Embodied histories. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică's Videograms of a Revolution and Ovidiu Bose Pas¸tina's Timi s¸ oara—December 1989 and the uses of the independent camera
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13642529.2013.774728
ISSN1470-1154
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoAbstract This article analyzes the most insightful documentaries about the 1989 Romanian revolution, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică's Videograms of a Revolution (Germany, 1993) and Ovidiu Bose Paştina's Timişoara—December 1989 (Romania, 1991). Though different in style and intellectual project, both films engage in a complex dialogue with recordings of the 1989 events taken by amateur cameramen and the national state television. The purpose of the study is to show how this dialogue reveals the critical role cinematography, the body of the camera and its relationship to the event play in the articulation of the audiovisual historical text. Keywords: 1989 revolutionsrepresentationembodied camerahistory on filmhegemonic relationsHarun FarockiAndrei UjicăOvidiu Bose-Pas¸tina Acknowledgements I, Constantin Parvulescu, take full responsibility that I have all the permissions needed and agree to be held responsible for any copyright infringement with regard to the publication of all images in this article. I have non-exclusive rights to reproduce these stills within Rethinking History, targeted at a specialist academic readership with a defined circulation; print and electronic rights in perpetuity to cover reproduction of the material in an online version available to customers; worldwide English-language distribution rights. Notes 1. Some of the better-known Romanian documentaries on the 1989 revolution are: the collectively directed series Free Newscast—The Romanian Revolution (Jurnal liber – revoluţia română, 1990); S¸erban Comănescu, Taking Off: The Romanian Revolution (Desprinderea – Revoluţia română, 1990); Cornel Mihalache, For Christmas We Had Our Share of Freedom (De Crăciun ne-am luat raţia de libertate, 1990); Robert Dornhelm, Requiem for Dominic (Requiem pentru Dominic, 1990); Cornel Mihalache, 1989: Blood and Velvet (Sânge şi catifea, 2005). Among the more remarkable foreign films on the 1989 revolution is the 2009 French production Romania: A Revolution in the Eyes of the Media, directed by Antonio Wagner. 2. The original German title is Videogramme einer Revolution. The original Romanian title is Timişoara, Decembrie 1989. Credits: Photography: Carol Przybilla; Sound: Tudor Stanciu; Editing: Eugenia Ianculescu; Production: Sahia Film. 3. Videograms is the work of two prominent representatives of metadocumentary film. Film historian Thomas Elsaesser regards Harun Farocki as one of the most important promoters of the ‘essay film’ in the tradition of Godard and Chris Marker (Elsaesser Citation2002). Some of his best known titles are Between Two Wars, 1978; Before Your Eyes, Vietnam, 1981; As You See, 1986; Images of the World and Inscription of War, 1989; Living in the BRD, 1990; and What Is Up, 1991. Andrei Ujică is the author of the acclaimed 2010 documentary The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu. 4. This is why it frustrated its audiences in the 1990s. It was more analytical and less willing to offer clear historical causation in a time when the Romanian public was craving it. It did not aim to write history, but reveal how, in the act of writing, the historical text constructs its events. It argued obliquely that the popular revolt started in Timişoara was appropriated, with the help of Ceauşescu's intelligence services, by a Gorbachevist echelon of the Romanian Communist Party, but this argument was included in a broader and relativizing statement: Popular revolts, moments of radical democracy, are always the object of appropriations. The mixed reception of Videograms in Romania was also the result of the fact that, unlike Bose Paştina's film, it was made for a foreign audience, who reacted less emotionally to the events. Emotional distance would be achieved in Romania too, but later, in the 2000s. Once however, this distance was achieved, Videograms stirred more favorable reactions, but its project was not fully acknowledged, and Videograms was still regarded as a documentation of the mise en scène of the Romanian 1989 revolution. It was the film's historical (and indexical) dimension that drew the attention of Romanian audiences, while its reflections on the political, commended by Farocki's German admirers such as Thomas Elsaesser, were given collateral attention. For instance, a December 2009 commentary in an influential Romanian cultural journal praised the factuality and the realism of Videograms, but didn't mention the film's interest in investigating not what was shown, but how (Popovici Citation2009, 15) Even still, scholarly articles on Videograms give priority to the mise en scène (see Young, Citation2004). 5. While the ideological effects of the concealment of the historicity of the camera might be common knowledge to cinema studies, where, since the 1970s, scholarship on cinematic suture and apparatus theory have revealed the way in which cinema positions its movie-attending subjects politically, Videograms analyzes how this process unfolds during actual turbulent political conditions. 6. Videograms engages here in a subtle critique of other types of documentary filmmaking. The point is to emphasize that talking heads, used in documentaries such as Bose Paştina's, are unreliable. (And indeed some of the talking heads in Bose Paştina's film do reproduce inaccurate rumors). 7. The 30–40 times inflated death toll circulated by the foreign press in those days, also known as the Timişoara syndrome, was in part the outcome of this heightened expectation. The early 1990s, when Videograms came out, were years in which most conspiracy theories about the Romanian 1989 revolution saw the light of print. Many of these theories were themselves reactions to other mystifications about the revolution that were articulated during and immediately after December 1989. The most puzzling mystification is the story of the 4000 bodies discovered in a mass-grave in Timişoara on 23 December 1989. An analysis of the theories that appeared in the first half of 1990 can be found in Cesereanu (Citation2009, 99–118). 8. In an interview, Mircea Dinescu, one of the key figures of the early television takeover (whom we can see in close-up in Figure 15), admitted that his famous speech that opened the broadcast of the liberated Romanian television (captured in Figure 14), was not live. What the Romanian people saw on TV was a recording, chosen from several other takes (Codoban Citation2009, 68). 9. The subtitle of a newspaper article announcing Bose Paştina's premature death in 2006 reads: ‘Colleagues and critics believe that Ovidiu Bose Paştina was the best Romanian documentary filmmaker’. Among these ‘colleagues’ were two of the main figures of Romanian documentary filmmaking, Florin Iepan and Alexandru Solomon. They regard Timişoara as the best Romanian documentary ever made, and support their claim by praising the poetic and even avant-garde style of the film (George Citation2006). 10. ‘Documentary from a personal viewpoint of the tragic events that occurred in Timişoara in December 1989’ http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/510521?view = synopsis 11. This testimony was included in the press release that accompanied the Italian showing of the film. (http://www.comingsoon.it/Film/Scheda/Trama/?key = 32377&film = TIMISOARA-DICEMBRE-89). Yet, the director's statements should be taken with a grain of salt. After a short prologue, the film's opening credits include a screen that reads ‘A film by Bose O. Paştina’. 12. Maybe the fact that it was shot on celluloid makes the use of video footage more difficult. Some footage is used in the second part of the film (images taken on 20 December), but the treatment of the footage is different. Its function is illustrative and is not regarded as an object of analysis. 13. The studio has been part of Ceauşescu's apparatus. With a few exceptions (some directed by Bose Paştina), it produced propaganda material. The main antagonist of these early post-1989 Sahia films becomes the TV-studio-produced image (even if some of the films produced by the Sahia Studio were destined for broadcast on national television). Ironically, after Timişoara, Bose Paştina became a producer in private television; his later directing awards are for commercial spots. 14. This medial discontinuity is continued by the filmmakers' effort to undermine and unravel the fundamental ‘continuity’ of filmmaking, the cinematic suture (filmmaking's effort to render invisible the cinematic apparatus). In the tradition of Vertov, Timişoara uses many techniques of rendering the cinematic apparatus visible. Among them is the visual trope of the camera filming itself, suggesting that it is an actor in the construction of truth and that its discourse is embodied and an act of subjective investigation. Yet, by filming the recording apparatus, the act of truth-searching about the revolution is involuntarily turned into the main spectacle of the film, suggesting the esthetic dimension of Bose Paştina's project. Ironically, as mentioned before, the ‘disconnected’ non-electronic aspect of the medium also threw some of these films into oblivion and caused their images to damage. 15. The other unmediated corrupting effect is the aging of Timişoara's celluloid footage. 16. This effect is enhanced by not identifying the speakers as individual historical subjects. 17. http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_8424000/8424361.stm
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