Andrei Ujica

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu starts with the familiar, grainy and juddering shoulder-held images of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena just before their execution. What follows is beautiful archival footage of state visits, party congresses, visits to crowded stores. In the course of the film – the subdued and radical masterpiece lasts more than three hours – the manifestations show increasing signs of megalomania; people sing and clap for Ceausescu, his name is chanted during endless parades. There are beautiful colour shots of Ceausescu joining in a volleyball match. He stands by the net and with one hand he keeps pulling it down a little to try and get the ball over with his other hand. No one dares to say a word.Read More »

Dietrich Leder, Film-Dienst 24/92 wrote:
In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica’s “Videograms” shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu’s last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy.Read More »