Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema

Abstract

Based on similarities in Mikhail Bakhtin's and Carl Gustav Jung's ideas about dialogism, this chapter discusses the inclusion of sequences featuring heterogenic audio-visual media of conspicuously lower quality – the shooting of a film, TV reportage, a home video – in representative selection of films by veteran Romanian directors Mircea Daneliuc and Lucian Pintilie, as well as in films by Corneliu Porumboiu and Gabriel Achim from the New Romanian Cinema generation. The chapter then argues that the resultant intermedial carnivalesque, or trickster narrative, is facilitated by a Trickster figure, usually a director's stand-in of ambiguous cultural, ideological and ethical repute. This self-reflexive and meta-médiatique versatility of Trickster narratives, the chapter concludes, have proven time and again to be superb vehicles for cinematic encoding, which explains the fascination of Romanian film auteurs with tricksterish re-enactments and intermedial carnivalesque.