisions of various films or series – which far outweigh actual discussions about films in number.

Call it what you will: political correctness, neo-marxism, or wokeness – terms that are interchangeable in this discursive economy, all emptied of any kind of original meaning they might have held. But how did this become such an obsessive theme in the local sphere of debate? Why are certain cinephiles or public intellectuals so disturbed by a form (affirmative representation) so devoid of substance – to evoke “Titu Maiorescu’s ghost”, in the words of G. M. Tamas – on a local level? A bird’s-eye look at Romanian cinema in recent years shows that there is absolutely no precedent for affirmative inclusion – prominent Roma film and TV actors can still be counted on the fingers of only one person, queer cinema remains a rara avis in the local landscape, as do films with overt feminist discourses. (That’s apart from the fact that Romanian audiences, per se, don’t even see these films in the first place if box office figures are anything to go by.) Or, in short: why are some viewers so offended by the inclusive initiatives of foreign film industries? Where do certain viewers’ (largely online) radicalization on these topics come from?

A short history of homophobic boycotts, backlash, and bans

Some of the first homophobic reactions to the representation of queerness in cinema came very soon after the decriminalization of homosexuality in Romania, in 2001 – one of the initial major targets at the time was the fledgling TIFF, whose policy of including films from the New Queer Cinema in its selections in the aughts drew constant attacks from the far-right press. Although few of these articles survive, there is an account of the phenomenon given by the festival’s artistic director, Mihai Chirilov, in an interview with Film Menu, who described these hit pieces as a type of “far-right discourse that doesn’t surprise me anymore”. Then came the scandal surrounding Milk, the 2008 biopic directed by NQC veteran Gus van Sant about gay politician and activist Harvey Milk – initially rated by the Romanian National Cinema Centre as 18+, despite the fact that, as shown in an analysis written by Stefan Dobroiu at the time, the film did not meet the necessary qualifications for such a rating;  following the scandal, the rating was revised to 15+. It’s also worth briefly mentioning the case of literature teacher Adela Stan, who was sanctioned for recommending the film Total Eclipse (1995, d. Agnieszka Holland) to her pupils as additional material as part of her lesson on the Symbolist movement, following a complaint from a parent who suggested that by watching and discussing the film, “children are being guided towards homosexuality” (!).

However, the most famous incidents of this kind were the boycotts of queer film screenings by protesters affiliated to the Orthodox Church and to neo-legionary political groups such as the New Right (Noua Dreaptă), which often targeted the “Horia Bernea” Hall of the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest, interrupting and blocking the screenings. The reason why the “Horia Bernea” Hall is the focal point of these types of protests is explained by some of the protesters who initiated these actions – the purported existence of a certain sacrilegious dimension that pits the identity of the Romanian peasant (seen as a symbol of a traditionalist, orthodox, i.e. heterosexual/heteronormative lifestyle) and the values, or even the very existence itself of the LGBT community. The first such incident took place in February 2013, at a screening of The Kids are Alright, held as part of LGBT History Month – and despite the fact that, at the time, the event seemed an isolated incident, five years later, in February 2018, as part of the same LGBT History Month, a screening of 120 Battements par Minute (r. Robert Campillo) was stormed by protesters. Later that week, a protest (divided into two groups, located in the hall and also in front of the museum) targeted the screening of the first Romanian feature-length film about a male same-sex couple, Soldiers. A Story from Ferentari by Ivana Mladenovic, but this time, the police managed to remove protestors from the cinema, allowing the screening to go on. Later that year, director Bogdan Theodor Olteanu, who released the queer film A Few Conversations About a Very Tall Girl, revealed that the “Horia Bernea” Hall refused to screen his film.

As an aside, it should also be said here that these incidents were so striking, even traumatic for the local cinema community that they inspired two separate films that dramatized these events, both constructed around a character who is part of the task force that intervened in the protests: Eugen Jebeleanu’s queer drama Poppy Field, in which a closeted gendarme is part of the crew sent to bring the situation under control at the Studio Cinema, and the thriller 5 Minutes, an ensemble film in which a gendarme’s inaction leads to the serious injury of a queer audience member at what appears to be the ARCUB Hall on Batiștei Street. (I mentioned the halls since none of the fictionalized depictions of these events are set at the “Horia Bernea” Hall, per se.)

These acute, chronic incidents are easily joined by a not-so-short list of virulent reactions against films with political aims (on a wide range of topics: from sexuality to national history) that are symptomatic of this climate. Take, for example, the scandal triggered in the country by the triumph of Touch Me Not (2019, dir. Adina Pintilie) at the Berlin Film Festival, spearheaded by TV presenter Dan Negru, an outrage that started months before the film was even screened in Romania, or the various attacks that appeared from the (far-)right press (including from ex-Cluj Napoca mayor Gheorghe Funar) against Radu Jude after the release of I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians.

Of course, these nationalistic stances are not only specific to Romania, but can also be found in other Central- and Eastern-European countries. Take, for example, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning film Ida (2014), where the film’s central character, a young Catholic nun, learns that her dead parents were of Jewish origin and, in the course of searching their grave, discovers that they were murdered during the Holocaust by the Polish family who was supposed to hide them from the Nazis. The latter detail was instantly labeled as “anti-Polish sentiment” and attracted 40,000 signatures on a petition initiated by a nationalist bloc (as an aside, a few years later, the Warsaw government criminalized any reference to the local population’s involvement in the Holocaust).

Moral panic: the threats and folk devils of mainstream cinema

Any analysis – however tenuous – of discursive phenomena of this kind cannot do without the concept (and conceptualization) of moral panic, which plays a central role in contemporary sociology and media science. This concept helps us understand how these currents of opinion are formed and spread, the social agents that sustain them, and the targets of these types of discourse.

The fundamental theorist of the concept of moral panic was the British sociologist Stanley Cohen, who, in 1972, defined it on the basis of popular subculture conflicts in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s (mods and rockers) as “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests (…) Sometimes the subject of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way society conceives itself”. Interested in how society reacts to “forms of behavior labelled as deviant” and finding parallels with studies of social response to disasters, Cohen criticizes the way the media functions as “agents of moral indignation” that “devote a great deal of space to deviance“, as well as the way various “moral entrepreneurs” (from media people and opinion leaders to politicians and members of the clergy) exploit the themes it brings forward. At the opposite end of the discourse, we find what Cohen calls “folk devils”, the incarnations of Said threats.

The life cycle of a moral panic, as Cohen sees it, and as summarised by Kenneth Thompson in “Why The Panic?”, proceeds as follows:
1. Something or someone is defined as a threat to values or interests.
2. This threat is depicted in an easily recognizable form by the media.
3. There is a rapid build-up of public concern.
4. There is a response from authorities or opinion-makers.
5. The panic recedes or results in social changes.

So, is the cinema itself the object of such moral panic, or rather, is it adjacent to elements of other widespread moral panics?

The answer seems to tend more towards the latter: certain episodes may be embedded within larger panics and neurotic concerns – such as the “great replacement” theory (reactions against diverse casting or of the employment of racialized actors in roles “meant” for white actors, discussions of whitewashing or critical reevaluations of the past), the so-called “LGBT grooming”/“gay propaganda”/“sexomarxism” theories (protests at cinemas, reactions against the representation of LGBTQ+ issues in cinema or the casting of openly queer actors in certain roles), anti-feminist theories (the “exaggerations” of the MeToo phenomenon, the so-called discrimination of men, etc.) and so on. However, all these provide us with a prima facie answer to the central question of this text: the proliferation of these panics among the Romanian population has primarily to do with their coverage in both traditional and new (i.e. social) media (after all, Cohen put forward his concept in the pre-digital era). The natural question that derives from all of this is: why are these topics part of the agenda-setting of Romanian news publications, be they fringe or mainstream? What is the editorial policy that led to the creation of these panics among the public opinion about arts and cinema?

Political correctness is here, and it’s hungry

Let’s take a concrete example – the Gone with the Wind case, or, better said, the moral panic created vis-a-vis an alleged “revisionist” move against in the history of classic Hollywood cinema. I won’t go so far as to look for articles about the case on websites with an obvious far-right political slant, but let’s take a look at mainstream news agencies and channels. It is the summer of 2020, and by the time this scandal breaks out in Romania, it has been about two weeks since the entire world watched the brutal murder of George Floyd and the ensuing massive protests across the Western sphere. In the context of these protests that, among other things, demanded the removal of speeches which romanticized the phenomenon of slavery or the figures of slave owners/traders, the HBO Max platform (which was launched in Romania in March 2022) announced that it would temporarily withdraw the classic blockbuster Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1940), until it could put together a disclaimer that would run at the beginning of the film, with the aim of critically addressing how the film depicted slavery. (The process lasted around two weeks.)

The day after the story was broken in the States by Variety, it is picked up by the News.ro agency and from there, like wildfire, it spreads to the vast majority of Romanian news outlets, not without additional comments. Observator, Antena1’s news program, blames the anti-racism protests right from the very headline and quotes Irina Margareta Nistor, who claims that “It’s an exaggeration! We’re not going to be able to change history, nor will the Americans be able to do that just to become politically correct” along with an extremely uninspired joke about… chocolate. (At the same time, the article doesn’t cite any opinion in favor of HBO’s decision, just like the majority of the coverage.) The Adevărul newspaper runs no less than 11 articles about the case in the time between the announcement of the withdrawal and the film’s return on the platform, with 5 articles published on a single day, June 11. (These include an opinion piece ridiculing “political correctness” written by theatre critic Mircea Morariu, who was later outed for viciously harassing his peers via anonymous SMS messages for months on end.) Digi24 TV produced a segment with journalist and commentator Cristian Tudor Popescu, who opined that the decision of HBO Max was “what the communists did, what the Nazis did”. Newsweek somehow ended up publishing, without any comment, the opinion of the Bishop of Huși (yes, from that Huși) on the case, who blames “anti-racists and Antifa”, “the progressive left” and “the neo-Marxist world”. Last but not least, the HotNews agency asked former Prime Minister (!!!) Dacian Cioloș for his opinion on the case, producing an entire article out of his neutral response (after, the day before, the publication had characterized the film as “the latest victim of political correctness”). A rare dissenting and lucid voice in the midst of this panic can be found in the pages of Libertatea, thanks to an editorial written by left-wing analyst Costi Rogozanu.

Now, one may ask – how does the temporary withdrawal of a film from a platform that is not even available in Romania become a news item of national interest, and does so in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic? A topic that generates such heated discussions that it becomes the subject of a question posed to a man who once held the second most important position in the country’s leadership? Or rather, one may ask – why? Precisely through such decisions in editorial policy – note that the vast majority of coverage of this subject in the press had a negative framing – which, beyond the obvious sensationalist/clickbait approach, do nothing more than apply the basic rulebook of moral panic: political correctness is here, and it’s hungry for your favorite childhood films, along with the very fundaments of your cultural consumption.

Moral-cultural Entrepreneurs: from the Nineties to the Present

But let’s leave aside for a moment the decisions of the editors, or the reactions of the (orthodox) clergy and its satellites in civil society (such as the ProFamily Association, the Parents’ Alliance, the Coalition for Family, and so on) – and take a look for at the moral entrepreneurs of these moral panics who are operating in the cultural and intellectual environment. Of course, in none of these cases will you find a discourse that openly indulges in misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, racism, or other kinds of toxic prejudice. Instead, you will find the gradual definition of a threat that underlies all these situations: the threat of political correctness, seen as a phenomenon that is seen as equivalent to the methods of censorship employed during the years of the Romanian communist regime (see, in this regard, the dialogue on this topic between researchers Mihai Iovănel and Christian Moraru). This discursive line appears from the very foundational text of Romanian anti-political correctness, H.R. Patapievici’s “American Communism” – a line that also takes root in the positions taken by towering figures in Romanian cinema. For example, take Lucian Pintilie’s notes from his autobiography, Bricabrac, where he often disparages political correctness: “The tolerant’s benevolent plea is like a pea lying in the same pod as the socialist censor’s appeal”.

This appeal to “political correctness” (which is often left abstract, unclarified in terms of objectives) quickly becomes part of the common rhetorical arsenal of a significant part of the opinion leaders of Romanian cinema, riffing on an vast variety of themes or events. For brevity’s sake, I won’t delve into an analysis of all these cases, but rather, I’ll make an inventory of situations that prompted these prominent figures – both filmmakers and film critics/commentators – to decry “political correctness”.

First, a 2010 case of a talk show broadcasted on the Romanian National Television, which was sanctioned by the authorities after the guest, Ion Cristoiu – a controversial local journalist and commentator – made comments that were apologetic of the fascist Prime Minister of Romania in the early 1940s, which the moderator (film critic and journalist Eugenia Voda) did not intervene upon. The sanction prompted prominent directors such as Lucian Pintilie, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, and Cristi Puiu (amongst others) to sign an open letter that decried the sanction as indicative of “a conformist spirit, opportunism, a trend of indignation”, a spirit which, according to the letter “can nowadays be called political correctness”.

Then, the 2009 coverage of the Berlin Film Festival penned by critic Alex. Leo Serban, at the time Romania’s most prominent film critic, often made use of the term “political correctness” in a derogatory fashion. Here, he ascribes the term to a piece written by a Talent Press alumn who had described a film as “superficial” in her review – and coins it has an “intolerance of anything other than films that have political substance”. Similarly, without giving any proper arguments as to why the film was in any way inferior to other candidates, Cristian Tudor Popescu lambasts the Oscar win of Guillermo del Toro’s 2019 The Shape of Water as being the result of “political correctness” (missing out on the irony of the fact that an opponent he praised, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, was much more overtly political in tone) – the reason being the fact that the film’s main antagonist was a white man, and the protagonist was a disabled woman (who counted a black woman as a friend).

Then, of course, there’s the topic of female representation, inclusion, and safety within the film industry. Director and TIFF founder Tudor Giurgiu has often railed against initiatives in this field as samples of “political correctness”, whether it’s about “the terror facing Thierry Fremaux” who is supposed to “count the number of female-directed films” in the selection of the Cannes Film Festival, or his speculation (rather, fears) that the reception of his yet unreleased film will be affected by the fact that it doesn’t have “enough” (whatever that may mean) female characters. A notable entry here is also Cristian Mungiu’s 2019 assertion that the Cannes Film Festival’s newly-inaugurated hotline for sexual harassment victims (which received several calls a day, as per festival representatives) while ceding to the importance of fighting against the phenomenon, was nonetheless “an embarrassing development” of a type of “political correctness that is hard to bring under control”.

Last, but not least, I’d extend the crown to film critic Anca Gradinariu, a staple writer of TIFF’s daily magazine, AperiTIFF – who has, in one way or another, but certainly with increasing aplomb and obsessiveness, been writing about “political correctness” since 2009. I’ll let her three most virulent texts – “The Crusade of the Offended”, “No Police in Film”, and “To Be or Not to Be (Politically Correct)” – speak for themselves, especially this small extract from the latter piece, which is most illustrative of the workings of moral panic: “These specimens (…) are out for your head. They want you in jail. They want to scalp you (am I allowed to ‘culturally appropriate’ that word?)”.

At the end of this inventory, you don’t really get to understand what political correctness actually is, beyond a threat that often seems to have something to do with women (sic!) – but it is precisely this ambiguity that serves the purpose of creating a concept that can be molded as to fit any situation, however clear or vague, and wielded as a weapon. This is what writer Miruna Vlada so eloquently describes: “This association (…) is meant to delegitimize any serious discussion about discrimination and the promotion of tolerance, that certain groups of conservative intellectuals in Romania use to caricature a very serious issue. This phase of complete denial of injustice is just as harmful as overzealousness.”

Enough Internet for today

But I would like to add to Vlada’s lines: the aim is not just delegitimization or caricature, but also the reinforcement of a position of (hegemonic) power, on the one hand, and the tacit validation (whether intentional or not!) of the most egregious excesses of those who embrace anti-political correctness. Of course, it may sound like a speculative accusation – that the validation of “anti-PC” discourse from the top of the intelligentsia trickles down, over time, into the chauvinistic and phobic attitudes/stances of certain radicalized communities – if one wouldn’t be able to find specific clues of this very proximity, beyond pure rhetorical hints: for example, the publication, in full, of H.R. Patapievici’s “American Communism” on the anti-abortion website Știri pentru viață (News for Life); a website which also published a piece that justified the protest that suspended the screening of 120 BPM through a morally relativist (and, of course, essentially homophobic) line of argument, which equates the strategies of the ACT UP group with the actions of the group that raided the “Horia Bernea” Hall.

What I mean by this is that there is a certain ecosystem in which these ideas exist, one in which discourses about “political correctness”, however abstract (or precisely because of this abstractness), end up being appropriated, down the line, by people whose states intentions are to limit the access of minorities and disadvantaged groups to various public services, to public visibility, and so on. The transformation of this vague term into a panacea, a shorthand invoked in absolutely any situation involving either the representation of a minority or the discussion of uncomfortable aspects of history have had nothing but harmful long-term effects, and it has contributed to an atmosphere in which events such as those at the Central School, or at Mihai Viteazu College, or at the Horia Bernea Hall have become possible in post-Article 200 Romania. And that all these discussions, ironically enough, contribute precisely to one of the problems that it so fervently denounces: the fact that cinema, in and of itself, is no longer actually the topic of discussion. And I, for one, can’t wait to go back to actually discussing cinema.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.