Female stardom in contemporary Romanian New Wave cinema: unglamour?

This article analyses film roles, red-carpet appearances and nonfilmic performances of three of the most well-known and admired actresses of the Romanian New Wave (Luminița Gheorghiu, Maria Popistașu and Anamaria Marinca). Their unglamorous female stardom is paradoxical if considered from the standpoint of mainstream/dominant cinema and the tradition described by Jackie Stacey as “[t]he ‘visual pleasure’ offered by the glamour and sexual appeal of Hollywood stars” (159). Aspects such as the major contradiction between screen role and screen persona, or the lack of ideal(istic) images offered to the audience are theorised on the basis of Christine Gledhill’s and Richard Dyer’s models, Anne Morey’s term of “the elegiac female grotesque” and Ana Salzberg’s concept of narcissistic Hollywood female stardom and embodied experience (107). The coherence of unglamorous female stardom as a real-life discursive construct emerges in the article through the consideration of Romanian New Wave cinema–similarly to 1970s-1980s New Indian Cinema in which unglamorous female stars existed (Gandhy-Thomas)–as a peripheral cinematic formation defined by a specific relation to glamour and consumption (Dyer, Gundle). Furthermore, the article suggests that this coherence is dependent on considering the production context of the Romanian New Wave in the framework of small national European cinemas (Hjort and Petrie, Soila), while emphasising the lack of integrated studio background (Haskell) and the fact that its female stars have been conditioned by postcommunist possibilities to articulate female public identities (Pasca Harsanyi, Roman)

Media Borders in a Post-Media Age: The Historical and Conceptual Co-evolution of Cinema, Television, Video and Computer Screens

This chapter offers an overview of literature theorizing our condition defined by electronic screens, often called a post-cinema age, the age of expanded or fragmented cinema, or indeed named the spatial turn in the analysis of electronically mediated audiovisual communication. With a faraway starting point in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and relying on Lars Elleström’s media theory throughout, the overview covers comparative theorizing of cinema and television, cinema and video, and cinema and digital screen(s). Such monographic titles are covered as Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, Manovich’s The Language of New Media, Sybille Krämer’s Medium. Messenger. Transmission, Gaudreault and Marion’s The End of Cinema, as well as referring interventions by Roger Odin, Francesco Casetti, Giuliana Bruno, Thomas Elsaesser, Erika Balsom or Irina Rajewsky and Laura Mulvey. The media borders between cinema, television, video and streaming are shown to be conditioned by historical developments in electronic communication technologies, by the fictional filmic representation of such developments, and finally by the critical-theoretical conceptualization of their co-dependencies. The concepts of broad intermediality (Lars Elleström) and genealogical intermediality (Irina Rajewsky) are proposed as denoting the default experience of our era of media convergence on the all-engulfing digital platform. The suggestion is made that the electronic screen has been existing as a messenger of medium specificity in the pre-1990s era, keeping its status amid the changed circumstances of the digital era too