Communicating a conflict from the past: a discursive analysis of social, cultural, and individual memory in the Romanian film Reconstruction

Abstract

This study considers how the documentary Reconstruction (2001) by Irene Lusztig engages with individual, social, and cultural memory in the context of Romania's communist and post-communist history. By focusing on Lusztig's personal investigation into her grandmother's involvement in the 1959 Ioanid Gang bank robbery and the subsequent state-orchestrated propaganda trial, the film operates as a critical site for examining the interaction between personal trauma and collective remembrance of a conflict situation. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines discourse-informed thematic analysis, narrative analysis, and cultural memory studies, this research uncovers the film's discursive strategies for representing a conflictual event memory as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. The analysis shows how Reconstruction employs narrative fragmentation, dialogic tensions, and visual symbolism to expose the ideological forces shaping historical narratives and to foreground voices marginalized by both state censorship and family silence. We also show that Reconstruction is both memory-productive and memory-reflective: the documentary not only illustrates cultural memory processes in action within the narrative but also offers a new narrative about individual trauma stemming from social conflict, social identity, and cultural memory. Building on Assmann's distinction between communicative and cultural memory, the article shows how Reconstruction curates interpersonal testimonies and archival propaganda into a counter-canon that reconfigures public remembrance about a historically and socially marked communist era in Romania.