On December 21, 1989, from the balcony of the People’s House in Bucharest, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu gave his last-ever public speech. Broadcast nationally, the speech was interrupted by the roar of the protesting crowd. The transmission was cut off and the television station was taken over by the people. Four days later, Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed. Compiled from 125 hours of audiovisual material recorded by both amateurs and news professionals, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution is an essayistic documentary that examines how this historical turning point was mediated and constructed through images.
“The film is truly gripping precisely to the extent that the viewer is placed in an analogous position to the actual participants in the revolution […] The film becomes as much about an unfulfillable desire for some guarantee of televisual veracity, as it is about the chaos of an unfolding historical process”
Christopher Pavsek / Rouge
,"The prevalence of documentation is no stranger to us today. Videos, images, snaps and tweets are uploaded as quickly as the media can decipher and decode what is actually happening. Videograms posits the inquiry: When our phones and cameras are pointed at a subject or an event, at what point are we just recording history and at what point are we constructing it?"
Anny Oberlink / Screen Slate
