The Visual Memory of Informality in Romania and Bulgaria

This presentation analyzes the cinematic discourses on systematic corruption in two Eastern European societies. In an attempt to understand different social practices of informality through a look at transnational similarities and disparities we will analyze two recent films from Romania and two films from Bulgaria. These Romanian (Cristi Puiu, Cigarettes and coffee, 2004; Alexandru Solomon, Kapitalism our improved formula, 2007) and Bulgarian (Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov, Gloria, 2016; Vesela Kazakova, Mina Mileva, The Beast Is Still Alive, 2016) films that address corruption will be studied comparatively from a theoretical perspective situated at the intersection of the literature on corruption and artistic memory studies. Besides a shared communist past, both countries have experienced in the last decade the largest protests against the corrupt elite and social injustice since the 1989 change of regime. The presentation will discuss the existence of a certain common type of remembering communism in the cinematic discourse on informal practices in the two case studies. A preliminary analysis of the media discourse on the matter shows how blame is assigned to communism, considered as the source of acceptance of social and economic inequalities. This commonplace social fact is a characteristic of both post-communist regimes during the transition period. This type of media discourse will be crossed with the artistic one. We argue that artistic readings of contemporary issues offer a more comprehensive perspective on the phenomenon, which helps elucidate certain social practices such as informality. In both cases we want to interrogate the existence of an artistic discourse that holds responsible the recent past for the present generalized corrupt practices. Furthermore, this presentation argues that, the transnational approach of the issue shows the circulation of artistic practices in the anti-corruption fight that can offer an understanding of the similarities and also of the particularities of the construction of this movement in both countries.