Agfa Forte

The role of humor in the newsreel was frequently discussed both by the production teams of the studio and by the journalists reporting on the newsreel in the written press. On the one hand, humor – and, more broadly, a preference for “light” entertainment – was in keeping with the early days of newsreels (in Romania and abroad), when going to the cinema was a common pastime and audiences expected entertainment and sensationalism rather than hard reporting.

On the other hand, satire served as a form of official humor in the early days of News in Pictures, intentionally woven into the newsreel to eradicate “bourgeois remains,” as the era’s rhetoric put it. While satire can be used didactically, it also functions as a tool for social control, fostering cohesion by uniting those who share similar experiences: such as those struggling to understand the kinds of poetry that, though diverging from the socialist realist canon, were still being published in cultural magazines.

The story included here is a good example of a topic that exceeded the competence of the newsreel editors, who invited two popular comedians from the 60s and 70s (Mircea Crișan and Horia Căciulescu) to mock the work of several renowned poets such as Valeriu Oișteanu and Nina Cassian, through a combination of tendentious reading and exaggerated, suggestive grimaces. The animated title of this story  is a play on words between etching – an engraving process that consists in corroding a copper plate with nitric acid (a reference to the corrosiveness of satire) – and the type of film stock used by the Sahia studio (Agfa). (AB)