Books by Constantin Parvulescu
Indiana University Press, 2015
a institute for Culture and Society, university of navarra, pamplona, Spain; b dipartimento di St... more a institute for Culture and Society, university of navarra, pamplona, Spain; b dipartimento di Studi umanistici e del patrimonio Culturale, university of udine, udine, italy This special issue provides a glimpse into the way recent European quality film originally participates in renegotiations of the social and political Project Europe, with its generous democratization process and transnationally shared cultural and economic goals. The stimulation of quality film-making has been on the political agenda of the EU for a while and followed more or less explicitly, two priorities: integration and competitiveness. Taking this stimulation into account, our goal is definitely not limited to showing how recent European cinema serviced EU priorities as soft-power controlled art. Animated by our own belief in the European project, we aim to reveal the way film-makers and their public art moved forward European concerns. We also try to trace the way films articulate deviation and excess of and within signification-sometimes divergent or critical of EU priorities-which not only raises awareness of various issues independent of the EU or national states agenda, but also performs the counter-ideological work of gesturing towards the misleading questions and challenges that animate the quest for political, ethical, economic and aesthetic value in current-day Europe (Žižek 2006).
Studies in Eastern European Cinema , 2018
Global Finance on Screen is the first collection exclusively dedicated to a growing body of multi... more Global Finance on Screen is the first collection exclusively dedicated to a growing body of multi-format and multimedia audiovisual work that this book designates as the finance film. Finance film provides critical visualizations of the secretive, elitist, PR firewalled, and gender and race-biased world of finance, and its mysterious characters, jargon and products. It reconstructs for the screen and for broader audiences finance’s logics, responsibilities, practices, and ethos, and traces the effects of money, markets, investment, credit, debt, bubbles, and crashes on our well-being, desires, values, and actions.
The chapters for this interdisciplinary collection are written by European and North American scholars in film studies, anthropology, business ethics, cultural studies, political economy, and sociology. They reveal and evaluate the ability of film to document financial cultures; reflect economic, cultural and political transformations related to financialization; indicate the alienating and exploitative consequences of the growing role played by financial services in the global economy; mobilize social action against finance’s excesses, as well as spread finance and capitalist mythology. The collection offers in-depth investigations of feature films such as Wall Street, Downfall, Margin Call, Justice&CO, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short, and documentaries such as Inside Job, Capitalism a Love Story and In a Strange Land.
Cluj University Press, 2018
Papers by Constantin Parvulescu
Images, 2022
My article compares the catalogues and interfaces of a small and a big VOD provider and emphasize... more My article compares the catalogues and interfaces of a small and a big VOD provider and emphasizes the critical innovative potential of the intervention of the former and, more generally, of small streaming services. I employ a cultural studies approach and closely read the acts of curation of these two types of providers. As a case study, I focus on the curation of the feature film The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu on both types of platforms. By critical innovation, I understand an economic or industrial intervention that questions and disrupts hegemonic discourses in its field. In the case of VODs, it refers to an engagement with discourses on digital film consumption, the branding of premium content, establishment of taste, and diversity of content. I also approach critical innovation as political and economic. I provide proof that small non-profit providers set up more advantageous viewing experiences that benefit a film and its makers. I also show that they play an important role in maintaining the sustainability of a digital distribution ecosystem.
Studies in World Cinema, 2022
The article analyzes the catalog, acts of curation, and promotional materials of the Romanian-bas... more The article analyzes the catalog, acts of curation, and promotional materials of the Romanian-based vod platform Cinepub (www.cinepub.ro). It also draws evidence from an interview conducted with the founder and manager of the platform, Lucian Georgescu. The analysis reveals the embedding of the service in the Romanian cinema culture, as well as in a global digital periphery. Some of the aspects that make Cinepub's service stand out, the article argues, can be interpreted as responses to and reflections of its embedding. The broader question raised by my case study is to what extent and under what conditions VODs from the European periphery can become viable actors on present-day markets.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2022
The article shows the way must-see film lists hosted by financial publications positivize, after ... more The article shows the way must-see film lists hosted by financial publications positivize, after the 2008 crisis, the message of feature and documentary films representing finance. Here positivization refers to the detouring or softening of the critical edge of the message of a film in the interests of the hosting website and the profession of finance in general. Emphasis falls on financial literacy and on a film’s artistic prestige and entertainment potential. The author argues that positivization is a semantic strategy indicative of a neoliberal business ontology that informs the interpretation of cultural artifacts. It instrumentalizes signification processes in order to foreground exchange value and present film reception as an investment in human capital.
ILUMINACE Volume 33, 2021, No. 2 (122), 2021
Th is article draws on previous research on European digital peripheries and explores the way the... more Th is article draws on previous research on European digital peripheries and explores the way they are created on the interfaces of VOD (video-on-demand) catalogues. Our analysis distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative peripheralizations and considers both European providers who received subsidies from the EU and global services such as Netfl ix. It focuses on European fi lm cultures and critically engages the umbrella concept of "European fi lm. " Th e article argues that EU funded VOD platforms tend to favor bigger European fi lm cultures such as France, and disfavor smaller ones such as those from East-Central Europe (Czechia, Romania, Hungary, etc.). It shows that streaming giants like Netfl ix tend to generate less disparities between European fi lm cultures than European providers. Th e article also questions the increasingly commercial mindset that drives such eff orts to globalize European fi lm through digital viewing services and regards it as a cause of peripheralization. It advocates consideration of the diversity of European fi lm output in such globalized and increasingly profi t-driven contexts.
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2021
This article examines present-day reruns of Romanian socialist-era historical films, their progra... more This article examines present-day reruns of Romanian socialist-era historical films, their programming, the publicity related to their programming, and their reception. It argues that, unintentionally, reruns act as an instrument of historical revisionism. It shows that the cinematic administration of the distant national past is still carried out by socialist-era films and explains the causes of this predicament and its cultural effects. It reflects on how the process of rerunning works to neutralize their labelling as Communist propaganda, a label that has been applied to these films by a large segment of Romania's postsocialist cultural elite. The article also briefly explores the marketing of two films, Dacii (The Dacians, 1966) and Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave, 1971), and highlights the commemorative practices brought into the present by these films. It uses contextual and genre arguments to explain why the commemorative practices proposed by socialist-era film appeal to present-day audiences and why their symbolism and ways of relating to the past are appropriated in contemporary Romanian popular culture. RÉSUMÉ L'article examine les rediffusions actuelles des films historiques roumains de l'ère socialiste, leur programmation, la publicité liée à leur programmation et leur réception. Il affirme que les rediffusions, sans le vouloir, jouent le rôle d'un instrument du révisionnisme historique. Il montre que la gestion filmique du passé national lointain est toujours effectuée par les films de l'ère socialiste, et explique les origines de cette situation et ses effets culturels. L'article réfléchit sur la façon dont le processus de rediffusion neutralise leur étiquette comme propagande communiste, étiquette qu'une grande partie de l'élite culturelle postsocialiste en Roumanie attribue à ces films. L'article examine brièvement la commercialisation de deux films, Dacii (Les Guerriers, 1966) et Mihai Viteazul (Michel le Brave, 1971), et souligne les pratiques commémoratives actualisées par ces films. Il utilise les arguments contextuels et de genre afin d'expliquer pourquoi les pratiques commémoratives proposées par les films de l'ère socialiste plaisent aux spectateurs actuels, et pourquoi leur symbolisme et leurs rapports avec le passé sont appropriés dans la culture populaire contemporaine en Roumanie.
Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2021
This article delivers the first critical analysis of contemporary presentations of the concept of... more This article delivers the first critical analysis of contemporary presentations of the concept of money in non-fiction films, and indicates their prevalent lines of argument. Analysis focuses on money literacy films such as The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Adrian Pennick, 2009), Money and Life (Katie Teague, 2013), Money Puzzles (Michael Chanan, 2016), and Blockchain City (Ian Kahn, 2018). It reveals the political and economic thought that informs the way film visualizes money, tells its history, presents its post-2008 role in society, and calls for improving its performance. Under scrutiny are the narrative set-ups, investigative methodologies, casts of characters, visual and aural metaphors, and implicit audiences of these films. The analysis employs three complex variables that help indicate the economic and political perspective of each film: the level of formalism, the construction of expertise, and the interpretation of the financial crisis.
The European unconscious If one takes a look at the dials of larger size radio sets made in any d... more The European unconscious If one takes a look at the dials of larger size radio sets made in any decade of state socialism between 1945 and 1989 in East Central Europe, one cannot notice the Iron Curtain. A shortwave dial of a radio made by the Romanian Electronica factories in the pre-transistor era of the 1960s reflects the utopia of borderless (and nationless) Europe that postwar intellectuals and politicians envisioned. The dial displays a mix of European capitals and large cities and encodes neither geographical nor ideological difference. It does not articulate oppositions between East and West, North and South, socialism and capitalism, or British and Nordic types of welfare. It presents Europe as one interlinked and accessible whole that can be crisscrossed freely with just a fine movement of one's fingers. One can acoustically travel, from the centre of the dial to the right, through Milano,
Cinema of Crisis, 2020
Mediterranea, Moon, Toni Erdmann, Capital
Studies in World Cinema, 2020
Res Historica, 2020
This article employs Lauren Berlant’s concepts of cruel optimism and impasse to explain the way t... more This article employs Lauren Berlant’s concepts of cruel optimism and impasse to explain the way the cinematic work of Cristian Mungiu comments on the condition of small East-Central European cultures. The article analyzes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Beyond the Hills (2012) and Graduation (2016), and draws evidence from the narrative structure of these films, gender and social and economic condition of their characters, as well as the audiovisual poetics of their endings. The main point of the article is that Mungiu’s films criticize a mental mapping East-Central Europe with origins in the Cold War that imagines it as a region of small nations in the permanent state of danger and in need of urgent protection. Mungiu’s films show that this mapping exposes these cultures to inescapable cycles of political abuse. The slow and contemplative endings of Mungiu’s films also propose a solution. They gesture toward the development of a condition of political hovering that, as interruption, may enable East-Central European political imaginaries to envision more creative solutions to escape cycles of abuse. This interruption is linked to the memory of 1989 and to the historical openness 1989 created. As a political approach for East-Central European cultures, interruption is a strategy of letting one’s political imaginary be inspired to the opening of 1989.
(Romania, 2010, dir. Marian Crișan) tells the story of the assistance a Romanian citizen provides... more (Romania, 2010, dir. Marian Crișan) tells the story of the assistance a Romanian citizen provides to an illegal Turkish border crosser. Set on the margins of the European Union, M insightfully thematizes illegal emigration, hospitality, cosmopolitan ethics, and the way in which Europe envisions its others. e aim of this article is to discuss how Crișan's lm engages these issues from a peripheral perspective, decentering cosmopolitan ethics and its Western, white and middle-class formats. It also aims at questioning the e ciency of individual ethical acts of assistance and suggests that they need to obtain international legislative and political translation. In order to emphasize the originality of M 's approach, this article compares its picture of hospitality and the construction of the foreigner with that of other lms, in particular with W (France, 2009, dir. Philippe Loiret).
Global Finance on Screen, 2018
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Books by Constantin Parvulescu
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040350X.2017.1421739
The chapters for this interdisciplinary collection are written by European and North American scholars in film studies, anthropology, business ethics, cultural studies, political economy, and sociology. They reveal and evaluate the ability of film to document financial cultures; reflect economic, cultural and political transformations related to financialization; indicate the alienating and exploitative consequences of the growing role played by financial services in the global economy; mobilize social action against finance’s excesses, as well as spread finance and capitalist mythology. The collection offers in-depth investigations of feature films such as Wall Street, Downfall, Margin Call, Justice&CO, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short, and documentaries such as Inside Job, Capitalism a Love Story and In a Strange Land.
Papers by Constantin Parvulescu
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040350X.2017.1421739
The chapters for this interdisciplinary collection are written by European and North American scholars in film studies, anthropology, business ethics, cultural studies, political economy, and sociology. They reveal and evaluate the ability of film to document financial cultures; reflect economic, cultural and political transformations related to financialization; indicate the alienating and exploitative consequences of the growing role played by financial services in the global economy; mobilize social action against finance’s excesses, as well as spread finance and capitalist mythology. The collection offers in-depth investigations of feature films such as Wall Street, Downfall, Margin Call, Justice&CO, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short, and documentaries such as Inside Job, Capitalism a Love Story and In a Strange Land.
Keywords: 1990s Romanian cinema, Radio Free Europe Romania, RFER, anticommunist propaganda, European identity, transition to capitalism, hauntology
Journal of Digital Media & Policy
The popular audiovisual media has contributed to and capitalized on this change in perception and has produced a variety of investigative and narrative materials that explore the operations of the industry and their social and political impact. It has created a rich archive of feature and documentary films, television investigative journalism, and innovative digital material addressing the industry’s business practices, corporate ethos, organizational structures, political influence, professional glam, individual attitudes, and strategies of fraud.
This workshop aims to be an interdisciplinary collective reflection on the value, the relevance and the social impact of this audiovisual archive. It brings together scholars from the fields of cultural and audiovisual studies, economic history, financial studies, business ethics, and political economy to discuss the representation of financial services and finance capitalism in popular narrative and documentary audiovisual culture. The purpose of this dialogue is to reflect on topics such as:
The historical and anthropological value of this archive
Its critical potential and impact on the financial industry and policy makers
Drama, populism, and the ethics of representing the financial sector
Audiovisual stereotyping and mythologizing of the financial industry
The narrative and spectacular aspects of financial transactions
The tension between the archive and promotional audiovisual representations of the financial industry
The role played by emotions, affect and their management in the operations of the financial sector and film and television materials
Abstraction and the financialization of audiovisual culture
Lobbying, sponsorship, and the interest of financial firms in film and television production
National and regional diversity of the archive