part to
the audience a great deal of political meaning through their
interpretation of such seemingly innocuous plays.

FILMS

The film industry has a long and venerable history dating back to 1912,
when the first full-length feature was produced. The silent comedies of
the 1920s compare favorably with those produced by the best film makers
of the time. In the 1930s and 1940s, until the communist takeover,
Romanian musicals and tales of suspense and of the supernatural were
popular at home and abroad. Most of these films were produced with
technical and financial assistance from France and other countries (see
ch. 11).

Cultural restrictions in the 1950s and early 1960s prevented the
Romanian film industry from taking part in the technical and artistic
developments that were changing the film industry in France and other
Western countries. As a result, films produced in Romania as late as
1970 were technically and artistically old-fashioned compared to those
produced in noncommunist countries and even in Czechoslovakia. Most
critics outside the country compare them to the good films produced by
Hollywood in the 1940s. Nevertheless, several Romanian films in the
1960s have won prizes at lesser known international film festivals.

Two of the important directors in the late 1960s were Mircea Dragan and
Ion Popescu-Gopo. Dragan specializes in historic adventure films of epic
proportions, whereas Popescu-Gopo concentrates on fantasies, including
science fiction. Popescu-Gopo is also well known for his animated films.

LITERATURE

Literature in the form of folk tales and poetry is of ancient origin. A
vast collection of legends, tales, ballads, proverbs, and riddles has
been preserved and is known to both rural and urban Romanians. Legends
and tales deal with the daring exploits of a national hero, sometimes
real and sometimes imaginary. In the oldest tales, the adversaries are
monsters and inhabitants of the underworld; in later ones, they are the
foreign conquerors and occupiers.

Ballads were originally intended to be sung but are now more often
recited as poems. They deal with the same subjects as legends and tales,
and many are of epic proportions. In the mountains of Transylvania and
Moldavia separate groups of ballads developed dealing with the pastoral
life of the people.

The earliest known texts written in Romania are chronicles in Old Church
Slavonic. In the sixteenth century a number of religious tex