Abstract

Although socialist Romanian cinematography focused on commer­cial and artistic feature films, hundreds of short films were produced every year on the fringes of the industry, in specialised animation and documentary studios, in amateur cine-clubs, by students at the National Institute of Film and Theatre in Bucharest, and by other amateurs (some of them visual artists) who owned a personal camera. Starting from an analysis of the context that allowed for such practices to flourish in a state whose official policies did not support this typology, this essay explores the modes of production and the experimental tendencies in Romanian cinema during the socialist era, mapping the territo­ries where the avant-garde and experimental film manifested themselves. It is a gesture of digging at the margins of the film industry in the hope of shaking up the current canon and of offering a better understanding of the peripheries of the period’s cultural production, which will reverberate in the ways we are used to approaching its centre.