by Harun Farocki
In 1989, when the Ceausescus were nearing their end, there were hardly any automobiles to be seen on the streets of Bucharest other than Dacias. This was a copy of a Renault produced under license in Romania with a rear end like a duck’s tail, production of which had stopped in France twenty years earlier. Only a few people with foreign currency incomes owned imported automobiles: actors and soccer stars – and the Ceausescus’ daughter Zöe, who drove a Renault 21.
The two-inch VTR technology which had gone out of use in the countries of Western Europe ten to fifteen years before was still there in the television studios. Romania’s first betacam was to be found in the film department of the Central Committee and had been acquired to be focused on the Ceausescus: on their receptions and his speeches. The advantage of beta technology lies in the compactness of camera and recorder and in the resulting mobility. The Ceausescus only did things which had been established down to the last detail in protocol, and if anything deviated from it, it was not to be shown. Did the regime acquire a mobile camera because it suspected the future would bring unforeseeable changes? We have included shots from this protocol camera in our film: the scene on the morning of December 22, 1989, as the crowd was thronging in front of and into the Central Committee building while books and pictures were flying out of the windows and from the balcony, was recorded by this very beta camera (I). It had been positioned on the third floor of the side wing in order to record the organized captive audience in its entirety.
Now a little sociological imagination is required. Imagine a man sent to film school in Moscow during the Stalin era. There he was shown Soviet avant-garde films, and he learned that juxtaposing a close-up from below and a long shot from a high angle lends extreme dynamism to an event. Later, when he was visual director for the Romanian newsreel responsible for appearances by the Ceausescus, he assigned one camera to a raised position on the third floor. If at this point he could still remember why, the reason was forgotten with constant repetition over the next twenty years. (The Unity Party’s dramaturgical problem was to assemble great multitudes a militant mood while not showing an opponent, whose very presence would have testified to the regime’s weakness.)
In addition, the concept of "moral depreciation" is valid here. Innovations devalue things long before they fail technically. Today any cameraman would feel belittled if one gave him a camera used by Josef von Sternberg to make movies, as would any politician if one pointed a camera at him used to photograph Marlene Dietrich. In 1970, French cinema could show Anni Girardot happily getting into a Renault with a duck’s tail – twenty years later this car had become as unbearably obsolete as an old-fashioned tube-camera.
The concept of "moral depreciation" comes from Marx and was taken up again in 1968. The year 1968 was special in Romania because Ceausescu did not participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the states of the Warsaw Pact. This gave him room to maneuver. One has to remember that when Paris took to the streets in May 1968, Charles de Gaulle was visiting Ceausescu.
The worker in the last scene of the film says of Zoë Ceausescu, the woman who drove the Renault 21 , that she had ninety-seven thousand dollars in her account while he and people like him could never enjoy themselves – the lights went out at six o’clock. He says this in a factory and not in a business district, where our television has long given a say to people with less than ninety-seven thousand dollars in the bank. So that the politics doesn’t take away our time for the pictures, l will sum up: 1968 saw the acceptance of the idea that what is truly important is not the production of goods, but rather the production of consumers of goods. Anyone capable of craving goods or services can have his say. The worker at the end of our film does not covet goods enough to still have a voice in the future.
Romania was also behind the times when it came to non-professional camera equipment. The relatively few VHS cameras attracted users who regarded shooting pictures as a craft and not as a function of the camera’s program. Many whose material we quote in the film learned from textbooks or in courses that a foreground gives depth to a frame or that you have to make intermediate cuts because a process filmed in a long, continuous take can hardly be shortened otherwise. The man on his balcony who captured the moment when army soldiers fired over the heads of the Securitate, thus siding with the revolution, gave his tape to a student archive without bothering about its utilization. Many others, however, have tried to use recordings of the revolution to promote their media professions. It is hard to avoid the thought that the cameramen of the revolution wanted to use their work to apply for jobs in post-revolutionary television. With the future political elite in front of the camera and the future television elite behind the camera, we observe the attempt of both these groups to rid themselves of their amateur status.
But why were video recorders privately available at all in a state whose police registered typewriters and kept proofs of the typeface? The obvious answer is the correct one: the police were fixated on the written word. The workers' movement had been organized through writing – a memory which persisted in the security services. It was also true that that time, no resistance movement had been organized on the basis of video communication. Videotapes evidently don’t attract authors capable of making imaginative use of them. While a piece of paper can be used to design a different life and the method of obtaining it, a videotape serves rather to record and to represent that which has happened. In the Romanian revolution, video cameras did hot even have this documentary function. The news that the security forces had shot at children in Timisoara, that there had been mass protests, and that the army had withdrawn only reached Bucharest via foreign broadcasts (in words transmitted by radio), through telephone calls, from travelers, various rumor channels, but not through video-tapes.
At this point I should like to discuss the long shot at the beginning of our film: a man holds the camera from the window; because his lens does not allow him to get close enough to the body of the protest march, two-thirds of the picture is taken up by two six-story residential buildings and a flat garage block. So trivial a picture is endurable only for a man who lives in the place and is accustomed to look out of the window to reassure himself of his specific existence. One should thank the cameraman for having persevered with this view, a vision which hits the target precisely because it misses.
The man behind the camera does not shoot the picture in the hope of being able to distribute it and thereby also the idea of the revolution. Perhaps he has a couple of friends in mind to whom he could show it to, thus preserving the factual character of the event. Were the demonstrations to be suppressed and the Ceausescu regime to emerge victorious, it would be difficult to hold on to the memory of the uprising. With his picture, the man behind the camera proves that he did not just look away. In addition, his film looks forward to times in which one can show such pictures; it serves to summon up the dawn of such an era.
The revolution, an unforeseen and unusual event, comes into the camera’s field of vision. Behind the pictures of the revolution another image shines through, that of a foreseeable and everyday world, a world the camera equipment was designed to record. A protest march passes in front of a camera which had been produced and sold to record family celebrations or vacation trips, and it is in front of just such a camera that the trial of the Ceausescus is held. A member of the military was given the task of starting and pointing the camera; this trail cameraman outranked the court stenographer.
A few charges against this film:
A filmic narrative requires above all else that people and places reappear in different guise yet remain recognizable. In order to sustain the development of the action, montage above all has to confirm continuity of the events. Because our filmic narrative is composed from found footage and because there was no central direction of the persons in front of or behind the camera, it seems as though we are seeing history itself creating its own shape.
A scene from Bucharest, shortly before the revolution:
Father This year one communist regime after another has fallen, sometimes within hours. They could obviously last only as long as the Soviet Union could protect its sphere of interest, the area it was granted in Yalta.
Mother Precisely the Ceausescu regime, which has claimed since 1968 that it was independent of the Soviet Union, was able to hold out the longest.
Daughter When they see the rift which has opened up in the power structure, the army, militia, and Securitate will all try to change sides. Precisely because he had distanced himself from the Soviet Union, Ceausescu failed to understand that Moscow was not interested in his survival.
Grandfather Bravo, a genuine revolution! One like ’68 in France, when de Gaulle was here. I saw a film with Anni Girardot once, she was driving a Dacia.
Daughter No, it was a Renault!
Grandmother You can have some dentures made soon, you didn’t have the money till now.
Son The fall of all these regimes this year was completely undramatic. The celebrations in Paris for the anniversary of the revolution were more spectacular than all the real revolutions.
The youngest daughter Things will be different here in Romania.
Although this scene was written to illustrate that that there are some ideas which play a part in people’s actions yet hardly ever find expression in scenic dialogue - the child proved right.
(I) References are to the film VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, FRG 1992, 16mm, color.
(II) Alain Finkielkraut, Die vergebliche Erinnerung — Vom Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit (Berlin 1989).