Hollywood Peeks

The Setup

Videotheques were alternative exhibition venues. Their monitors showed films that could be seen neither on television nor on the wider screens of movie theaters. From this perspective, their cultural function resembled that of cinematheques (film clubs), an institution that existed in Timişoara since the early 1960s. ² Unlike cinematheques, however, they no longer showed films on celluloid. Also, unlike cinematheques, which focused on art films and were organized by amateur filmmakers’ associations or cinephile groups, videotheques were for-profit enterprises presenting commercial films for a mass audience. While all other exhibitors worked with state-owned or legally rented material (from film archives and cinematheques abroad or from foreign embassies), videotheques trafficked privately owned tapes. They were acquired on the black market and were mostly copies of original videotapes or of TV broadcast films, as Romania had no outlets for videocassette purchase or rental. The compactness, the mobility and the affordability of the videotape medium triggered an economic and cultural traffic that the more expensive and inert medium of celluloid could not generate. State control over the activities of videotheques, from content to exhibition schedules, was limited, as the origins of the exhibited material remained, for legal and political reasons, unquestioned. Moreover, the electronic technology used in showing films made exhibition more portable and more adaptable to improvised viewing conditions, which, like in the pioneering days of the cinema, allowed organizers to convert any public space that offered seating and sold tickets into a viewing venue.

In Timişoara, videotheques appeared and functioned as a response by local cultural institutions to the 1983 enforcement of a 1975 decree issued by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party on the “self-financing” of cultural institutions. ³ The decree called on cultural actors to become more profitable, sell more tickets, and engage in collateral economic activities. The 1983 enforcement of the decree materialized in budget cuts of up to 80 percent. ⁴ People who worked in theater or cultural centers recall these cuts as a deadly blow to the functioning of their institutions, allegedly affecting the quality of performances and the creativity of their personnel. Yet, as one historian admits, this introduction of free market criteria into the state-subventioned world of cultural institutions also “set minds into motion, putting pressure on managers to find solutions where everything seemed impossible.” ⁵

As profitability became a managerial indicator for theaters and cultural centers, ⁶ they were forced to find ways to make money. Theaters rented out spaces for banquets, weddings, and other social events, organized aerobics classes in their rehearsal rooms, used their workshops for small production activities, opened their program booklets for advertising, and sent their managers to local companies for donations. The theater of a smaller city close to Timişoara held a disco in its lobby, and some cultural centers even hosted miniature casinos, equipped with slot and electronic poker machines, in order to balance their budgets. Among these enterprises aimed at making cultural institutions economically more efficient, videotheques were the most lucrative.

In Timişoara, all theaters, even the puppet theater, organized videotheques. In smaller cities around Timişoara, mobile videotheques were set up. At the peak of the phenomenon, videotheques presented three shows per day, starting at 4 or 5 p.m., and ending at 10 p.m. The videotheque was a mixed enterprise, a combination of state and private investment. The VCR players and the tapes were privately owned; the room and the seating were the property of the cultural institution. The sound system and the monitors belonged sometimes to the private organizer and sometimes to the institution (or to both). Small videotheques had one television set. In larger ones, which hosted up to 200 people, three or four screens were disposed in various places in the room. A master monitor was placed in the middle. It had the bigger screen and the best colors. A few extra ones stood on supports fixed on the side walls. Sometimes, they had smaller screens and were black and white. Some participants recall, though this information has not been confirmed, that admission was differential, visual access to the master monitor being more expensive.

The cultural institution sold the tickets and signed a services contract with the person providing the films and the VCR technology. Most videotheque organizers were individuals who had set up discotheques, were active DJs, or were involved in the black-market distribution of tapes, music, and other high-demand products from the West (from clothing to chewing gum). There were just a few individuals in Timişoara who were in charge of the whole phenomenon. They sometimes provided the technology and the films for more than one videotheque. The tickets were slightly more expensive than movie-theater tickets. Advertising was done, but with caution. Hand-made posters announced the daily shows, but, for obvious reasons, publicity via media was avoided. Because videotheques were good money makers, authorities turned a blind eye on the problematic nature of their content, which was ideologically banned (Western commercial cinema) and legally dubious, as its exhibition infringed copyright laws.

Content

The uncontested superstar of the videotheque era was Bruce Lee, as martial arts films filled the seats of videotheques and shaped the imagination of a generation of young adults. Participants also remember the performances of Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, and Chuck Norris, while female spectators recall romantic comedies and pop-musicals, such as Flashdance. ⁷ Oscar dramas made it into the program of one videotheque, organized by the Timişoara Opera, ⁸ while pornography was too risky to be shown in public. Music clips were also included in the program before the feature presentation. Alongside the success of the karate movie, the genre with the most acknowledged long-term public impact was horror (or thrillers and Sci-Fis bordering horror, such as Alien [1979] and The Thing [1982]). Modern horror films were an absolute novelty on the screens of Timişoara (and of Eastern Europe). One such videotheque sensation was John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980).

The films presented in videotheques were translated live by organizers or, toward the end of the phenomenon, the tapes came with Romanian voiceover translation. Most of the time, it was the same voice, belonging to a Bucharest-based interpreter, Irina Nistor. Nistor had worked in television and had translated (live) for the Bucharest cinematheque. ⁹ On the tapes shown in videotheques, she reproduced or summarized the lines of all the characters in a film. The quality of the translation was mediocre, as it was recorded live in an improvised duplication studio in Bucharest, which processed, as Nistor recalls in an interview, up to seven films a day. ¹⁰ The fact that most of the circulating tapes came with Nistor’s translation shows that, even if illegal, the supply of the tapes shown in videotheques was centralized (videotheques being the exhibition venue for only a part of the films that circulated on the black market). ¹¹ We can thus talk about a developing distribution scheme. According to Nistor, and confirmed by our subjects, airplane pilots on international flights were the most diligent smugglers of videocassettes. Since many Western European countries dubbed films, smugglers had to be picky, or bring tapes from the United States and Britain. ¹² Nistor recalls that she translated in a studio owned by an engineer who had the technology and the skill to set up the mixing of sound. All this activity happened with the silent consent of the secret police. She recalls that the studio was located in the basement of a building, and that, on the ground floor, were several recording devices multiplying the translated films, which were then sent all over the country through, Nistor claims, an organized network of truck drivers, a fact hard to prove. ¹³

Electronic subtitling technology was practically unaffordable for private use in Romania in those days. Voiceover translation was better suited for videotheques because the small sizes of their screens made the reading of subtitles difficult. Distributors also preferred voiceover translation over subtitling, because it made the production of the translated videocassette more time efficient. For copying and distribution in an assembly-line regime, which seems to have been the operating mode of the studio mentioned by Nistor, subtitling would have significantly slowed down output. ¹⁴ Since videotheques, like early film exhibition venues, attracted less literate audiences, viewers also preferred voiceover translation to subtitling. Even though several jokes derived from Nistor’s translation errors circulated among viewers, they accepted and even valued translation as a step forward in making viewing more comfortable. Romanian cinema industry and the Romanian television subtitled (unlike the Hungarian or the Czech ones), and voiceover translation was perceived as a novelty. It was a technological attraction, and its deficient quality was accepted as a marker of a pioneering effort, differentiating the public use of a new medium (video) from the old ones (cinema and television). ¹⁵

But the mixing of the superimposed voice with the original soundtrack decreased the quality of both sound and image. It meant a recopying of the film. Videotheque-goers recall not only deficient sound but also grainy images and oversaturated colors. They also recall strong volume in the loudspeakers and humming white noise caused by the over-recording of the translation. For one of our subjects, the loud, humming noise was one of the characteristic elements of the videotheque experience. Especially in the case of horror films, it became a signifier, bolstering dramatic tension. Given the small screens of videotheques and the low quality of the image, the high volume augmented the importance of sound in film reception and, in particular, of the voiceover translation. Since the small screens of videotheques limited optical perception, films, even the karate ones, were primarily experienced as sound and visualized dialogue. The swooshing noise of the punch had more impact on the audience than the choreography of its delivery. Also, in this predicament of low-quality exhibition, the narrative of the film gained importance, making genre films more suitable for videotheque showings. Their more predictable characters and plots were easier to decode on grainy screens and with summary translation, whereas actors’ performances, sets, lighting, and various elements of cinematography, specific for dramas and art cinema, were harder to appreciate.

Audiences

A revealing coincidence is the fact that the videotheque era overlapped with the introduction of color television in Romania. According to the website www.descopera.ro,¹⁶ the first color television broadcast took place on August 23, 1983, just as the decree on self-financing was put into practice. Ironically, the color broadcast also coincided with the gradual reduction of the national television daily broadcasts, culminating with the year 1985, when the second national channel, TVR2, was put off air, and the first channel (TVR1) broadcast only two hours a day, between 8 and 10 p.m. during weekdays, mostly propagandistic material. Interest and demand for color images on TV screens became high. It was bolstered by the fact that there was a scarcity of color TV sets on the market (some people waited for years to be able to buy one, and priority was offered to members of the Communist Party). VCR players, which in those days were available only on the black market, were sold at prohibitive prices (more than one average yearly income). This predicament explains people’s interest in the videotheque from a different perspective. The public sought not only content but was also attracted by the medium of the color TV screen itself, as the videotheque might have been one’s first encounter with color images on a television screen.

The demand for color images coupled with the high interest in Western products (noticeable all over the Soviet Bloc, not only in socialist Romania) explains why, as one videotheque organizer recounts, in the beginning of the phenomenon, any film would show with sold-out rooms as long as it was foreign. The act of seeing a film enabled the viewers’ imaginary integration into a community of consumers that transcended the Iron Curtain. ¹⁷ One could watch the same films as men and women in Western Europe and keep up with the new technology of presenting them. What was however different in Timişoara (and in the videotheques all over Eastern Europe) was the fact that viewing was collective, while on the other side of the Curtain, video became a medium of living room exhibition. From this perspective, the videotheques in Eastern Europe (and of other “developing” parts of the world, such as Africa, where videotheques are still functioning today) fulfilled the dream of Western VCR rental outlets to make money out of collective viewing. As Joshua Greenberg describes, American rental stores had set up theaters on their premises in the early days of the videocassette. Their goal was to compete with cinema viewing and to render the videotape medium transparent, as if it was enabling its viewers direct access to the film. ¹⁸ The effort was ineffective, but the success of the videotheques in the Second and Third World can help us find different explanations as to why the VCR became so quickly a medium of private viewing.

The uncritical and technology-dazed videotheque consumption reported by organizers harks back to descriptions of the early film spectatorship of the turn of the twentieth century. Not only did videotheque-goers (like early cinema-attenders) crowd to see the new medium, but they immersed themselves in the consumption of its images and sounds with passion and suspension of disbelief. Reports of people watching two or three films in a row were common. Some descriptions of early cinema attendance also imagine the viewer in similar ways as our interviewees remember their customers. In Christian Metz’s seminal book The Imaginary Signifier (and in his article “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator”), the early cinema-goer is depicted as naive, “credulous,” and awed by the entertainment gadgets of the Lumiére brothers. ¹⁹ Videotheque-goers themselves recall their viewing experiences as ones of total immersion in spite of the many technical inconveniences of the pioneering days. And the example that our informers most often use to argument this immersion is the horror (or thriller) film, that is, a format of suspense, visual spectacle and shock, creating the same turmoil as, in Christian Metz’s description, the Lumiére brothers’ presentation of the arrival of the train in La Ciotat station had produced when showed in 1895. ²⁰

Besides describing the reaction of audiences, narratives about early days of exhibition pay attention to the exhibitors’ innovative spirit and entrepreneurship. They depict how viewing venues were set up (transforming vaudeville theaters, cafés or stores into cinemas), how technological challenges were overcome, how economic success was achieved and stabilized, and how competition and censorship had to be fought. Videotheque organizers evoke their achievements in a similar way. Ingenuity is the main factor in their accounts as to how they set up the viewing space; how they procured, translated, and recirculated tapes; how they dealt with connecting more monitors to one VCR player; how they chose repertories; how they sold tickets; how they herded people in and out of the show room; how they advertised; and how they managed to persuade the Socialist authorities and cultural organizations to obtain the permission to organize shows and how they prevented them from closing their venues.

But, as Tom Gunning warns us, a present-day effort to envision film watching experiences in times of pioneering media is informed by the habitus to historicize and theorize. ²¹ Several film historians and theorists have told the story of the early days of a medium (film, radio, television) as one of technological innovation, while others, Gunning argues, “have made careers out of underestimating the basic intelligence and reality-testing abilities of the average film viewer and have no trouble treating previous audiences with similar disdain.” ²² These narrators aim to rationalize why certain technological and artistic options prevailed over others and to discover in the behavior of the audiences of the early days of the medium the origins of standardized forms of consumption of the present. Reconstructions (“myths”) of the childhood of film and its spectatorship serve as an anthropological argument to legitimize the development toward more “mature” forms of reception of the future, and these reconstructions often come under the influence of critical engagements that approach early spectatorship as part of the culture industry (even if wrapped, as is the case of Metz, in the universalizing language of psychoanalysis). They construct the early consumer in contrast to the more vigilant listener/spectator of the present, who is more aware of the social and political role of the medium as ideological apparatus. At the same time, on a social (vertical) level, these narratives draw a distinction between more educated audiences, who have the intellectual skills and the values to distance themselves critically from desire and consumption, and the unskilled consumers, who are not able to engage critically the medium’s claim to represent reality and thus ostensibly engage in escapist viewing practices. ²³

Even if they are not film historians or theorists, our informants adopt the position of more “mature” film viewers. Even if they uncritically appreciated the films they presented, videotheque organizers claim to have benefited from a de-mystified relationship to consumption. As people who made things happen, they understood the economic dimension of their initiative. Film lovers, men and women who sat in the audience, also regard themselves as different consumers in the present. Their testimonies suggest that they no longer are the hungry buffs of the videotheque era, who watched films in a row on flickering monitors in crowded rooms. They recall their videotheque experiences from the perspective of a consumer who dwells in a market saturated with Western products. While organizers talk with nostalgic fascination about the entrepreneurial and technological challenges they faced, viewers construct, like Metz, an age of scarcity spectatorship, in which one was attracted uncritically to the medium, the origin of the exhibited material, and the act of consumption itself. Our subjects also confirm that interest in videotheques was spiced up by their quasi-legal condition. Film-viewing on video is remembered as a subversive activity, revealing that consumption in the videotheque era was not only an economic activity but also a political one. People rushed to the videotheques because it was obvious that they would be short lived. The general impression was that organizers had found a way to fool the authorities, smuggle into the socialist cultural mainstream something that did not belong there, and that, sooner or later, authorities would react and shut everything down.

The Politics of Western Film Consumption

Metz and Gunning’s contrasting views of non-institutionalized forms of spectatorship help us explore the politics of videotheque attendance and envision to what extent the functioning of these venues served or threatened the cultural politics of the Communist regime. Art-film buffs, cinematheque-goers, and representatives of the theaters organizing videotheques did not see any subversive potential in videotheques. Their perspective was similar to Metz’s, as they saw in videotheque-goers a naive audience, whose consumption of Western films would trigger only aesthetic wonder and political docility. For the theater people who organized videotheques, cultural resistance toward the regime could be exercised only through the medium of high art, such as the theater. The theater could articulate the values necessary to put into perspective the regime’s hegemonic worldview, gain critical distance from it, and resist it. In interviews, representatives of cultural institutions regard the showing of vulgar commercial films only as a vehicle for balancing the budgets of their struggling institutions and as an economic gimmick serving the pockets of a few privileged individuals connected to the Communist Party elite and the secret police. Nothing intellectually or politically relevant and comparable to the stage or the concert hall spectatorial experience could emerge in front of the TV monitor. ²⁴

Interviews with art-film buffs reveal the same high culture versus low culture scorn at videotheques. One cinematheque organizer declared that he and his film club colleagues never set foot in a videotheque because they showed only “those bad commercial films” with Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris. Communist authorities should thus have no fear. The audiences of videotheques would be satisfied to rebel and fight injustice vicariously on the screen, with the fists of Bruce Lee or the machine guns of Rambo, and then return to their daily routine of political quietness. Yet Gunning proves that the public of the pioneering days of a medium was not as docile and as gullible as one might envision in post-factum historicizing accounts. ²⁵ Gunning describes their predicament in words that are ominous for the general feeling of the mid-1980s Ceauşescu era: viewing experience was “larded with an awareness of illusion and . . . the ennui of the insubstantial, the bleak disappointment of the ungraspable phantom of life.” ²⁶ In other words, this public was much more aware of its consumption and the limits of its escapism than consumers of higher art or present day informants assume them to be.

In the case of videotheques, the audiences’ liking for Bruce Lee or Schwarzenegger was roused by the fact that the Ceauşescu regime found them politically problematic. Moreover, spectators new to a medium, as Gunning argues, viewed films not only with a credulous eye but also with technological curiosity. This curiosity translated into a gaze similar to the one of a spectator of a magic show. The viewer is both startled by the illusionistic act of the magician and tries to understand how the trick works. Thus, the captivation of the public of videotheques might have been triggered not only by the film’s diegesis but also by its realization. This public new to the medium might have been not only credulous but also inquisitive and interested in the techniques of making believe and in the artistry of make-believers. In an era of intense political mobilization, such as the mid-1980s, awareness and understanding of technologies of making believe was a subversive practice in itself.

In addition to Gunning’s defense of the undisciplined gaze of early audiences, Robert Sklar and Miriam Hansen emphasize other political effects of popular culture consumption. Sklar shows how early spectators sought not only entertainment and self-forgetting in film, but profited from its informative socializing function, which helped them integrate—from language to dress code—in communities from which they felt marginalized. ²⁷ Sklar also reveals how early film democratized visual access to sites previously available only to the privileged (such as the Manhattan skyline or Grand Canyon), ²⁸ videotheques offering their viewers glimpses into the West and into its way of life. Miriam Hansen broadens the discussion and suggests the emergence of “alternative public spheres” among early viewers. ²⁹ If Gunning aims at revealing the incredulous dimension of the gaze of early viewers, Hansen focuses on the “inclusive” character of their viewing experience, which she contrasts to the exclusive/exclusivist one of the high-culture consumer. Unlike Gunning, who is more interested in questioning the myth of the early spectator’s interaction with the new medium, Hansen argues that the subversive aspect of early and noninstitutionalized viewing experiences might lie exactly in the credulous, uncritical, and awed way in which the public consumed the cinematic product, abandoned itself to it without claiming an identity to resist its manipulative effects and the values it promoted.

A videotheque organizer, Mimo Obradov, describes such an uncritical and inclusive attitude toward Western cultural products:

We saw [on Yugoslav television] what people can purchase there [in the West], what books one can buy in bookstores, what magazines they have, what cars they drive, the freedom to travel all around the world their citizens benefit from; how their stadiums and their sports arenas look like, what music they listen to, what bands hold concerts there. . . . This is what pained us. Here, we were isolated from the world. We were not allowed to travel outside the borders of the Communist Bloc. The information that came to us from the West was highly censored. We had no free press, radio, television. We slowly moved through a grey zone. ³⁰

Videotheque audiences, like marginal social groups in the days of early cinema (immigrants, illiterates, recently urbanized women), regarded themselves as excluded from the mainstream cultural consumption centered in Western Europe. Hansen argues that, given this predicament, marginalized early cinema publics—like videotheque-goers—used theaters as quasi-legal sites

to negotiate the historical experience of displacement in a new social form. . . . They seized upon hitherto unrepresented discourses of experience as their raw material, if only to appropriate them—as commodity . . . Yet, with neither a legitimating ideology nor experiential substance of their own, the industrial-commercial public spheres grafted themselves onto older forms of cultural practice, creating an unstable mixture which, for particular constituencies under particular circumstances, could produce the conditions of an alternative public sphere. ³¹

Obradov reports that such a negotiation of historical experience of displacement in a new social form happened when his videotheque showed Pink Floyd’s scripted and composed musical The Wall (UK, 1982, dir. Alan Parker). When the film was presented, “the room was so full that, under the pressure of the crowd, the glass doors of the building broke.” Nothing else overtly rebellious happened, he recalls, except that “a few thousand people watched the film in an uncomfortable position, with their heads leaned backwards, on the three monitors hanging from the ceiling. Maybe they were able to hear and see something, but I’m not sure if they were able to understand the story unfolding on the screens. But there they were, ‘The Wall’! Pink Floyd!!!’” and the audience understood and reacted to that; their bodies, their thoughts, and their emotions engendering the “unstable mixture” Hansen talks about. ³²

The Authorities’ Response

Hansen questions the culture industry argument used against credulous audiences such as the videotheque public. In light of her ideas, credulity can become politically progressive and can empower. Hansen borrows from the German intellectuals Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge the argument that the best proof of the subversive character of a certain form of cultural consumption is the authorities’ censoring reaction. ³³ The argument applies quite well to the public consumption of Western films in communist Romania. Censoring and controlling efforts on behalf of the authorities (though not as many as expected) were reported by all organizers. One rumor has it (confirmed on a blog by Irina Nistor herself) that the minister of culture of the time, Suzana Gâdea, had asked for the voiceover translation of the tapes circulating in the country in order to keep track of their content and distribution. ³⁴ Other Timişoara videotheque organizers confirmed that local Communist Party bureaucrats in charge of culture requested verbal reports on what was shown, and where and when.

The showing of The Wall at the Youth Center did not turn into overt antiregime protests. The audience consumed the product, satisfied their cultural/economic need, and returned to their normal life. Even if composed of rock music fans, the audience followed docile patterns of cinematic consumption. But the event, Obradov reports, alarmed authorities. Though at certain moments it called for civil disobedience, The Wall did not gesture toward the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, or totalitarian communism (as the 1984 screen adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four did, or as Pink Floyd themselves aimed to suggest in their 1990 Berlin mega-concert). The film was a critique of petty-bourgeois capitalist Britain and Western militarism—both, but especially the latter, staple themes of anti-NATO and anti-American Communist Bloc propaganda. Yet authorities asked Obradov to provide them with a Romanian translation of the dialogue and prohibited further showings, a proof that they thought the viewing of the film engendered the “unstable mixture” (antiregime resignification of the film’s plot) Hansen talks about.

It remains unclear whether the unstable signifying mixture caused by the film’s content was the only issue that bothered authorities. Censorship often works intuitively, not necessarily articulating reasons for its actions. Since authorities asked for a translation, it seems that, indeed, the content of the film was the source of their worries. We surmise, however, that the high interest in the film as Western product also worried them, even if they might have not fully understood the true causes of their concerns. The authorities’ main goal was to keep things at bay. Once they felt the phenomenon “was getting out of control,” as one such party activist confessed, they could shut it down. Since videotheques were quasi-legal activities distributing politically problematic content, they had to function under the radar, on the basis of a complicity between authorities and consumers, and thus could be terminated easily. “Keeping things under control” referred to this functioning of videotheques without public acknowledgment and to the regime’s complicity in what would normally be called “antisocialist activity.” This complicity, like any complicity, required mutual schizophrenia, the social and political game of pretending something did not exist. Yet a thousand people standing crowded in a hall, and their overtly passionate and credulous consumption, broke the code of silence. It was too much of a public acknowledgment.

The Wall episode brought to public attention the fact that authorities tolerated Western pop music and films and, more problematically, had ties to the black market. This cooperation was problematic not only because it was illegal but also because it accepted the existence on Romanian soil of a different economic order than the socialist one. It undermined the credibility of the regime and of the socialist project it was in charge of. As Catherine Verdery explains, the black market was one of the main delegitimizing elements of late socialist regimes. Economic relations on the black market were similar to those of capitalism and, according to the political doctrine of Marxist-Leninism, they were engendering different social and political relations. This made consumption of Western black market products deeply political: “goods and objects conferred an identity that set you off from socialism, enabling you to differentiate yourself as an individual in the face of the relentless pressure to homogenize everyone’s capacities and tastes in an undifferentiated collectivity.” ³⁵ Acquiring objects, consuming Western goods, became “a way of constituting your selfhood against a deeply unpopular regime” ³⁶ or, to use Pink Floyd’s lyrics, to struggle against one’s predicament of becoming “just another brick in the Wall.”

Videotheques were for-profit enterprises. According to the logic of such for-profit enterprises, Obradov notices, The Wall should have been shown at least a few more times. It would have made good money for the Youth Organization of the Communist Party, which could have then used it to sponsor its less profitable cultural activities. Still the authorities decided against showing it. Whether they realized it or not, the credulous consumption of videotheque-goers challenged the economic principles of the socialist project. In the context of socialist economies, no good, regardless whether material or symbolic, could be regarded only as a commodity and as a money maker. Socialist economies were political. The true value of symbolic goods in socialist economies was their contribution to the goal of building a new political order and a new man, Boris Groys shows. ³⁷ This is why, in the documents of the institutions organizing them, videotheques were listed as cultural and educational activities. Entertainment, the expression of the transformation of a symbolic good into a commodity, was incompatible with the socialist economy.

Videotheques were a living and thriving proof that capitalist economic relations existed and functioned well on Romanian soil. Their audiences’ passion for foreign film, for something that was politically and economically construed as not being vitally necessary for consumers (and as ideologically harmful) gestured toward the shortcomings of planned economy and the political relations it engendered. It suggested that, at least to a certain extent, the diversity of human needs might be better addressed by the principle of the free market economy, based on an unregulated and uncensored dialogue between demand and supply, a realization that would soon put into motion the economic reforms in Hungary and the Soviet Union. If authorities—even if schizophrenically—monitored videotheques, they must have paid attention to it also as an economic experiment with demand and supply and reflect on its results.

Here is thus the paradox of videotheques: Since they showed banned films, videotheques could be nothing else than sellers of entertainment. Since the content of the films they showed was counter-revolutionary, their activity could not improve in any way their audiences’ condition. Consequently, the socialist state was interested in playing the capitalist game of commodifying symbolic goods in order to render them ideologically neutral. And also, paradoxically, the audiences, which happily played the capitalist game of credulous economic behavior, recuperated the political dimension of film consumption and used their viewing experiences as socializing episodes in their effort of vicarious integration into a Western World from which they felt excluded. Simply put, ideological compromise forced the socialist economy to adopt capitalist rules of the economic game, rules which, then (in an unstable mixture), were both accepted and rejected by consumers, who refused to view films as pure entertainment, and sought for values and socializing functions.

Termination

Besides the argument concerning their getting out of control, we have no other information revealing the official reasons as to why the videotheques were closed; that is, if official documents containing clearly spelled out decisions to end an activity that was from the outset quasi-legal and regarded as inexistent ever could be found. Party activists of the time (the ones that are still alive) declined to be interviewed, and there are no documents in the city’s archive addressing the phenomenon, other than the financial statements of the organizing institutions, in which videotheques are marked neutrally as cultural events. None of our interviewees mentions any international pressure on the Romanian government for condoning copyright infringement. The Romanian state made money from piracy of Western pop culture since the 1970s, when cultural institutions started to organize discos, which played illegal copies of Western hits. Long before the era of the traffic in videotapes, pop culture, music in particular, was smuggled into the socialist territory via the media of vinyl discs, cassettes and tapes, and visually via posters and magazines. ³⁸ From an entrepreneurial perspective, discos functioned on a similar model as videotheques and can be considered the latter’s precursors—an argument supported by the fact that many organizers of videotheques had been or continued to be active in the distribution of music. Moreover, the public presentation of films on video was preceded by the showing of music videos in bars and music clubs. There was also a failed attempt to organize “video-discotheques” in the 1980s, which, for cultural and technological reasons, had a short lifespan. ³⁹

Some interviewees mention economic causes that led to the closing of videotheques. One organizer told us that he could not remember receiving an order from authorities to terminate his videotheque. For him, videotheques died the natural economic death of the capitalist order: they were overtaken by competition. By 1985, he argues, interest in public videotheques decreased. As in the early days of cinema exhibition, in less than three years, curiosity about the new medium was no longer the driving force that brought people to the theater. As more VCR players made it across the border into Romania, videotheques came under competition from an even more liberalized form of film exhibition: private video shows. Organized in people’s houses by VCR owners or with rented technology, they became a popular leisure activity. ⁴⁰ Authorities could exercise even less control over their content (which now included pornography) and were no longer able to tax the exhibition of films. From this perspective, consumption of films on video followed the path of Western Europe. Once more Romanians owned VCRs, video became more and more a medium of private entertainment. Yet unlike the West, for many years to come, until the introduction of satellite TV and the cancellation of censorship after 1989, film viewing on video in Romania remained mostly a collective activity (even if the number of viewers decreased to circles of friends).

Our interviews suggest six hypotheses as to why authorities supported/tolerated the videotheque project: First, videotheques made money for the state in the context of the economic scarcity of the 1980s. Second, by responding to the population’s demand for foreign products, videotheques served to give Romanian consumers some access to the Western market and thus preempt social tensions. Moreover, since the 1980s were times of economic crisis, commercial cinema might have been also cynically regarded as acquiring the role of distracting the viewers from everyday frustrations. Third, more or less programmatically, videotheques represented an experiment with free economic initiative responding to market demands, and a glimpse into the future, to an economically reformed communism. Fourth, authorities used videotheques to tax the black market. The era of videotheques roughly overlapped with the local authorities’ initiative to set up fenced flea markets that charged admission fees. These bazars were in fact shopping centers for Western products, admission becoming, as in the case of videotheques, a form of taxing the flow of smuggled goods. Fifth, videotheques were initiatives that in fact served to enrich some influential members of the local socialist elite. Sixth, videotheques emerged spontaneously as an annex of the discotheque culture and survived because authorities did not know how to react to their development. They turned a blind eye to them until they realized their subversive potential.

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. Competing discourses and schizophrenic attitudes informed the way in which the regime regarded videotheques. Some of the previously enunciated hypotheses give us also an explanation as to why videotheques were shut down. First, in time, the unlawful origin of the money made with videotheques became more evident and videotheques had to be terminated because they undermined the credibility of the regime. Second, private videotheques took over the role of offering the population some access to the Western market, and the state was relieved from its role of seller of a cinematic content it had itself forbidden. Third, too much excitement over Western products could not be condoned because it revealed the uncompetitive nature of socialist products. Fourth, as the experiment with the free market proved disturbingly successful, its results had to be kept away from the public eye because they gestured toward the weakness of planned socialist economy.

Conclusion

In Timişoara, local intellectuals used the new medium of the videocassette and the climate of tolerance around it to start also a “video-cinematheque”—that is, a non-profit videotheque with an explicit educational/cultural mission. It was located in the building of the Writers’ Union, charged no admission fee, showed art cinema (mostly European auteurs: Tarkowsky, Fellini, Truffaut) and often politically loaded films, and catered to a selective public, familiar with the cultural practices of the traditional cinematheque, which included presentations and postviewing discussions moderated by local cultural personalities or film buffs. ⁴¹ The format was, however, short-lived. Even though the new medium allowed organizers to show, with minimal state supervision, films as politically uncomfortable as they wanted, the weekly meetings of the video-cinematheque gathered not more than twenty people, puzzling organizers who started the project with great expectations.

The video-cinematheque was not shut down by authorities, but ceased to exist because of lack of public interest. Audiences, including educated ones (who might have visited the video-cinematheque), yearned, it seems, for other viewing experiences. Credulous spectatorship appeared to tempt them more, as it may have even been regarded as more enlightening and more political than traditional intellectualizing forms of cultural resistance via high-art consumption. The argument behind this conclusion is that in times of unpopular government, which is the case of the Ceauşescu regime, the population lacks objects of identification. The private milieus and the niches of the public sphere (such as a cinematheque) existing in socialist Romania were flooded with more or less explicit critical and over-critical (yet ineffective) attitudes toward the regime. Like the cinema of the Great American Depression, commercial films offered their audiences scenarios of identification, and the fact that these audiences rushed to escape into the imaginary landscapes of these films shows how much the Romanian political order frustrated its population’s basic social needs. Credulous consumption gained even more political undertones in socialist Romania because, as the Ceauşescu personality cult revealed, Romanian socialism invested heavily in mobilizing its population’s desires and in triggering credulous consumption of the political spectacle. In this context, any uncritical investment of desire and any form of fandom became a political gesture with more relevant consequences than private or intellectual niche articulation of discourses of resistance.

From an economic perspective, it is revealing that, when talking about managing his screenings, the organizer of the video-cinematheque insisted that “the discussions afterwards mattered more than the viewing of the film.” In stark contrast to this statement is the recollection of the cultural officer of an institution organizing the videotheque in Timişoara’s House of Culture. His challenge was not to keep people inside the room after the show, but to expediently evacuate them, because a long line had already formed in front of the entrance. This contrast coupled with the short life span of the video-cinematheque suggests that in the public imaginary, the medium of the videocassette was envisioned, at least in those days, mostly as one of entertainment. It became an alternative not only to state-selected cinematic material but also to high art. It smuggled into Romania high-consumption visual merchandise (horror, karate, and porn), the demand for it being as high as that for chocolate, coffee, and jeans. The videocassette was not, like the medium of the book, a purveyor of selective content. It served the desire for consumption and not the individual’s need for inner elevation and Schillerian aesthetic education.

From an anthropological perspective, the unpopularity of video-cinematheques is indicative of the association of the videotheque (as was the case of nickelodeons) with more vulgar, less sophisticated, and less ritualized viewing practices, different from the ones hosted by cinematheques. This representation of videotheque cultural behavior suggests that the reason why they were monitored and eventually terminated cannot be explained only in terms of legality and antisocialist content. In the early days of cinema, control over the content of films shown in nickelodeons, Sklar reveals, was an issue of class hegemony. Social elites of the time felt their leading role undermined. ⁴² In the case of videotheques, we might encounter a similar situation, which places Communist authorities with high-art devotees on the same side of the barricade against the videotheque public.

Interviews with celluloid cinematheque-goers reveal that they did not reject video as a medium of collective consumption (and consequently avoided the video-cinematheque) because of the size of its screens and their lower visual quality (compared to the quality of 36-mm film strip projection). Cinematheque-goers could also not be critical against the format of the video-cinematheque and its intellectual/educational stakes, since it replicated the consumption rituals they participated in themselves in cinematheques. For them, the public use of the medium of the videocassette remained simply incompatible with art cinema. Interestingly, our discussions with such cinematheque-goers did not bring to the fore any rational argument to explain this rejection, except the success of the videotheques themselves, their association with “Stallone and Chuck Norris” and with mass consumption.

The short life of the video-cinematheque demonstrates that video remained a medium associated with nonreflexive and allegedly nonresistant cultural consumption. The economic predicament of the videotheque in socialist Romania is suggestively revealed by its location in Timişoara’s Youth Center, the institution that hosted the showing of The Wall. While the cinematheque met in the festivities’ hall of the Youth Center, a huge black box with traditional movie-theater seating, the videotheque was held in its lobby, which also hosted the disco. While the cinematheque remained associated with the traditional medium of the cinema and with other accepted forms of audiovisual spectacle (concerts, theater, folk dance), the videotheques grew in an improvised space. The political dimension of videotheque spectatorial experience can be construed as the effect of its newness and of the way in which it challenged and disrupted established viewership and consumption rituals. No surprise then that, more tucked away from the public eye, in the darker rooms of festivities halls with no windows to break, cinematheques survived in muted resistance the regime’s censorship until 1989; while the more visible, more obstinate, more vulgar, less established, and thus less controllable videotheques were dissolved two or three years from their initiation. The parallel rise and fall of these two film exhibition venues provides a strong argument that credulous mass consumption proved more difficult to cope with by authorities than exposure to high art. It also proves that culture industry arguments regarding the political effects of entertainment on audiences need rethinking in the context of the socialist states. In the context of socialist, education-centered economies, one can, in some cases, even turn the culture industry hypothesis of control via commercial cultural consumption upside down, revealing unexpected side effects of mass spectatorship and thus redefining the way in which we approach strategies of disciplining and resistance.