Two of the important directors in the late 1960s were Mircea Dragan and Ion Popescu-Gopo. Dragan specializes in historic adventure films of epic proportions, whereas Popescu-Gopo concentrates on fantasies, including science fiction. Popescu-Gopo is also well known for his animated films. LITERATURE Literature in the form of folk tales and poetry is of ancient origin. A vast collection of legends, tales, ballads, proverbs, and riddles has been preserved and is known to both rural and urban Romanians. Legends and tales deal with the daring exploits of a national hero, sometimes real and sometimes imaginary. In the oldest tales, the adversaries are monsters and inhabitants of the underworld; in later ones, they are the foreign conquerors and occupiers. Ballads were originally intended to be sung but are now more often recited as poems. They deal with the same subjects as legends and tales, and many are of epic proportions. In the mountains of Transylvania and Moldavia separate groups of ballads developed dealing with the pastoral life of the people. The earliest known texts written in Romania are chronicles in Old Church Slavonic. In the sixteenth century a number of religious texts were translated into Romanian, and the introductions to them are the first known original writings in the Romanian language. Of significance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the chronicles written by a number of writers in Moldavia and in Walachia. Dimitrie Cantemir, ruler of Moldavia, wrote the _Description of Moldavia_ and _History of the Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire_ during the same period. A Transylvanian school of writing stressed the Latin origin of the Romanian people and their language and utilized a latinized Romanian in its writing. It was influential in awakening the national consciousness of Transylvanian Romanians. Four members of the Vacarescu family wrote lyrical poetry in the eighteenth century. The best of them, Iancu Vacarescu, is regarded as the father of Romanian poetry. The lyric tradition was carried on in the early nineteenth century, and much of the poetry dealt with historic subjects and expressed the growing patriotism and nationalist sentiment of the time. In the early nineteenth century the Latinist movement of Transylvania spread into Moldavia and Walachia and began to Romanianize the hitherto Hellenic culture of the Romanian upper class. The founding of the College of Saint Sava in Bucharest, using Romanian as the language of instruction, laid the foundation for the development of a reading public for Romanian literature. At the same time, the founding of a Romanian-language newspaper with a literary supplement gave writers a publication outlet. The newspaper was founded by Eliade Radulescu, who also founded the Philharmonic Society and the Romanian Academy, thus giving major impetus to the development of Romanian literature and culture.