With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe just behind us, the time is ripe for a look back at the revolutions that tore down the Iron Curtain. Romanian film director, Andrei Ujica, did just this with the entry of his film The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. The film, like many of the recent works dealing with this issue, is a type of catharsis for the author and for those personally affected by years of living under communism.
Ujica's Film Process
The film is the final in a trilogy on the end of communism, which includes Videograms of a Revolution in 1992, about the Romanian 1989 revolution, and Out of the Present in 1995, dealing with the Russian communist collapse. According to an interview with New York Times reporter Dennis Lim , Ujica and crew spent four years putting the film together. One year of which was devoted solely to the editing of what Ujica said was over 1,000 hours of video recording on Ceausescu.
He also told the New York Times of the special art of using and constructing music for the large amount of silent footage; and that his purpose was to create “a new subgenre of historical film,” that shows the possibility of film to reconstruct history. The Cannes Festival website commented on the syncretism of the mise-en-scene with classical editing to form the final picture and is prophesying the dawn of a new film genre. The footage used was originally shot at the behest of Ceausescu and composed a large part of his propaganda technique.
Reality of Ceausescu
Ujica realized that using these images reconstructed history as Ceausescu saw it rather than reality. But the director’s aim was to create a film that showed the humanity of the dictator, in an attempt to dispel fearful illusions of Ceausescu as some inhuman monster. Ujica told the New York Times that “the film is against historical clichés, and it shows that the psychological reality is always more complex.”
Ceausescu was a man who committed atrocities any man may be capable of in his quest for power. The people’s awe and fear of him as some special being was what kept Ceausescu ruling for so long. This film comes at an important time in the Romanian psyche’s process of healing. Only a few years of membership in the European Union, Romanian society is increasingly leaving the fear that permeated society and other communist era influences behind.
The one-sided view presented in The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is meant to bring people and Romanians in particular, into conversation with a person who was the embodiment of ruthlessness and madness to them. The film also allows other countries an inside look at what starving Romanians endured while their leader lived in luxury.
“For me it was also a historical and psychological auto-therapy. In the end I don’t hate him anymore. I’m free from him, so it was a successful therapy,” Ujica told the New York Times of his relationship with the subject of his film. This freedom is an amazing thing after twenty years. If this film can produce this same feeling of liberation for others who were affected by Ceausescu’s reign it is an important door to healing the wounds of the past and not just ignoring them.
Iemima Ploscariu - As a recent college graduate of Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, Iemima's writing experience consists of work done for ...
