Bad habits that do not exist
This is an educational story which attempts to delineate the boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour in school. Transgressions range from the length of the boys’ hair, to smoking and to behaviour deemed “antisocial”. While the voice over is read by a friendly, faux-childish voice, there is an underlying sharpness to its accusations that feels all too familiar. Those considered guilty are publicly identified by name and school attended, as will be the transgressive inhabitants of some Bucharest residential blocks of flats in a film produced six years after this one (Our house as a flower, Alexandru Boiangiu, 1963 – a film that likewise appeals to saccharine humour to gloss over its accusations). We also find a somewhat similar context in a later edition of the newsreel, where several poets whose work dared to take distance from socialist realism were also publicly mocked (Agfa forte, 45/1966, subject f).
In the absence of detailed production documents for these newsreels, it is impossible for us to identify the exact contribution of the team members mentioned on the credits; some of them, such as cinematographers Doru Segall or Pantelie Tuțuleasa, went on to become big names at the studio. For those familiar with the filmography of Slavomir Popovici (the author of the other Pioneer newsreel story included here), the absurd scenes imagined at the beginning of this story – pedestrians walking hand in hand on the street while trucks drive on the sidewalk beside them – give us a glimpse of an avant-garde imagination that we will later encounter in full force in the short docu piece How Do We Follow the Rules of the Road? (Slavomir Popovici, 1963), an educational documentary commissioned by the Bucharest police department and turned by Popovici into an experimental film.
The newsreel The Pioneer produced by the Sahia studio was inspired by the Soviet newsreel Pionieria – a model that is alluded to at the end of this topic, with a short Romanian dance number performed by Soviet pioneers, extracted from the aforementioned Soviet youth newsreel. (AB)