About Creative Industries – Cinematography
The final article in the Creative Industries series is dedicated to cinema, dubbed the seventh art, and with an impressive history, the first screening having taken place in Paris in 1895 with the Lumière Brothers’ camera. That moment became an iconic one, foreshadowing a path the film industry was to follow.
Each decade brought something new to cinema – from technical development and increasingly complex productions, to the great filmmakers and actors who were to become the benchmarks. And conceptually, film went through a number of marked transitional periods, from Expressionism, to French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Romanian New Wave and so on.
In Romania, film was strongly influenced by the period of communist censorship, followed by another heavy, transitional period of the 1990s, but one that anticipated a very clear turn – the emergence of the filmmakers who proposed a total paradigm shift. “Marfa și Banii” (Puiu, 2002), among several other films, was to radically change the way of reporting on cinema, authentically conveying an identifiable world through realistically exposed life situations and through free expression in language.
The film industry has now developed considerably, but in Romania it is still a problematic field – there is the possibility of huge box-office takings, especially following co-productions, but lacking financial support from the state, namely the film fund blocked since 2019, there have been major changes. Implicitly, with the current context of pandemic, VOD platforms such as Netflix and HBO have been the only and most popular methods of consuming movies – American series have gained even more ground. In the past year Europe saw €11.6 billion in revenue from VOD consumption last year.
An estimated $300 million is the amount that film and TV productions could have brought to Romania, but blocked at the Ministry of Economy, with no result following requests from producers. Despite these issues, which make it difficult for the country production processes, considerable efforts are still being made to keep the production process as alive as possible film industry, which is perhaps one of the most complex and wide-ranging subjects – an industry is well defined in two interconnected directions – the artistic and the pragmatic.
It is also a constantly emerging environment in which entrepreneurs in the Cultural-Creative Industries can manifest their artistic and technical skills.
#TransylvanianMoviePreneurs is an entrepreneurial education project in the field of Creative and Cultural Industries.
