JITARU ILEANA - INTERTEXTUAL FLOWS:
FROM ANCIENT OVID TO ROMANTIC POETS TO CONTEMPORARY
DIRECTORS. POETRY AS EDUCATIONAL ANTI-EXILE IN
DEAD POETS SOCIETY (PETER WEIR, 1989)
(pag. 53-61)
Harold Bloom’s seminal work The Anxiety of Influence postulates a critical vision according to which poets are influenced in their writing by the different relationships they become engaged in with precursor poets. Bloom discerns the process by which the small minority of what he calls ‘strong’ poets manage to create original work, in spite of the pressure of influence in an Agon1 that encloses six revisionary ratios. Peter Weir’s film Dead Poets Society reads as an intertextual continuum, a form of homage paid to the grand poets of English and American literature, who are themselves indebted to the Ancient poet Ovid. With a focus on Bloom’s revisionary ratios, the present paper aims to demonstrate that Weir’s movie is a filmic intertext descending from Ovid, and the grand Romantic poetry becomes an educational manifest for the anti-exile of the mind appropriated to a contemporary audience.
JITARU ILEANA - A Case of Spectatorship as Visual (Un)Pleasure : Moartea domnului Lăzărescu ( The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu)
(pag. 209-215)
This paper approaches Cristi Puiu’s 2005 film Moartea domnului Lăzărescu from the perspective of spectatorship theory: in order to obtain a response from the spectator, the film appeals to a number of film devices (camera movement, mise en scene and editing) that the director uses in order to draw the viewer into a particular relationship with the screen. Moreover, as a realist film and conventional narrative, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is an unpleasurable cinematic product, since it presents an unpleasurable reality (an impaired medical and human system in Romania) and a noneludible existence.