A day of Leisure

Work, whether industrial or agricultural work, alienating or liberating, occupied a central place in the official imagination of socialist Romania and, implicitly, in the non-fictional output of the Sahia studio. “Non-work” appears infrequently, sometimes labeled as “social parasitism”, presented at other times as a well-deserved break for the toiling bodies of the workers.

The title of this newsreel topic is a bit of a spoiler: we are dealing with one of the rare cases in which the camera stopped to look at people outside of the work process – that is, people on break – and not just anywhere, but in Poiana Stalin (today, Poiana Brașov, which between 1950 and 1960 was known as Stalin City). It’s a lighthearted, cheerful topic with people enjoying life, scenery, and snowballs, and even a cute sequence, probably scripted for the camera, that we’ll let you experience for yourself. Otherwise, if you didn’t startle when you heard the word “turnător”, we congratulate you: in Romanian, the word is a homophone that refers both to the honourable profession of ‘metal worker’, and the label given to a “snitch” or “spy” (for the Securitate, the Political Police) – that dreaded word that haunts the memory of  the people who experienced Romania’s would-be communism.

Although they are on break, the people that are being filmed are defined by their work, while the landscape that surrounds them is also overlaid with a politicized history told by the voice-over commentator: a history that goes from a “yesterday” when those idyllic country roads “only the rich strolled up and down” and a “today”  in which the same roads are trodden by “the feet of the working men, builders of a new life”.

For more images of leisure in the former Stalin City, we have uploaded on the platform a fragment of a documentary film produced five years after this newsreel subject (Report from the Red Flag, Alexandru Sîrbu, 1956), also filmed at the end of a working week. (AB)