Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

INDIAN SUMMER, ROMANIAN WINTER

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14746680600797129

1474-6697

Adina Bradeanu, Rosie Thomas,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. A comment in a daily refers to the ‘diabolical counter‐programming’ of Yaadon ki Baarat on Antena 1 (rating 18%) at the same time as the Big Brother final on a rival channel (12%). Other programmes broadcast by other channels at the same time as Yaadon ki Baarat were an Elton John concert (2%) and the fiction film True Lies (r. James Cameron; 10%). (Diana Popescu, ‘Melodrama indiană smulge lacrimi … concurenţei’/’Indian Melodrama Brings Rival Channels to Tears’ in Adevarul, 8 July 2003). 2. Natalia Stancu, ‘Vară indiană’/‘Indian Summer’, in Curierul Naţional, 7 August 2003. 3. In the sense in which Berdahl Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. “(N)ostalgie for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.”. Ethnos, 64(2): 192–211. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] (1994) refers to ‘East German things’ as a repertoire of objects or notions associated with the GDR by people who lived through the socialist years and have embodied memories of that time 4. The programmer of the Indian season on Antena 1 admitted that the decision to run the season was prompted by an awareness of the public's growing interest in cultural products which used to be popular in pre‐1989 Romania. 5. Those acts of individual and group recollection have surfaced mainly after 2000 in newspaper articles, personal websites, discussion forums and lists of memories of communism circulated by email, mainly among diasporic Romanians. 6. Nicolaescu's historical super‐productions include Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave, 1970–71), Dacii (The Dacians, 1966), Nemuritorii (The Immortals, 1974). His most widely known action‐adventure films are Un comisar acuză (A Police Inspector Calls, 1973), Revanşa (Revenge, 1978), Duelul (The Duel, 1981) 7. The mention of Adina's Romanian nationality in 2002 amongst a group of Bombay‐based film professionals prompted recurring references to Nicolaescu and to his ‘Comisar Moldovan’. 8. Nicolaescu's films are most often cited when it comes to allegedly unorthodox practices of tampering with box‐office figures. However, his action‐adventure films were highly successful even in the absence of those practices, with specific sequences still circulated in the public memory. 9. Narghita is remembered in a web‐published village monograph. The author recalls the film caravan connected to the car's battery and the films projected on bed sheets nailed on the wall of the local Co‐operative of Agricultural Production: ‘The caravan would come almost weekly and every time we saw the cart in the distance, we, the children of the village, would start jumping and screaming ‘the film is coming’. The same vinyl records were always played on a pickup. I remember mostly the popular music (…) and the records with Narghita. For years on end we kept listening to the same music, and now I still recall everything by heart: ‘Avaramu … O!O!O!’ … [here the author gives a nonsensical phonetic approximation of lyrics from Raj Kapoor films] Do not laugh! That was our life, that was the universe of the children born in that decade. That was the age of the partisan films, be those partisans living on the Volga river or in the fields, led by comrade Mao’. (Cojocaru Valentin 8 Nevember 2000 Buzău, available http at http://dealulsarbilor.buzau.ro/web/INLOCDESFARSIT.htm) 10. The box‐office hits of the decade were Awaara/Vagabondul and Shree 420/Articolul 420, both directed by and starring Raj Kapoor. 11. In a Christian education magazine, an Orthodox priest warmly recalls the Indian films of his childhood and explains their success through the role played in the plot by the unity of the traditional family. When speaking of the concrete effects of the films on the daily life of the audiences, Dallas recurs again alongside Hindi film: ‘For us, the people in the audience, those (Indian) films were real. Life and cinema became one. Their characters often took the shape of our own families or relatives. And it was the same with the films seen on television: for instance, my aunt was Pamela Ewing from Dallas, my uncle Valerian was Bobby, while us, the younger nephews and nieces, were usually left with the negative roles of Sue Ellen or J. R.’ (Father Liviu Bălăşcuţi, ‘Filmul, o şcoală pentru viaţă şi familie?’/‘Films as Lessons for Life and Family’ in Familia creştină, issue 4, 2004). 12. A newspaper tells the story of a Romanian woman (Mariana Saleh) who decided on a dramatic professional reinvention immediately after the fall of the communist regime in December 1989 and became a singer of Indian music. ‘Seeing Yaadon ki Baaraat as a child had changed her life: In January 1990 she was the first Romanian who applied for a visa to the Indian Consulate in Bucharest’ (available htp at http://www.vlg.sisnet.ro/arhiva/an2002/3957/Cultura.htm) 13. Natalia Stancu, ‘Vară indiană’/‘Indian Summer’, in Curierul Naţional , 7 August 2003. 14. Informatia, 8 July 2003. 15. ‘Două ore de grevă trilingvă’/’Two Hours of Trilingual Strike’ in Evenimentul, 19 February 2005. 16. S. Rădulescu, personal communication, 15 January 2006 17. A. Puran, personal communication, August 2005 18. A local journalist writes that ‘one is perplexed when hearing the familiar theme tune from Dallas played on the accordion by a Romanian street‐manelist, and even more stunned when the Dallas score morphs naturally into the purest traditional music from Banat (n.a. region in Western Romania). And what could one say about the hottest form of ‘Hindi turbo‐folk’, which borrows, remixes and spices up the lyrics of Bollywood movies?’ (Gheo, Radu Pavel, ‘Un gen muzical proteic’/‘A Proteic Musical Genre’ in 22, 25–31 January 2006.)