From “Letter” to Anthology

by Lucian Georgescu

It has already been two years since Cinepub launched its new editorial approach: from a single voice—at times monotonous and repetitive—belonging to the editorial desk, to a polyphonic concert, in different registers and styles, of diverse authors—some of them established film critics and historians, others unknown, film scholars in the making or newcomers to writing about cinema, coming from varied cultural, professional, and academic backgrounds. The reason is not merely the wish to offer you a diversity of viewpoints, to cast old and new films in a new light and from different angles, but is part of the cinepub.ro creed: film archiving seen as part of Cohen-Séat’s plurivalent concept of filmology (1946), a fluid undertaking, to my mind, which today migrates toward what Sian Barber (2016) calls “film as a source”—that tendency in academic research to use film as a resource, a corpus of scholarly study for all manner of fields: history, geography, anthropology, philology, philosophy, sociology, belles-lettres, cultural studies. Little by little, the roster of authors and the archive of the Cinepub newsletter (christened, as of this year, the “Cineletter”) has grown extremely large.

The texts are the real wealth and the only “property” of cinepub.ro: while the films we present to you belong to the rights holders who license them to us for contractually limited periods and territories, the texts of our “letters” belong forever to the Cinepub universe—with the authors’ due signature, of course. And Cinepub does its faithful duty of placing them in the public space free of charge, through the weekly dispatch of the cineletter. They are ours, everyone’s—and here I include, of course, you too, our readers and viewers. Beyond their number and their diversity, the tendency is for these texts to grow ever more ample, more complex—true academic studies, some of them, like the one accompanying tonight’s premiere. The number of Cineletter subscribers is, however, minuscule (a few thousand only) compared with that of the viewers (around 60 million a year). Of course, “video content is king,” says the theory of online marketing, and the difference between the two sectors—that of writing and that of the image—is understandable; but is it really so great? Seriously? We believe there can be more than a few thousand readers of the only (a revelation I had not long ago!) film magazine in Romania. A publication with weekly editorials, gathered into an annual anthology of the most accomplished texts of the previous season. Thus was born “Cinepub the book,” in collaboration with Polirom; the first edition, Cinepub 1.0, was published in 2025: if 1.0 stood for the first volume, as well as the first decade of activity, the one due this autumn—named (apparently without much inspiration) 2.0—marks not only our platform’s entry into its second decade of existence but also its evolution: a far larger number of authors, an ampler and more complex editorial corpus, multiple zones of cultural provenance among the authors included in the volume, and also a foreshadowing of the launch (in 2027) of version 2.0 of the cinepub.ro platform. A far more beautiful, user-friendly version, in which the curation is showcased as it deserves. If in the old days we called cinepub.ro, half in jest and half in earnest, “a Netflix-on-the-Dâmbovița,” I believe 2.0 will earn the name “a Mubi-on-the-Danube”—a phrase that rightly tosses out any possible pejorative shade.

Tonight we “christen” as a film scholar Răzvan Nicolescu, an anthropologist specializing in material and visual culture. Răzvan earned a doctorate at University College London, has also worked at Imperial College, and is the author of Social Media in Southeast Italy: Crafting Ideals (2016) and co-author of How the World Changed Social Media (2016). He is currently a Research Fellow at NEC (New Europe College), Bucharest. Răzvan makes his debut with a demanding film: Hanul dintre dealuri (The Inn Among the Hills), inspired by Caragiale’s fantastic prose. Cristiana Nicolae’s cinema is seen from a new angle—that of a young researcher, educated in the West, who adopts a viewpoint entirely different from what has been written so far—little, for that matter, where the “fugitive” Cristiana Nicolae is concerned, an unjustly forgotten director whom Cinepub salutes across the Ocean. For Răzvan, Cristiana Nicolae’s cinema was a lovely surprise, and the result is a veritable chapter of an anthropological inquiry—hence the length of the text, which obliges us to make a change to the cineletters: from now on they will be presented only in part in the email, and those interested will be able to read them in full on the site. In this way we shall avoid the blunders of editorial truncation, as happened recently with a text signed by our colleague Andrei Gorzo, subsequently re-sent in order to rectify the error.

The Inn Among the Hills: Rebellion and Conformity in a Seemingly Closed 19th-Century World

by Răzvan Nicolescu

Hanul dintre dealuri (The Inn Among the Hills, 1988, directed by Cristiana Nicolae) follows the journey of Ștefan, a minor boyar drawn by the prospect of an advantageous marriage to Kira, the daughter of the polcovnic Iordache (polcovnic: a colonel-rank militia commander). The polcovnic is a powerful man who built his fortune and influence quickly, by catching rebels for the Prince (Vodă) and seizing their homes and wealth. Along the way, Ștefan stops at Mânjoală’s inn, where he is fascinated by the innkeeper, a beautiful woman held to possess magical powers, who offers him mystery, love, freedom, and, perhaps, the chance to become someone else. The film traces the tension between the allure of these promises and the conformity demanded by the social order.

The fantastic in Caragiale’s short story La hanul lui Mânjoală (At Mânjoală’s Inn) is developed by Cristiana Nicolae in order to explore deeper and more uncomfortable themes. The film offers a direct yet nuanced critique of the arbitrariness and violence of power, of social injustice, of the impossibility of individual freedom, and, above all, of the mechanisms by which people come to accept and acquiesce in situations of domination.

Read anthropologically, the film stages the confrontation between, on the one hand, the control the powerful exercise over people, their desires, and their destinies, and, on the other, a possible escape from this logic through the activation of mechanisms situated beyond the social order.

The Magical World as a Bastion Against Social Injustice

A remarkable aspect of the film is the way the magical world functions not as spectacle but as a space of resistance. The innkeeper and her inn offer an alternative—even if only a temporary one—to an order dominated by boyars, by institutionalized violence, and by economic and social calculation. The supernatural, magic, are perceived as fascinating forms of autonomy and of the exercise of power by those who have no access to resources and authority within the dominant social order.

The innkeeper’s ability to build her own space of resistance in a world that condemns her is not an isolated theme in Cristiana Nicolae’s filmography. In several films the director explores female characters who are strong yet socially vulnerable, and who confront, in different ways, the injustices and constraints of their social class and of the world they live in. In De dragul tău, Anca (For Your Sake, Anca, 1983), the rebellious adolescent Anca is regarded with suspicion and marginalized because she refuses the unwritten rules of communist society. In Sanda (1990), the factory worker Sanda is caught between domestic violence, the violence of the state—including against her own body—and an exhausting life at the factory and at home. Cristiana Nicolae looks at these realities with a remarkable lucidity and anthropological curiosity, in a cinema that operated under the pressure of a regime that preferred predictable answers to questions, and social discipline to voices that stepped out of line.

Unlike the two heroines just mentioned, the innkeeper in Hanul dintre dealuri has a relatively stable and ample place of refuge. The inn is a liminal space, in the sense given by the anthropologist Victor Turner: it exists at the margin of both the boyar and the peasant orders, at the intersection between the world and the forest, between the normative and the forbidden. Turner described as liminal spaces those zones of passage lying outside the normative social structures, where the ordinary rules are suspended and where alternative forms of existence and identity become possible. The inn is a place of rest and of encounter among travellers, but also a place where the social order may be suspended and the magical one may manifest itself. The passage into this magical world, free of social constraints, is made through the secret gallery behind the great mirror in the inn. And the festival of the masks, the film’s culminating point, condenses this space into a liminal time in which the social order is inverted and social hierarchies are ritually suspended.

But the film suggests that this space is fragile and doomed. Boyar power can invade and destroy it at any moment, as happens twice. The first time, the polcovnic burns the inn to its foundations and kills the innkeeper’s entire family, long before. The second time, the rebuilt and prosperous inn is set ablaze at the end of the film.

The magical functions not only as a fantastic element but as a way of expressing the social tensions that the film’s characters cannot articulate directly. The innkeeper is perceived as having supernatural powers. She seems to dominate people (the dead robber), the natural world (the storm), and the supernatural one (the Sânziene, the midsummer fairies), and she has an important link to the lesser-known world of outlaws and fugitives.

For Ștefan, the magical is bound up with the fascination of another possible identity. The inn offers him a space and a time in which he feels he can become someone other than the man society expects of him through marriage and the fulfilment of social obligations. For the polcovnic, however, the magical is intolerable, because it represents what cannot be controlled: an independent woman, an autonomous space, and a subversive social order. The burning of the inn is not only an act of violence. It is also an attempt to destroy this alternative order.

The magical register is sustained by a folklore of resistance that comments freely on social reality and survives the structures of domination. Doine (lyrical folk laments) and ballads appear at key moments of the film: at Ștefan’s first entry into the inn’s courtyard, at the festival of the masks, and at Ștefan’s wedding to Kira. Folklore here represents a popular language of hope, of longing, of pain, one that describes with great expressiveness both social reality and what is, or could be, beyond it.

Gender Relations: The Body as a Resource

The film constructs a world in which gender relations are defined by control and power. Individual freedom is glimpsed as a real possibility, yet it remains fragile and never complete. The human body is the principal terrain on which this power is manifested.

Kira, the polcovnic’s daughter, is treated as a resource: her body, her pregnancy, and her future become instruments in her father’s hands. Her resignation is lucid. Kira understands the system better than Ștefan and knows that survival means acceptance and submission. “He wants to see that you are submissive,” she tells Ștefan, who is outraged by the injustice being done to him. Her body is part of a logic of alliance, of wealth, and of social continuity.

The innkeeper is Kira’s opposite: independent, possessed of authority, armed with determination and knowledge (entrepreneurial, local, and magical). Her association with witchcraft and the magical world can be read as a projection of social anxieties toward a strong and independent woman. This social position, unusual for a woman, makes her dangerous to authority and condemns her. If Kira’s body is a resource managed by the father’s power, the innkeeper’s body is a threat to that same kind of power. That is why the polcovnic throws her down into the dirt and ties her to a horse at Mânjoală’s death, cuts off her hair when Ștefan is captured, and finally eliminates her altogether when the inn is set on fire.

Despite the significant differences between them, both women in Ștefan’s life are in the end defeated by the same social order. Kira is caught in the trap of a loveless marriage, and the innkeeper vanishes in the smoke of the fire. The film suggests that in a world controlled by men and by wealth, there is no model of womanhood that survives unaltered. Neither submission nor freedom offers a real way out.

Aspasia, the inn’s serving-maid, has neither the innkeeper’s freedom nor Kira’s passivity. Her devotion to the innkeeper reads in an attentive gaze, in an injured eye, and in simple, courageous movements.

The male bodies are, in their turn, marked by power. The polcovnic Iordache is always well dressed and imposing; he appears on horseback, in a boyar’s high-backed chair, or weighing a purse of money in his hand; he leads through command, a sly smile, and a wide but cutting gaze. He is a man used to being obeyed. His body communicates absolute authority. Calistrat, the commander of the troop of arnăuts (Albanian mercenary guards), reproduces this manner of displaying and imposing power, but expresses it through a militarized, energetic, precise gesture. He is arrogant, devoid of hesitation, an efficient extension of his master’s power.

Ștefan, by contrast, carries on his body the signs of his vulnerability. The wounds and bruises he accumulates over the course of the film inscribe on his body the tension between the two worlds he hesitates between: the world of the social order, represented by the manor, wealth, and marriage, and the free, sensual, dangerous world represented by the inn. Ștefan’s body is rather a battlefield on which the power of others is enacted. Ștefan is bound and beaten in the polcovnic’s house, bound and left to thirst at the monastery, tended, transfigured, and brought to life at the inn.

What is interesting is that the film constructs masculinity not as strength but rather as failure. Strength is evident, always ready to project violence, yet it always leads to a certain kind of failure: either the failure of absolute power, which becomes tyranny, or the failure of freedom, which becomes resignation. The failure is material and marked on the body. The polcovnic is castrated by the protector of the rebels (Mânjoală); Calistrat is whipped by a Ștefan who steps into the social role allotted to him; Ștefan becomes apathetic and rigid. Which suggests that the film criticizes the social order not only as an instrument of domination—over women, over social classes, over the weakest—but also as a system that in the end leads to a certain kind of personal failure. No one survives this social order intact, neither those who wield it nor those who try to slip out from under it.

The Boyars, Absolute Power, and Class Struggle

The film describes a social world in which the boyars dispose not only of land and material goods but also of people—of “souls.” “Souls that exist and that will be born,” specifies the dowry deed with which the film begins. This juridical formula, by which a boyar disposes of the people existing on his estate and of their descendants, condenses an entire vision of social relations in the Romanian Principalities in the first half of the nineteenth century. The corvée peasants (clăcași) were bound to the boyars by multiple obligations of labour, money, and produce until the Agrarian Reform of 1864. Slavery (robie), which targeted the Roma and meant the legal right of ownership over the person, was abolished in Wallachia in 1856. The film captures this world in which the peasants on the estates were regarded as resources of the boyar household and were transacted together with the land.

From an anthropological perspective, this practice belongs to a system in which those who hold power control not only material resources but also the mobility, identity, and reproduction of their subordinates. The anthropologist James C. Scott (1990) has shown that in such systems of domination the powerless permanently perform a public discourse of submission (the public transcript), expressed through repeated attitudes of deference, respect, and submission toward the powerful. These forms are socially visible not because the dominated accept authority, but because any deviation from this script can be punished with violence.

At the same time, there exists a hidden discourse of the dominated (the hidden transcript), made up of judgments, criticisms, and desires they cannot express publicly but which keep the consciousness of injustice alive even in the absence of visible revolt. Kira, the polcovnic’s daughter, does not openly rebel against her father, yet she judges him lucidly: she describes him as a man driven by pride and greed, sins that make him wicked. This moral judgment is a form of acceptance that registers the injustice but operates only in secret.

The innkeeper and Ștefan refuse this script. The innkeeper situates herself in a zone of social and financial independence in which she has built an intense and rich world. The richness consists first of all in intimate and constant access to resources: both natural—through knowledge of plants, of the customs of the place, and the reading of nature’s signs—and human, through solidarity with trustworthy people, including outlaws who might, at a given moment, represent an alternative to the existing social order. Ștefan, for his part, is only partly dependent on the polcovnic, on account of his own social status and of the fascination he feels for wealth and money. This positioning makes them dangerous and condemns them, because in a world where power is maintained also through the public display of submission, those who do not perform submission become an existential threat to the dominant classes.

But the polcovnic is not content with Ștefan’s public submission alone. He wants him submissive in private too. He probably wants to be convinced that his son-in-law keeps no inner life of his own and no attraction to a subversive world.

The polcovnic seems an exceptionally wicked character, yet he is representative of a social class that has internalized the absolute right to dispose of people. His good relations with the Prince—expressed publicly, in particular, through the relatively rapid accumulation of wealth and the freedom of action within the territory in his charge—illustrate the mechanism that legitimizes this power and constitute a disarming proof for all those who might think to contest it. They see that local violence is rewarded by the central power so long as it reproduces the existing order. The Church appears as part of this network of legitimation, allied with power and willing to accept the material benefits it offers.

Re-education Through Beating

One of the film’s most provocative dimensions is the scene of re-education through beating, a motif that reminded me of the experiments in re-education through physical and psychological torture in the communist prisons of Romania in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Through the re-education of political prisoners, the communist regime sought to transform dissidents into submissive subjects, or at least into people who accepted the regime’s political and social order.

This parallel is all the more interesting in that, in Caragiale’s short story, there is no hint of such systematic violence. On the contrary, in the story the polcovnic is a rather friendly character, understanding toward Ștefan’s extramarital experiences—in the story, Ștefan and Kira were betrothed. Cristiana Nicolae’s choice—she also wrote the film’s screenplay—to introduce this dimension is therefore deliberate and significant. It suggests that violence is not merely an individual aberration on the polcovnic’s part, but an instrument of a system that reproduces its authority through physical and psychological coercion. The irony, intended or not, is that the film describes in historical language precisely the mechanisms by which the regime under which the film was produced consolidated its own power.

The film can thus be read as a critique on two planes. On the one hand, we have an explicit critique of the boyar regime that maintains its authority through violence, fear, and class privilege. On the other, we have an implicit—perhaps even involuntary—critique of the communist regime, which resorted to similar methods of coercion and re-education to produce obedient, easily controlled individuals.

Identity, Magic, and Social Order

The characters seem only sketched as distinct individualities, the emphasis falling on their role within a social system that prescribes their roles, behaviours, and limits. In this way the viewer can observe more clearly the condition of the individual in nineteenth-century Romanian society: an individual defined first of all by belonging to a group, a social class, and relations of power that considerably limit his assertion as an autonomous subject.

From an anthropological perspective, the idea of personhood is not fixed; rather, we construct it permanently, in particular through the social relations in which we participate, through our own actions and those of others, and through the way we understand and make sense of the surrounding world. In this sense, it stands to reason that the figures in Hanul dintre dealuri define themselves less through an individual psychological interiority and more through the position each occupies within a network of dependencies, obligations, and constraints. The polcovnic exists as authority and master; Kira as daughter and future wife; the innkeeper as an independent woman held to be at the margin of the social order; and Ștefan as a character caught between the status offered to him and the alternative identity that fascinates him. The latter two seem to struggle against a social system that prescribes their role and their destiny.

On the other hand, this social system creates the opportunity for exemplary stories to exist and to fascinate. Precisely because each character is caught in a prescribed and limited social role, any deviation takes on intensity and becomes story. Ștefan seeks a temporary way out of the order that prescribes his marriage, his status, and his future, while the innkeeper’s independence is not merely a trait of character but a challenge to the patriarchal world.

The tension between the two worlds attains its culminating visual expression in the scenes of the festival of the masks. In the first place, Ștefan is the only one of the dancers to wear a mask. But he wears it not on his face, rather on the back of his head, so that his face remains uncovered. What is more, being the only dancer wearing a mask, he stands out and can be recognized more easily. Thus the mask does not fulfil its ritual role—that of conferring a (temporary) ritual identity that would suspend the ordinary social role.

Although they belong to a specific local folklore, the masks point toward broader questions of identity, power, and transformation. In modern art and in anthropology, the mask has often been understood as a form of access to another order of existence. Picasso was fascinated by the expressive and transcendent power of the masks of Africa and Oceania, and revolutionized modern art. Anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss have shown that masks function as systems of meaning through which societies encode and transmit their vision of the world and of the person, as well as the relation between the social and the supernatural orders. Seen thus, the masks in the film are not a simple ethnographic element. The mask is meant to confer upon Ștefan a collective role and a ritual identity within which the social order can be imagined otherwise.

This is precisely why the way Ștefan wears the mask is so important: the mask offers him the possibility of a transformation, but he does not take it on all the way. One possible interpretation is that Ștefan stands between two worlds, yet belongs fully to neither. On the one hand, being of boyar stock, he was not bound to take part in the ritual. On the other, Ștefan does not fully belong to the social world he seeks (and imagines), so a ritual alteration of his social role serves no purpose. Thus the mask becomes one of the clearest images of his identity crisis. Worn on the back of the neck and not on the face, the mask remains a sign of his personal indecision and an allegorical anticipation of his future conformity to the life of the polcovnic’s submissive son-in-law. The innkeeper takes in, with tension, this expression of Ștefan’s indecision. She understands that the moment of flight can no longer be postponed. Flight means not only escaping the polcovnic’s authority but also granting Ștefan an interval in which he might fully become what he seems to want to be. But just then the polcovnic bursts into the inn’s courtyard, followed by his band.

The fantastic is rather a solution / a story for others, but not for the innkeeper. She understands and masters the social and economic reality, and she fights to overturn the political one. She teaches Ștefan to fight, tries to turn him into a man capable of acting against evil. She tells him almost brutally: “Custom requires that a man do away with evil.” She does not seem at all convinced that magic, or the supernatural in general, can overturn the political order. She believes that evil can be fought only with force. It is precisely this lucidity that makes her more dangerous in the polcovnic’s eyes. He fears not so much her supernatural powers as her clear understanding of how power works, and her capacity and determination to contest it.

That is why the conflict between the polcovnic and the innkeeper becomes a broader conflict between two forms of authority: one official, founded on class, wealth, and violence, and one marginal, built through knowledge, trustworthy social connections, and a certain kind of autonomy. It is worth noting that in this conflict faith and religious feeling are utterly absent. This absence can be read as a significant choice, since in that period faith and the Church were important reference points of everyday life. Moreover, in Caragiale’s short story the contrast appears explicitly between Ștefan, presented as a believing man, and the innkeeper, associated with a lack of faith and with the magical world. It is therefore possible that the scenographic and directorial choices to eliminate almost completely the religious symbols and references—with the exception of the wedding scene—reflect the official position of the communist regime toward religion, or the way it imagined and represented the past.

Flight and the Limits of Freedom

“Which world?” the innkeeper asks when Ștefan first proposes that they flee far from the polcovnic. This question is crucial from a social standpoint. In strongly stratified traditional societies, mobility is not only physical but also symbolic and identitary. To leave means not merely to abandon a place but to renounce everything you are in the terms of the social order you belong to: name, family, social relations, status, identity. Moreover, the unseen space is an imaginary construct, one that in the period was dominated rather by fear and uncertainty and did not represent a reality accessible to most people—which runs counter to the innkeeper’s realism and practical spirit.

Ștefan, by contrast, hopes: “Perhaps there is some place in the world without the polcovnic.” But he has no plan. He accepts secret training in close combat, yet he does not exercise this knowledge until late, as the polcovnic’s son-in-law. And not against the polcovnic himself, but against the commander of his band. The polcovnic’s satisfied smile at the sight of this revolt against Calistrat assures us that Ștefan is now integrated into the mechanism of power. He is capable of violence, but not against the source of evil—rather against one of its agents, who can be replaced. He fights not to destroy the polcovnic’s order but to assert his role within it.

Conformism as a Choice

Ștefan struggles with the impulse to rebel, yet he chooses to acquiesce in the quiet, monotonous life beside Kira. The burning of the inn and the disappearance of the innkeeper—which keeps a register of mystery—find him resigned and without the will to protest. The source of his vitality and of his own identity has vanished, and on his own he cannot, or has no reason to, go looking for it any longer.

On another level of reading, this is exactly what the communist power structures wanted: submissive, predictable people who do not stand out, who do not become heroes and do not attract the sympathies that might feed dissident currents. The man who can repress his heroic impulses and accept the social norm, even when he perceives it as hostile or immoral, is the ideal man of an autocratic and arbitrary regime. We do not know to what extent the screenwriter and director Cristiana Nicolae intended this reading. But the effect is powerful. The film shows, with lucidity and without explicit moralism, what conformism looks like, how it sets in, and what is lost when a person gives up the possibility of heroism in exchange for the security offered by conformity.

From an anthropological perspective, the film is valuable precisely because it offers no simple answers. The magical world saves no one. The outlaws are absent or ineffective. The possible hero never gets to be a hero. Love is destroyed. The social order reproduces itself. The film registers this order with a lucidity that constitutes, in itself, an act of cultural criticism. It reveals the mechanisms by which people give in and acquiesce, and by which structures of domination reproduce themselves not only through violence but also through the implicit or gradual consent of those who would have had the resources to contest them.