On November 19, 2015, starting from 4:00 p.m., the Romanian Cultural Institute in Prague, in partnership with the Department of the Romance languages of the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, organizes a conference with the topic „From Anti-Communism to Self-Colonial Gaze. Remembering Socialism in Romanian post 1989 literature and film", given by Claudiu Turcuş, Assistant Professorof the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. The event will take place at the seat of the Romanian Language Department of the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava.
The presentations aims at interrogating the ideological perception of the post 1989 Romanian literature and cinematography, with emphasis on the remembrance of Communism, in a dual argumentative approach: one perspective is the impact on the Romanian transition period - anti-communism - on building the post December collective memory, and following this, examining the way, in which this discourse has been absorbed in the literary and cinematographic representation. This intellectual construction is finalized by a critical analysis about making a series of adequate self-colonial principles that meet the new Romanian cinema wave, thus attempting to answer a radical question: do these films make the object of Eastern European orientalism through their relation to the Communism memory and to the western type expectations?
Between November 20 and 21, 2015, at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Claudiu Turcuş is invited to represent Romania at the fifth edition of the international conference „Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference: Transformation Processes and New Screen Media Technologies", with the presentation „Popular Hungarian and Romanian films in the 2010s: public funding decisions, audience tastes and festival hype". The event aims at investigating the historical and contemporary dimensions of the audiovisual mass-media industries in the region from all angles - local, transnational, economic, cultural, social and political - put in written through a varied series of theoretical works and empirical case studies. The researcher interventions are meant to be a light-shedding reflection on the above-mentioned topic.
Claudiu Turcuș is a PhD and Assistant Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, lecturing on Film Criticism, and Eastern European Cinema and Literature. Hid areas of interest are: cinematography and the Central Eastern European novel, post-communist identity imagology, cinema adaptation, critics theory.
He obtained his PhD in Humanities (2011) at Babeș-Bolyai University after a fellowship research at Bard College, New York. His research interests are focused on East-Central European Cinema and Novel & Theory of Criticism and Adaptation. He is also the editor of the peer-reviewed journal Ekphrasis - Image, Cinema, Theory, Media. His book, The Aesthetics of Norman Manea, Bucharest, 2012 (awarded by Writers' Union of Romania) is the very first monograph about life and oeuvre of this important Romanian-American writer, nominated twice for the Nobel Prize. Currently, Claudiu Turcuș has finished a postdoctoral project about socialist aestheticism in Romanian cinema and literature.
