Videograms of a Revolution. 1992. Germany/Romania. Directed by Harun Farocki, Andrei Ujică. DCP. In English, German, Romanian; English subtitles. 106 min.
In Andrei Ujică’s seminal collaboration with Harun Farocki, official broadcasts of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s iron rule over Romania seem an impotent sham in the face of on-the-ground, eyewitness accounts of his dramatic demise by ordinary citizens, some of them wielding video cameras. Over five chaotic days in December 1989, street demonstrations in the western Romanian city of Timişoara erupted into violence and brutal state recrimination across the nation. Civilians occupied the national television station in Bucharest while Communist party stooges, attempting to flee or shift blame, were rounded up and put on trial. The Ceauşescus, once fêted by Queen Elizabeth, Jimmy Carter, and Kim Il Sung, were found guilty of “genocide” by an Extraordinary Military Tribunal and executed on Christmas Day. Two days later, viewers in Romania (and throughout the world) tuned in to watch incontrovertible videotape evidence of their bullet-riddled bodies. Ujică and Farocki perform a forensic study of authoritarian propaganda at a climactic moment of flameout, when reality could no longer bend to a dictator’s pernicious fiction of prosperity, progress, and international stature.