This volume explores the philosophical and metaphysical manifestations of contemporary cinema. Starting with the hypothesis that movies provide an experience that is both a pathway into the thinking mechanisms of modern humans and into our collective psyche, this study focuses on the elements that form the "Romanian cinematic mind" as part of the European cinema-thinking. While this book is based on specific case studies provided by recent productions in Romanian filmmaking, such as Proroca (2017) and Touch me Not (2018), it also contextualises the national cinema within the larger, European art of making movies. Offering close interpretations of the works of world-renowned directors like Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu or more recently Adina Pintilie and Constantin Popescu, this book questions the "Romanianess" of their cinematic techniques, and places their philosophical roots both in a particular mode of thinking and within continental philosophy.

This book presents an original and engaging look at contemporary popular culture, opening with the provocative idea that this is a day and age of complete exhaustion of ideas, images, stories, and myths. Questioning the effects of content recycling in cinema and other media, the author further elaborates on the repurposing of cultural junk, the reassembling of narratives and myths. The thought-provoking hypothesis proposed in this research is that we have entered an age of cultural promiscuity. By analyzing the mutations of myth-making practices and connecting them with larger cultural manifestations, the author explains these transformations as integral to the development of a myth-illogical imagination. Cinematic and mythological representations in mainstream Hollywood films have reached a point of amalgamation with no return, which marks the beginning of a "fourth age of representations," where signs and meanings are manifested in illogical permutations. This is more explicit in films that commingle aliens, cowboys, undead American presidents, and zombie nazis, joining together in the same narrative ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, aggregating disjoined storylines and historical fake facts, all coalesced in an orgy of empty burlesque and infantile masquerades. This interdisciplinary research combines cultural studies, film criticism, art and myth interpretations, bringing into the debate multiple concepts from related fields such as critical theory and media criticism. The book also opens up to innovative approaches from a wide array of academic disciplines, offering researchers, students and those fascinated by the transformations happening in contemporary cinema an interpretative tool based on a revised dialectic approach. The conclusion is that we are now victims of a zombie semiotics. Meaning-making in contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics is dominated by a process of incessant desecration of significations, specific to the total mishmash of representations analyzed here.

Modern Romanian filmmaking has received wide international recognition. In only a decade (2001 to 2011), a group of promising young film makers have been embraced as important members of European cinema. The country developed a new fervour for filmmaking and a dozen new movies have received international awards and recognition from some of the most important film critics in the world. This development, sometimes called ""New Wave cinema,"" is fully explored in this book. By using a comparative approach and searching for similarities among some of the most important cinematic styles and trends, the study reveals that the Romanian young directors working after 2000 are part of a larger, European, way of filmmaking. Looking for elements of cohesion in this new school of filmmaking, the discussion moves from the specific themes, motifs and narratives to the philosophy of a whole generation of filmmakers, such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu, Tudor Giurgiu and others.

This volume explores the philosophical and metaphysical manifestations of contemporary cinema. Starting with the hypothesis that movies provide an experience that is both a pathway into the thinking mechanisms of modern humans and into our collective psyche, this study focuses on the elements that form the "Romanian cinematic mind" as part of the European cinema-thinking. While this book is based on specific case studies provided by recent productions in Romanian filmmaking, such as Proroca (2017) and Touch me Not (2018), it also contextualises the national cinema within the larger, European art of making movies. Offering close interpretations of the works of world-renowned directors like Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu or more recently Adina Pintilie and Constantin Popescu, this book questions the "Romanianess" of their cinematic techniques, and places their philosophical roots both in a particular mode of thinking and within continental philosophy.