Remembering socialist entertainment: Romanian television,gestures and intimacy

Explaining the popularity of socialist-era television after 1989: nostalgia and beyond

To understand the success of socialist-era entertainment after 1989, which is often discussed through the interpretive framework of ‘post-socialist nostalgia’ (e.g. Imre, 2013; Pehe, 2014; Reifova, 2009), it is important to consider some of the literature on mediated nostalgia and the practice of re-broadcasting old content elsewhere in the world. When trying to explain the recycling of old television content for American audiences, critics have acknowledged that products of popular culture cannot be divorced from the political climate in which they emerged. However, they have also pointed out that the use of reruns has been determined largely by niche marketing and the tastes and values of particular demographic segments (Grainge, 2000). Specifically addressing the ongoing commodification and aestheticization of nostalgia in relation to media recycling in American culture, Paul Grainge argues that they cannot be interpreted as a sign of ‘creative exhaustion’, ‘millennial longing’, ‘temporal breakdown’ or ‘postmodern amnesia’, as various critics have sought to explain it, but rather as a strategic deployment within specific consumer industries. ‘The content and “meaning” of nostalgia is, in many respects’, Grainge (2000) insists, ‘secondary to strategies of production and imperatives of niche consumption’ (p. 31). In Eastern Europe, a similar combination of impulses has no doubt motivated the recourse to socialist entertainment after 1989 (Reifova, 2009).

In a similar vein, when trying to account for the success of ‘Nick at Nite’, a channel launched in 1985 that specializes in old sitcoms and television reruns, Lynn Spigel (1995) asserts that the success of the reruns ‘has less to do with the universal appeal of television art – its ability to last through generations’ – than with the network’s strategies of representation which repackage them ‘through a new camp sensibility’ and the playfulness through which stars like David Cassidy host special marathons (p. 18). Moreover, in Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, David Kompare (2005) points out that the ubiquity of past television and the constant recirculation of the nation’s cultural and individual pasts have now created a ‘television heritage’ that generates specific forms of public history and memory. He also draws attention to the fact that the way in which viewers and scholars ‘remember’ the television of a particular time is inextricably bound to how television remembers itself. This point seems applicable to examinations of post-socialist mediated memory as well, given that research in this area often pays particular attention to programmes that have achieved their prominent status in vernacular memory party because of their repeated broadcasting.

Another factor worth considering is the temporal and mnemonic logic specific to different types of media, regardless of socio-political context. For Amy Holdsworth (2011), the dominant framework through which television remembers and refers to itself is nostalgia, a ‘safe return’ as she calls it, where ‘recovery or return is not the object of desire but the relative safety of distance and longing’ (p. 97). By looking at the construction of different ‘Golden Ages’ of television and the role of generational memory in remembering television, Holdsworth (2011) reminds us that in a North American context, the reruns of situation comedy shows from the 1950s in the 1970s can be linked to a specific desire for more stable and simpler times, a time of innocence and security (p. 119). From this perspective, nostalgic engagements with old television programmes in post-socialist Eastern Europe do not so much appear as an expression of a longing for a specifically socialist past, but rather articulate a more diffuse sense of longing for a generic past, seen as a time of lost innocence and security, and rooted in the domestic character of television viewing. To put it differently, the enjoyment of old television programmes is an expression of longing for one’s own childhood, spent at home watching television.

Holdsworth’s emphasis on the link between television, domesticity and nostalgic longing reminds us of the fact that mediated nostalgia is not necessarily, or at least not entirely, driven by political attitudes. As Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko (2004) argue in their critical review of debates about post-socialist nostalgia,

any analysis of nostalgia must guard against two temptations: reading politics into nostalgia (that is, assuming inherent political meaning or implications to specific nostalgic practices) and reading nostalgia into politics (assuming that every reference to the past is indeed a nostalgia one). (p. 490)

Drawing on Svetlana Boym and Susan Stewart’s writings on nostalgia, Nadkarni and Shevchenko point out that longing in nostalgia is never longing for a specific past, as much as it is longing for longing itself. This, they explain, becomes evident in instances of material or sensory nostalgia, where the physical object deployed – whether a rerun of an old film or a madeleine dipped in tea – cannot satisfy the desire that it stirs, for the simple reason of this desire being self-referential. What is at stake in each case, they point out, is not the film or the pastry or the historical period they signify but rather the individual’s ‘memory of past desire’ and ‘the awareness of the impossibility of reliving this desire again’ (Nadkarni and Shevchenko, 2004: 492; my emphasis).

In other words, audiences might want to watch socialist entertainment again in an attempt to rediscover the innocence of the world in which they grew up and perhaps to reflect, with anthropological curiosity, on the past world from the perspective that they gained after 1989. Ultimately, while the sights and sounds that socialist entertainment may index are able to conjure up the habitus that once structured the socialist era, it is important to remember, as Joe Moran (2004) suggests, that nostalgia often has to do with everyday objects or routines that are not easily articulable, ‘such as the preference for … the more abrasive GDR toilet paper’ (p. 228). As he puts it, ‘people can feel nostalgic for even the most enslaving of routines, the certainties that at least make life predictable’ (Joe Moran, 2004).

For better or worse, however, post-socialist nostalgia tends to be discussed from the point of view of its political implications – that is, from the point of view of its role in negotiating popular attitudes to the Communist rule. In this respect, Constantin Parvulescu (n.d.), who writes about nostalgia in the Romanian context, makes an interesting argument that focuses on the complicated psychological work of self-justification and psychological survival after communism through which television nostalgia aids post-communist subjects. Interpreting the return of communist-era television as an instrument of dealing with the communist past, he contends that the re-watching of old television content facilitates a forgetting of the past. This process enables ‘survivors of socialism’ to adopt a self-understanding in which their past, most likely lived through compromise in an oppressive system, is viewed through exonerating lenses.

For Parvulescu (n.d.), the renewed success of state socialist detective comedies in post-socialist Romania reveals a process through which audiences seek confirmation of the impression that the socialist ideology only touched their lives superficially. The nostalgic turn to the past, therefore, empowers audiences to look back at themselves as ‘shrewd men and women, who not only did not let the system break them, but who also knew how to efficiently defend themselves from it’ (Parvulescu, n.d.: 42; my emphasis). More specifically, the return to comedies about small crooks and social clowns enables the Romanian viewers to identify with characters that to a certain extent embodied the way in which they envision themselves during socialism, as victims and survivors of the system. Like the small crooks tricked into petty crime, viewers were also tricked into problematic moral and social acts that forced them to negotiate living through the constraints imposed by a tough system. The nostalgic look engendered by the reruns thus manages to provide audiences who experienced socialism with ‘exonerating scenarios’ that ultimately help audiences to ‘suspend responsibility’ and relieve them ‘from asking himself or herself uncomfortable questions’ (Parvulescu, n.d.: 40).

Parvulescu’s (n.d.) argument touches on an important point, namely, the concrete pleasures derived from re-watching socialist-era television – in this case, the pleasure of remembering (or perhaps rewriting) one’s past self as a critical viewer capable of deflecting the power of Communist propaganda. In what follows, I will show that such pleasure is indeed an important factor that can help explain the popularity of socialist-era programming in post-socialist Romania. I do so by examining comedy sketches, which constituted by far the most prominent positive memory of state socialist television in interviews I conducted in Romania in 2014. However, I will also argue that such prominent, well-articulated and remembered pleasures are not the only type of pleasure derived from watching state socialist television. Rather, they are accompanied by a pleasure derived from watching familiar programmes, encountering familiar television characters and thereby re-experiencing the sense of intimacy generated by the domestic context of television viewing.

Sources and methods

To examine the reasons for the continued popularity of socialist-era TV programmes, this article draws on a combination of sources and methods. In 2014, I conducted a series of 30 interviews with participants born in various regions of the country between 1930 and 1975. To ensure that the interviews captured a range of viewing experiences, the sample included a roughly even split of men and women from different social and educational backgrounds. The participants also came from three different generational cohorts, which correspond to three distinct stages of political development and media development in the country (for an overview of these developments, see Mustata, 2013). The oldest generation, born before 1945, experienced the early stages of communist rule and grew up in a media world dominated by radio. The middle generation, born between 1945 and 1965, grew up at a point in time when communist rule was already well established and when the media landscape was slowly becoming accustomed to the growing influence of television. The youngest generation, born after 1965, grew up with television as an established medium but also experienced the formative years of youth or early adulthood during the 1980’s, when the quality of life in Romania deteriorated dramatically, when TV programming was reduced to only 2 hours on weekdays and when the level of political oppression reached its peak.

My interviews were semi-structured, and they consisted of two main parts. In the first part, I began with an open-ended question that invited the interviewee to describe their first memories of television and then move through different stages of the life-cycle over their lifetime and concluded with a set of targeted questions about specific television programmes, including New Year’s Eve broadcasts. In the second part of each interview, I asked my subjects to view a sample of old clips as a stimulus, including a clip from Pistruiatul, with the aim to elicit further comments. The interviews were conducted in domestic and public settings, such as restaurants and cafes, and lasted for about an hour. (Let me also clarify that these interviews were not conducted solely for the purpose of issues addressed in this article, but as part of a larger project designed to address a variety of other research questions.)

However, these interviews are not the only source used here to investigate the success of socialist entertainment. I also draw on the analysis of the TV guide Programul de radio şi televiziune and the various articles and illustrations appearing in it, on printed interviews with television professionals who worked in television before 1989, as well as on various forums, YouTube comments and my own experience growing up in socialist Romania. Finally, I also use the analysis of programmes themselves and speculate on the importance of gestures and close-ups in the creation of a special intimacy between actors and the socialist (as well as post-socialist) audiences.

This combination of sources helps compensate for the weaknesses of each individual source: archival sources such as historical TV guides can offer insight into public discourses that shaped the reception of particular programmes when they were first aired, but are ultimately reflecting the perspectives of producers rather than viewers; the analysis of TV programmes can identify the various creative techniques used by TV professionals to appeal to their audiences, but cannot really ascertain with certainty whether these appeals were successful among audiences; finally, while audience interviews have the capacity to elucidate the experiences and perspectives of viewers themselves, they can also be highly unreliable and also rarely include detailed comments on individual programmes. Combining different sources and methods therefore offers the best way of establishing a rounded understanding of why certain TV programmes possess such a lasting appeal.

The New Year’s Eve comedy sketches

The socialist-era comedy sketches, usually broadcast on the New Year’s Eve, have enjoyed a continued popularity with the Romanian audience. These sketches were usually broadcast as part of the New Year’s Eve special entertainment programme, which began around 21:00 or 22:00 and lasted until 5:00 or even 6:00 in the morning. Painstakingly prepared many months in advance and eagerly anticipated, this programme was conceived as a variety show with numerous music performances, dance pieces and comedy sketches. Its enormous success at the time was due, first and foremost, to the quality of the sketches, which, as I show below, were not only funny, but also often very subversive, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, the importance of the ‘Revelion’ programme, as Romanians call it (from the French term réveillonner, to spend a reveillon), is also tied to its aggressive promotion in television guides from the early 1960s, which functioned as a means of deflecting the attention given to Christmas celebrations in an atheist, communist country. In the years before Romania’s first television broadcast on 31 December 1956, communist authorities sought to gradually eliminate the traditional customs and religious symbols of Christmas from public life and substituted them with the new symbols of socialism. Television, in this respect, came under pressure to perform this symbolic shift. Similar changes were under way elsewhere in the region at the time. The substitution of religious celebrations with secular holidays was a characteristic shared by state socialist countries globally and formed, as Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable (2016) underscore, ‘part of a transnationally shared sense of the passage of time’ (pp. 343–344) in the state socialist world.

In 1948, when communists came to power in Romania, 25 December became a working day and within a year, ‘Father Christmas’ came to be known as ‘Father Frost’ (similar to Ded Moroz in Russian). Not only that; as Ozana Cucu-Oancea (2005) points out, ‘While in the past Father Christmas had been considered the messenger of Jesus, the accent was now placed on proletarian Father Christmas who could be either a mechanic, a diver, a salesman, or a switchboard operator’ (p. 167). At the same time, Christmas carol lyrics were replaced by patriotic songs about saving the ‘Red Star’, which sought to create confusion between the star of Bethlehem and the five-pointed red star, widely used as a symbol of communism (Cucu-Oancea, 2005: 164). A similar mixture of religious and communist symbols and narratives could be found in the television guides published during the 1960s and the 1970s: one of them, for instance, featured a drawing of Father Christmas delivered, like a baby, by a stork that places it on an antenna, while another included images of Father Christmas along with a knight on a horse, a snowman, a postman and a rocket flying through the stars (see, for example, Programul de radio şi televiziune, 23 December 1965, 1 January 1966). Arguably, images such as these could strike numerous chords: on one hand, they helped some of the traditions associated with Christmas survive in a secularized context; on the other, they took Father Christmas out of the traditional religious context and displaced his religious importance.

Radio-television guides published at the time also regularly featured articles that hyped the importance of humour in New Year programming and the painstaking preparations of comedy sketches. For instance, in a guide published in late December 1960, one could read an article about the enormous stress that writers of comedy and satire go through in order to please the audience:

The New Year’s Eve celebration is a pleasant celebration. People party, drink, dance and, of course, eat traditional Romanian food. The only people who remain sad are the comic writers. From January 1^st, they already begin to think about the funny moments for the next year’s New Year’s Eve, and, of course, come December, they can’t find new ideas! And when at last they do find them, and are extremely happy about this, they discover that other people came up with the same ideas in the previous year! On New Year’s Eve, the comedy writer does not eat traditional food and does not drink wine. He merely looks at the other people at the table to check if anybody is laughing. And if anyone happens to laugh, then the writer admits that he wrote the sketch. If nobody laughs, he has two options. Either he complains that people did not listen to it, being more preoccupied with the sausage than with satirical art, or he comments that the satire was written by somebody else.

Half of the front-page cover of 23 December 1965, to give another example, is dedicated to the ‘satire, humor, and music’ that was scheduled for the ‘Revelion’. The whole guide on this day also creates an aura of expectation, offering glimpses of what audiences would be able to watch to attract the reader to the festive screen:

In front of each television camera, diverse clips from the hundreds of minutes of the musical-entertaining New Year’s Eve programme run quickly and feverishly through the lenses of each television camera. On the electrical control, the consumption of kilowatts increases, and the editing scissors dress up the pellicle clothes of some of the programme selections. The directors and the interpreters rehearse their parts. We could, dear viewers, tell you in detail everything that the small screen will host on the night of New Years’s Eve, but we are convinced that you would not forgive us if we spoiled you the pleasure of the unknown. However, we would like to assure you that your beloved singers, comedy actors, and many pleasant surprises will not be missed from the New Year’s Eve schedule.

Even though such hyperbolic announcements of the festive schedule may have been originally motivated by the politically driven desire to displace religious festivities, there is little doubt that New Year’s Eve programming was enormously successful among audiences. As my interviews with people from three different generations of Romanian viewers reveal, the New Year’s Eve sketches are almost exclusively remembered with great fondness. Significantly, they were among the first things that people recalled in connection with Romanian socialist-era television, functioning as a shortcut to a host of memories of various other pleasures. These pleasures were tied, in the first instance, to collective practices of watching television with family and friends, eating good food and laughing at jokes. Furthermore, the ritual surrounding the New Year’s Eve festivities was inextricably tied to a process of expectation and anticipation of the programme, as well as to the creation of a shared familiarity with the humour of the jokes.

The intimate, safe space of this familiarity was generated through repeated viewings of the sketches during their re-broadcasting on the first days of January and, sporadically, throughout the rest of the year. For most of the people whom I have interviewed, there is a sharp contrast between the pleasurable experience of watching the New Year’s Eve television programme during socialism and the unexciting, monotonous experience of watching the programmes made today. For example, one man in his early 70s commented that

Nowadays, everything has changed. I don’t have the same sense of anticipation of the programme. I lost interest. I am not excited anymore. There are so many channels, and I keep zapping in the hope of catching a good joke, and in the end I become so frustrated that I turn off the TV and go to sleep. They make poor quality programmes nowadays and it’s frustrating because you don’t know where to watch and you wonder whether you perhaps missed a better programme on another channel. (RO-1946, Male)

For another woman in her 60s,

The magic of the New Year’s Eve programme is now gone. I don’t know, it’s not the same anymore. I have no particular interest in it, I watch it for a little bit and then I go to sleep. There is so much vulgarity on television nowadays, and the jokes are cheap. In the past, I used to celebrate it with other people, but in the last few years I ended up spending the Eve by myself, at home. I don’t have much money to spend in restaurants. (RO-1954, Female)

A younger woman, now in her early 40s, remembers the ritual of watching the New Year’s Eve programme with her family, eating good food in the cosy atmosphere of her house:

I always watched the New Year’s Eve programme with my parents, and we regularly had guests at our house. We had a good time, eating and drinking throughout the whole night, and when the comedy sketches came on TV, we all turned our attention to the TV screen and watched them with great interest. I was eagerly waiting for the New Year’s Eve programme, and I would enjoy watching it again, even today. I remember that on the first days of January, they showed the comedy sketches again and again, and since we still had plenty of food left, all we did was to sit in front of the TV, eat, and watch the comedy sketches again. From time to time, we threw a log into the fire and then we kept watching. (RO-1973, Female)

In other words, what audiences remember is ‘not programmes, but interactions with the world of television’ (Bourdon, 2003: 12). As Jérôme Bourdon (2003) points out, remembering television is ‘not remembering a text with chapters’ but ‘remembering contacts with a certain world “out there,” which comes to exist through the television screen, but generates a variety of interactions that cannot be reduced to simple viewing’ (p. 13).

Apart from recalling New Year’s Eve television in the context of interactions with family and friends, interviewees also frequently mentioned the recurring male actors who performed comedy sketches on Romanian television at the time, including Amza Pellea, Toma Caragiu, Dem Radulescu, Florin Piersic and Jean Constantin. More than mere recurring characters, these actors became true stars, and viewers often regarded them with affection. With the exception of one male philosophy professor (born in 1967) who believed that the New Year’s programme was merely ‘background noise’ and that the comedy sketches weren’t really that funny, there was a general consensus among the people I interviewed that the sketches were a great source of entertainment and that the actors who played them were truly exceptional. In a sense, New Year’s Eve was unimaginable without the sketches; actors such as Caragiu and Radulescu were an indispensable ingredient of New Year festivities, just as the dishes traditionally consumed on these occasions. Indeed, the consumption of food and interactions with and around television were closely intertwined. As one interviewee argued,

I believe most Romanians’ lives on New Year’s Eve were strongly connected to the Revelion television programme. Our parents would bring in the food, and when they started to sing and dance on TV, we would start eating. These actions were somehow connected. The whole ceremony of bringing food was regulated by what was shown on TV. When they announced that something was about to begin, we would open the champagne, or bring the cakes from the kitchen. I don’t know, we liked it. We liked to see how the actors were dressed, and the jokes were really funny. Especially since that was the only day of the year when we had such a long programme on TV … we were hungry for TV. And we would stay up the whole night until the special morning dance, ‘Perinita’. And the following day, on January 1^st we would eat noodle soup and watch re-runs of the previous night’s programme. Every year, we would consistently eat noodle soup. Then we had ‘boeuf eggs’, an aspic dish, meatballs, olives, cascaval cheese, cut in a decorative way, stuffed vine leaves … (RO-1972, Female)

One of the factors that contributed to the popularity of the sketches and the intimate bonds established between actors and viewers was the use of numerous close-ups, which captured the actors’ dramatic facial expressions, gestures, body posture and movement, as well as particular ways of addressing the audience. As Richard Dyer (1998/2011) argues with regard to films, these dimensions play an important role in viewer engagement; their meanings are also heavily context-dependent, tied to particular cultural and historical contexts (p. 134). The same applies to Romanian comedy sketches. The actors performing the sketches were well-known for their expressive skills, recognizable gestures and body movements: in an interview from 2006, Dan Mihaescu (2011 [2006]), who wrote many of the popular New Year sketches, describes Toma Caragiu as an actor who had ‘an extraordinary talent of charging every word with an explosive force while at the same time using a certain movement of the brow, a certain gaping grimace, a certain look’ (p. 383). The importance of skilful use of facial expressions was enhanced by the fact that many of the comedy sketches were in fact monologues in which the actor addressed the audiences directly. Amza Pellea, for instance, embodied a character called ‘nea Marin/Uncle Marin’, who often began his sentences with ‘Ba fratilor’/‘My brothers’, ‘ba brate-miu’ – ‘my brother’ and a recurring ‘Stii, …’/‘You know …’, thereby seeking to establish an intimate, quasi-familial bond with viewers. Dressed in traditional folk costume and speaking with a pronounced Oltenian accent (a dialect spoken mainly in the region of Oltenia, characterized by the use of the simple perfect tense rather than the complex perfect which is used in other dialects), Uncle Marin also made use of a wide range of gestures that ultimately embraced, rather than rejected, the rough qualities of his character. Taken together, these gestures, expressions and forms of address arguably played an important role in forging the memorable bonds with festive television among Romanian viewers.

Another feature that contributed to the popularity of the sketches among viewers was their (mildly) subversive nature. Contrary to what one might expect, given the fact that censors closely monitored the content that was broadcast on Romanian television, the socialist New Year’s Eve comedy sketches were extremely daring for the times, even during the 1980s, when political control over television reached its peak. The jokes regularly alluded the repressive power of the system, for instance, by mentioning that ‘even the walls have ears’ and thereby alluding to the fact that whatever people said or listened to in the privacy of their apartment could be overheard by neighbours ready to report them to the authorities. In this sense, the jokes provided an outlet that allowed people to see their problems recognized and acknowledged – albeit indirectly, and on rare and exceptional occasions such as the New Year’s Eve celebrations – in the public arena.

The ‘structure of feeling’ that these jokes relied on was intimately connected with the act of decoding and commenting on the situations depicted in the sketches. Replicating the actors’ lines and mannerisms, people would often find refuge in the euphemistic character of their ‘code words’ and phrases as a means of describing their own situations without risking repercussions. The fact that such code words are still being used today testifies to the power of their affective charge. For instance, the made-up word ‘soparlita’ (‘little lizard’), which first appeared in a sketch by Toma Caragiu that was originally broadcast in 1969, is nowadays widely used with reference to dishonest people who seek to undermine others. Quite blatantly entitled ‘The “Soparlita Libera”/The Free Little Lizard’, the sketch also openly alludes to the practice of listening to Radio Free Europe, an anti-communist station banned by the authorities. ‘I have just learned that there are several types of little lizards: the ones that live in the forest, the ones close to people’s houses and the ones that live around the files of workers, “Sopirla Dosaris”’ (a made up ‘Latin’ term that seemingly references the little lizard that attaches itself to the secret police files),’ Caragiu says at the beginning of the sketch, clearly alluding to the informers who wrote ‘reports’ for the secret police. In ‘A Discrete Telephone Call’, another sketch from the same period, the actor calls his friend from a public phone in order to tell him about the opportunity to obtain at a cheap price an icon painted on glass (a forbidden artefact in an atheist country). The humour of the sketch derives, on one hand, from Caragiu’s attempt to create various euphemisms in order to avoid a direct reference to the word ‘icon’, fully aware that the phone is being wiretapped, and, on the other hand, from his friend’s inability to understand (or pretending not to understand) his references.

In sum, the analysis presented here suggests that the popularity and continued resonance of socialist-era New Year’s Eve programming among Romanian audiences derive from a range of factors. On one hand, these programmes were heavily promoted at the time and represented a highlight in the broadcast year, partly due to the fact that they served as a secular replacement for traditional religious festivities surrounding Christmas. On the other hand, they also became part and parcel of intimate family rituals and comforting routines, with TV personalities and programmes functioning as an integral part of the festive season. As I have argued, comedy sketches formed a particularly popular and memorable part of New Year’s Eve programming, a fact that can be linked in part to their subversive nature and in part to their reliance on close-ups, which emphasized the importance of gestures and facial expressions and fostered the formation of intimate, affectionate bonds between viewers and actors. In order to fully understand the appeal of socialist-era programming, both in the socialist past and in the post-socialist present, we therefore need to look beyond political and commercial interests and consider the micro-aspects of the programmes themselves and the context in which they were received by audiences. As we shall see in the following section, a similar argument applies also in relation to the popularity of the TV serial The Freckled Boy.

The success of Pistruiatul/The Freckled Boy

The serial Pistruiatul, directed by Francisc Munteanu and broadcast for the first time in 1974, was one of the most popular domestic serials produced in Romania during state socialism. The storyline is set in July 1944, and the plot revolves around the relationship between a 13-year-old boy Mihai (‘the freckled boy’) and a fugitive named Andrei (played by Sergiu Nicolaescu), who turns out to be a communist hero. With the help of Mihai and his friends and family, Andrei manages to evade his enemies as well as communicate with his supporters in an attempt to coordinate resistance against fascist troops approaching the city where he lives. The resistance activities prove successful: in the last episode, communist forces occupy the local police headquarters, and the serial concludes with scenes of collective euphoria that engulfs the town upon arrival of the liberating army.

Pistruiatul underwent a series of re-broadcasts during the socialist period, in 1980, 1982 and 1984. In the years immediately following the release of the serial, director Munteanu sought to produce a follow-up movie that would trace the life of ‘the freckled boy’ at a later stage in his life, but his attempts failed: unlike Pistruiatul, Roscovanul/The Redhead (1976) relied too much and too obviously on propagandistic elements. In 1986, Munteanu returned to the script of Pistruiatul again to work on a film adaptation in three parts based on the original 10 episodes of the serial, titled Pistruiatul I, Evadatul (The Freckled Boy 1, The Fugitive), Pistruiatul 2, Ascunzisuri (The Freckled Boy, Hiding Places), and Pistruiatul 3, Insurectia (The Freckled Boy 3, The Insurrection). After 1989, the original serial Pistruiatul, more than any other socialist-era serial, was frequently broadcast on Romanian television, and each episode uploaded on YouTube received thousands of fans.

In 2013, when the famous actor and director Sergiu Nicolaescu, who played the communist hero Andrei in Pistruiatul, died, the main Romanian television channels, Antena 1, Pro TV, TVR and Pro Cinema, re-broadcast Pistruiatul and a series of other well-known historical films made during Nicolaescu’s prolific yet controversial career. Despite the numerous media scandals surrounding the blatant distortion of history in many of his films, the outpouring of grief following his death was channelled through yet another return to his work that was re-broadcast on television. The extraordinarily high audience ratings recorded at the time demonstrate the appeal that Nicolaescu and his work still holds for many Romanians. The record of these retrospective viewings was held, unsurprisingly, by Pistruiatul 2, Hiding Places, with 2.7 million viewers each minute, followed by Pistruiatul 3, The Insurrection, with almost 2 million viewers, and a series of patriotic films made by Nicolaescu before 1989: Un Comisar Acuza/A Police Commissioner Accuses (1973), Nemuritorii/The Immortals (1974), Mircea/known as Proud Heritage (1989) and Dacii/The Dacians (1967) (Obae, 2013). These ratings need to be put into the context of Nicolaescu’s prolific career spanning 55 years, with a legacy of 60 movies in which he occasionally acted simultaneously as film director, as an actor and as a writer and screenwriter.

Few of my Romanian interviewees failed to recognize Pistruiatul when seeing the clip during the interview, and many explicitly mentioned watching the programme either before or after 1989. Yet very few of them actually recalled any details about the experience or had much to say about what attracted them to the serial. When I asked them why they liked Pistruiatul, they all acknowledged watching it with pleasure both during socialism and after its demise, but had difficulty describing the elements on which their pleasure hinged. An exception was a female interviewee in her mid-40s, who discussed the serial in greater details and mentioned enjoying it for aspects that had little to do with its ‘ideological content’:

I remember that Pistruiatul was a sort of Gavroche of Romania, the boy who helps those who fight against … I don’t remember who … and that the characters were well defined, as it was clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. It was all about this boy’s adventures, placed in a context that did not reflect reality. It was an imaginary scenario. I don’t believe it has to do with any political aspect. I don’t remember any details, I remember that things happened. I remember I was fascinated by the way in which one guy placed letters in a case – I enjoyed watching the process of printing manifestoes rather than the ideological content of the serial. (RO-1973, Female)

A similar absence of detailed recollections and reasons for enjoying the serial is apparent in the comments posted on various on-line blogs, YouTube and Facebook pages dedicated to the serial. The majority of the comments merely state that the serial is simply ‘great’ and ‘a masterpiece’. There is no post-modern irony at stake here (of the type ‘it’s so bad it’s good’), but rather an obsessive desire to watch Pistruiatul again and again: ‘I saw it about 30 times and I would still watch it again’; ‘this film is my favourite and I’m 18 and I still watch it’; ‘This is the 89th time I saw it and I am still not tired of it!’; ‘I’ve seen it about 35 times and I am still not bored with it’; ‘It’s incredible, I saw it about 100 times and I still watch it – Bravo to the people who made these serials’. ¹ Similarly, a Facebook posting with a clip from Pistruiatul and the question ‘Can you recognize the film? How many times have you seen it?’ shared by Cultural BZI.ro elicited responses such as ‘hundreds of times’; ‘I believe I saw it at least 30 times … I am not joking, I also have all the CDs with the serial, Super’; ‘It’s Pistruiatul, I saw it 10 times and even more’; ‘I saw it for … well … countless times!!!’ (Facebook 2015). ²

It is important to note that the ideological content of the serial, namely the fact that the story revolves around a communist hero who manages to save his town from the advancement of Nazi troupes in 1944, never comes up in any of the viewer comments as a reason for enjoying the serial. As we have seen, the importance of such ideological content is also explicitly dismissed by one of the interviewees. Even though we need to interpret such viewer testimonies carefully, and should not take them as conclusive evidence of failure of communist propaganda, it would also be wrong to dismiss them altogether. Rather, we should see them as an invitation to look more closely at the characteristics of the TV programme itself, and reflect on all the aspects that may have contributed to its lasting appeal, not only ideological ones.

First, the serial does not promote communism in a straightforward way but rather uses the figure of the child to express admiration for it, or rather, for an abstract version of what it is supposed to be. The action of the story never tells us much about the communist hero Andrei, except that he has managed to escape from the police vehicle that was taking him to an execution place. He is working on ‘strategic plans’ to defend the advancement of fascist troops, but we are not given any details about them. Throughout the 10 episodes of the serial, the qualities that make the communist hero ‘great’ have little to do with his political views. Rather, they rely on his charisma and sex appeal (significantly, reinforced through numerous close-ups), as well as his ability to inspire and influence others simply by virtue of his existence.

Pistruiatul constructs Andrei as the object of desire around whom everything else revolves. We learn that he is a great man simply because everybody else is convinced that he is great. While Pistruiatul’s own father speaks highly of him (‘Do you know Andrei personally? Do you know how great this man Andrei is? Two years ago I was with HIM’, he tells his son), other people working underground to help him are similarly in awe with him for something that he did before the action of the film started. Even Pistruiatul’s beautiful history teacher is in love with him. As a typical patriotic hero, however, Andrei never gives in to her beauty, putting his duty for the country first; when she expresses her love for him, he rejects her, claiming that he is too busy working on underground missions. Yet this makes him even more desirable: in the scenes that follow, we see the teacher (through numerous close-ups) pining in bed for him, squeezing her pillow as a substitute. In another scene using close-ups, Pistruiatul spontaneously hugs Andrei, making visible, once more, the economy of intimate relationship, libidinal desires and drives that govern the serial.

These examples suggest that we should read the appeal of the serial by taking into consideration factors beyond the ideological plot. The success of Pistruiatul, I propose, can be accounted for, at least in part, by reflecting on the ways in which the serial builds affective bonds with the viewers through a series of intimate gestures between characters, reinforced through frequent close-ups. This intimacy is created in Pistruiatul through an economy of gestures such as winks that suggest an understanding between two characters that elides a third party. For instance, Mihai’s history teacher and his father repeatedly exchange winks to indicate that they share a secret, while Mihai and Andrei establish a pact on how to best make a fist in order to bring good luck. Moreover, this gestural intimacy is taken to another level in a scene that suggests one’s intimacy with oneself and the comfort that comes from realizing this. For instance, when Pistruiatul notices Andrei’s face on a ransom poster attached to the wall of a building in town, he ceremoniously stops and winks at it, saluting Andrei with two fingers touching his forehead.

Much of the pleasure of watching and re-watching the serial, therefore, may come from a longing for the sense of intimacy that the serial manages to establish. In a way, we could even say that some of the pleasure that audiences derive from watching Pistruiatul has to do with following the economy of gestures and winks foregrounded in the film as a way of retracing the affective bonds that Romanians constructed over time, by sharing secrets (in an oppressive regime) and using signs such a winks to acknowledge this type of intimacy. Ironically, a narrative that was meant to celebrate communist heroes and their role in liberating Romanians from Nazi oppression could, in this sense, be read as a narrative of popular resistance against communist rule.

Second, I argue that the repeated broadcasting of Pistruiatul before 1989 played an important role in shaping the way Romanians experienced the tumultuous events of December 1989, when actors such as Sergiu Nicolaescu seemed to personify the well-known heroic character and re-enacted, in real life, dramatic scenes from the serial. Although this may be less known to outsiders, some of the first people that appeared on television to encourage audiences to believe that a revolution was indeed going on were the nation’s most well-known actors, who gave incredibly dramatic, improvised speeches. One of these actors was Sergiu Nicolaescu, who, much like in his fictional role of a communist hero speaking about ‘Free Romania’ from the balcony of on occupied building in the last episode of Pistruiatul, was now playing the role of a real-life revolutionary, this time denouncing communism. There is a blurring of history and memory at stake here, in which the images of liberation from Pistruiatul seem to become superimposed, like a palimpsest, over the ones from the 1989 Revolution. Well-versed in the art of public speaking, Nicolaescu was among the very few people at the time capable of delivering coherent, rousing speeches about ‘true, courageous Romanians’ who ‘withstood the enemy’s bullets and their tanks’ in their street protests. He received standing ovations from the crowd gathered in the centre of Bucharest after Ceauşescu fled his palace and asked the crowd to listen to and support the soon-to-be president Ion Iliescu. Nicolaescu went on to become an important figure during the 1989 Revolution and in 1992 was elected to the Romanian Senate as a member of the Romanian Social Democratic Party.

In an article titled ‘Articulating Stardom’, Barry King (1985) distinguishes between ‘impersonation’ and ‘personification’ in acting. Impersonation is usually produced by actors such as Meryl Streep, who are able to transform their body and voice in ways that signify differences between the characters she plays. Personification, by contrast, refers to performances such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s that display many similarities in the uses of the body and voice. It occurs when there are no obvious signs of transformation of the actor in order to represent a character so that an actor’s performance takes on the appearance of being consonant with his personality.

Sergiu Nicolaescu, one might speculate, personified his performances, ventriloquized his former characters’ bodies and thus in doing so foregrounded, as Richard Dyer (1998/2011) points out in relation to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the continuities of the actor’s image over and above differences of character (p. 185). With personification, vocal and physical continuities persist, as the actor makes little or no concession to individual characters. Nicolaescu’s spectacular performance as an actor of the Revolution, in other words, has meant that his voice and mannerisms were infused with extra meaning: the body of the actor and the body of the ‘revolutionary character’ became superimposed, speaking through each other.

Conclusion

Building on existing research on post-socialist nostalgia and television, this article has used the Romanian context to point out some of the tensions and contradictions at stake within various critical analyses that problematize the return of socialist entertainment after 1989. In doing so, my desire was, first and foremost, a desire to counter assumptions that view socialist television through Cold War dichotomies which discredit audiences’ pleasures of re-watching socialist television programmes.

To this day, the culture of Eastern Europe (and of Romania in particular, given the austerity of the 1980s) appears to be, for some scholars, severely compromised by contact with communist ideology. Peter Gross (2004), for example, who frequently writes about media transition in Eastern Europe, argues that Eastern European societies have embedded pre-communist and communist cultural traits which are ultimately ‘inimical to democracy’ (p. 112; my emphasis). In articles and books with dramatic titles such as ‘Forward to the Past: The Intractable Problems of Romania’s Media System’, ‘Dances with Wolves: A Meditation on the Media and Political System in the European Union’s Romania’, ‘Limping to Nowhere: Romania’s Media Under Constantinescu’ and ‘Between Reality and Dream: Eastern European Media Transition, Transformation, Consolidation and Integration’, the author intimates apocalyptic scenarios in which there is truly no escape from the burden of the ‘communist legacy’. Perpetually in transition – if not in limbo – and, to use his words, in ‘a crisis of values’, Gross’ (2008) Romania is, one may say, ‘bloated’ and indeed ‘gone wild’. If the country did indeed transition to – as he puts it –‘wild capitalism’, it is still ‘suffering from its communist past, one that is a social organism in gestation’ (p. 136; my emphasis), tormented by ‘undigested experiences’, from ‘elements of endogenously driven ferment’ (Gross, 2004: 212; my emphasis), constantly being ‘pushed and cajoled to meet standards’ while in fact ‘attempting to Potemkinize the realization of standards’ (Gross, 2008: 126).

Notwithstanding the many burdens and responsibilities that may indeed characterize the ongoing transformation of Romanian and Eastern European media, relentlessly pointing the finger at its failures does little to uncover the ways in which real audiences actually engage with its legacies. In this respect, calling attention, as I have done in this article, to the complicated politics of memory and the significance of television becomes especially important. As I have shown throughout this article, the success of socialist television in post-socialism is never simply a consequence of audiences falling prey to political manipulation or commercial imperatives. In many instances, the pleasure of re-watching socialist entertainment can be linked to the act of remembering what it meant to be fascinated by minor, seemingly insignificant details, such as the specific gestures or facial expressions that created an affective bond between actors and audiences. In other cases, re-watching old programmes may entail revising a sense of familiarity and intimacy associated with particular viewing rituals, such as those characteristic of New Year’s Eve festivities. Against arguments that might want to privilege ironic, ‘retro’ or ‘postmodern’ forms of nostalgia for socialist past, I argue that we also need to acknowledge a more complex set of affective investments that repeated viewing of familiar entertainment tends to engender. For some people, such a revisitation of known content stems from some sort of anthropological curiosity to rediscover oneself and one’s innocence at an earlier stage in life, while for others it may have to do with unconscious desires and identifications – whether they are tied to unacknowledged colonial identifications with the West (see Imre, 2012), with the blurring of history and memory, or the desire to be addressed as a spectator by a type of entertainment that assumed a unified national audience.

Last but not least, I also hope that my analysis demonstrated the value of combining a variety of methods and sources, including textual and visual analysis of programmes, for the purpose of understanding the dynamics of vernacular memories of television. Especially in cases where interviews with viewers yield little detail, as was the case with Pistruiatul, a careful examination of programmes themselves can provide significant insights into the factors that contribute to their continued appeal among audiences.