Abstract
A decree passed by the socialist Romanian state at the beginning of the 1970s stipulated the need to defend state secrets as a condition for the country’s economic and social progress in the context of its growing participation in world commerce. While the law operated with a wide notion of state secrecy, referring to any piece of information which, if disclosed, could jeopardize the Romanian state’s interests, it included harsh regulations with regard to personal contacts with foreign citizens and served primarily for establishing a heightened operative control over the local economic life. Following the Romanian State Security Council’s encouragement of campaigns for popular education, which should help prevent any trespassing of this decree, the early 1970s saw the commissioning of several instruction films made by the newly founded Film Service of the Ministry of the Interior as a form of ‘counterintelligence training of the working class’. The present paper contextualizes and closely analyzes some of these films staging fictional cases of industrial espionage and their subsequent investigation by State Security as a form of useful cinema, arguing that, aside from their main educational mission of raising awareness about the legal responsibilities ensuing from the decrees concerning state secrecy, these films also acted as an instrument of national, geopolitical and institutional self-representation.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 As an interesting parallel to these films, one could consider especially the popular Chinese genre of ‘fantepian’ films, which also dealt with issues of counterespionage in the early days of the People’s Republic of China. See for this especially Zhang (Citation2021), Lu (Citation2020, 17–24), Lu (Citation2017) and Du (Citation2017).
2 See for this understanding of useful cinema as ‘films that work’, Hediger and Vonderau (Citation2009, 9–16).
6 See for this also Ilinca and Bejenaru (Citation2006/2007).
12 For some examples, see Paraschiv (Citation1970) or Macri and Olar (Citation1971). According to David Graeber’s famous classification of ‘bullshit jobs’, ‘duct tapers’ are workers hired to simply patch up structurally dysfunctional organizations, see Graeber (Citation2018, chapter 3).
15 *** (1984, 7). For a similar research concerning the cinematographic output of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, see Strausz (Citation2020 and Citation2021).
17 See for instance the bibliography included in Securitatea 2/42 (1978), 84.
18 See for what follows Rîpeanu (Citation2013, 208–209 and 240–241).
19 See for the following Verdery (Citation1991, 121f and 167f).
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Stanford: Stanford University Press. Additional information
Funding
This work was supported by the Romanian Ministry for Research, CNCS/CCCDI – UEFISCDI, research grant PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020–0791.
Notes on contributors
Christian Ferencz-Flatz
Christian Ferencz-Flatz is a philosopher and media scholar. He currently works as a senior researcher at the University of Bucharest and as a lecturer at the National University of Theatre and Film. He was the PI of the research projects “Structures of Bodily Interaction. Phenomenological Contributions to Gesture” (PCE 2020), “Continental Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Elements of Empirical Research in Early Phenomenology and Critical Theory” (TE 2017) and „Habitus, Memory, Sediment: Facets of a Phenomenological Approach to Tradition” (TE 2010), funded by the Romanian Science Foundation, as well as Senior Researcher in other philosophical and film-scholarly projects. He was a Senior Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Cologne. He published extensively in philosophical and film-scholarly journals. Together with Radu Jude, he co-authored the experimental film Eight Postcards from Utopia (in post-production). His latest monograph: Critical Theory and Phenomenology. Polemics, Appropriations, Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer, 2023.
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