A far-reaching book printed in the UK and the US by a prestigious publishing house has been at last dedicated to contemporary Romanian cinema. It is a well-deserved and long-awaited one because Romanian filmmakers have strongly asserted themselves in the last decade or so. In order to better understand that this is of international significance we should notice that Romanian cinema – similarly to other Romanian arts – has never benefited from the honour of having a book entirely dedicated to it in English or other international language.
Dominique (Domnica) Nasta is a Professor of Film Studies at Université libre de Bruxelles and the author of two books: Meaning in Film: Relevant Structures in Soundtrack and Narrative (1992) i and New Perspectives in Sound Studies / Le son en perspective: nouvelles recherches (2004) ii, dealing with film music and sound. She has also contributed extensively to several encyclopedias and dictionaries on cinema (for instance the chapter on Romanian cinema in Storia del cinema mondiale [2000] edited by Gian Piero Brunetta iii). Perhaps not coincidentally, the author is of Romanian origin and lives in Brussels. Being an ‘outsider’ to some extent is both an advantage and disadvantage involving a certain distancing and lack of bias, but requiring great endeavor to see and review a long list of Romanian films and access a long bibliography in Romanian. In addition, Nasta returned several times to her native country to meet filmmakers and obtain important details from the directors Nae Caranfil, Radu Gabrea, Lucian Pintilie and Corneliu Porumboiu, as well as from the scriptwriter Razvan Radulescu and the cinematographer Oleg Mutu. ... More