COURAGE

prepájame zbierky

The volume Rock sub seceră și ciocan (Rock under the hammer and sickle), which came out in a first edition in 2016 and was republished in 2017, is the first part of an ample project of mapping the rock music movement in Romanian. As the author himself presents it, Nelu Stratone’s book is an invitation to go on “a journey in time, in search of the roots of the rock spirit in Romania, in which freedom was countless times suppressed or censored in the face of a merciless authoritarian regime, but triumphed through strength and creativity, laying the foundations for one or more generations of people who have made their mark on our culture and our collective memory.” The volume is indeed valuable also because the story of rock in Romania is intimately interwoven with the author’s own story: he confesses that he was impelled to write the book because “I have accumulated quite a rich experience, so I have decided to share with others something of my knowledge.” The period covered in this first volume is the last three decades of Romanian communism, from 1960 to its collapse in 1989. The main chapters of the book are entitled: “Rock and Roll, comrades!” which describes the penetration of rock music into the Romanian space in the period 1960–1971, “The personality cult and rock music,” which follows the evolution of this music after the delivery of the famous anti-Western Theses of July 1971, “The underground movement,” which shows how indigenous Romanian rock flourished after 1977 in spite of the restrictions imposed by the regime, and “The situation as a paraphrase,” which covers the last period of communism in Romania, from 1985 until the Revolution of 1989, during which the song whose verses are quoted in the epilogue was composed: “Azi în Timișoara, mâine-n toată țara” (Today in Timişoara, tomorrow in all the land). Numbering over 470 pages, the book is the most significant and rigorously documented synthetic study of Romanian rock music in the communist period. On top of that, the magazine Dilema Veche included it in their list of the most important books published in Romania in 2016.

This special issue of Caietele CNSAS (CNSAS Notebooks), the academic publication of The National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), the institution with custody of the Securitate archives. This special issue gathers contributions dealing mostly with the situation of various religious denominations in Romania under communism, especially the relationship between the state authorities and the denominations.

Finally, after the end of the war and the distribution of property among the new nation-states, the negative of “Plastic Jesus” was returned to Belgrade, and is housed at present in the Yugoslav Film Archive with “Centar film” continuing to hold the rights to the work. At the beginning of 2016, with the goal of screening the film at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York City, the Yugoslav Film Archive remastered the film, reintegrating a controversial scene. This scene had been edited out in 1972 after the consfiscation of the film. DeCuir explains why: "Utilizing archival footage of Chetniks in the movie along with a song about them would be viewed as an extremely confrontational thing to do in Socialist Yugoslavia. What made this insertion worse, when Stojanović took his critical views too far, was the next set of images in this particular montage sequence. After the insertion of the archival footage of Chetniks, Stojanović cuts to archival home footage of the wedding party of Ljubiša Ristić (an actor in the film) and Višnja Postić, both of whose fathers happened to be army generals and who were in attendance at the party along with other government officials - all prominently displayed in the footage. As a result of the associative montage the idea was produced that these officials could be equated with Chetniks - or even worse, were Chetniks. The extreme political sensitivity of this scene proved to be the ultimate undoing of the film.” (DeCuir et al. 2011b, p. 248) The scene was under special ban and the secret service returned it to the Yugoslav Film Archive only in 2009. DeCuir sees the fate of this scene as “a reminder of the extent to which oppositional criticism was suppressed in Yugoslavia, as well as the potential penalties.” (Ibd.)

The new, remastered 2016 version of the movie is the first complete version of "Plastic Jesus" since its creation. Thus, the movie was screened, with the director present, for the first time in its entirety at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in April 2016.