Videogramme einer Revolution

The film, Videogramme einer Revolution, is astounding – as is what happened to the Ceausescu regime. Although hard to define, we could venture to call it a reflexive historical documentary thriller. Compiled from amateur and professional video sequences (over 125 hours of footage), the film focuses primarily on the stretch from 21 to 25 December 1989, and could simply be a highly instructive documentary on the downfall of the “Danube of Thought”; but it is also and above all an inexhaustible object of reflection on the relationship between image and power. The filmmakers offer us these often drawn-out images of a revolution both as a warning and a call to treat them with vigilance. The film also questions whether it is possible to democratically film reality, in this case, a revolution…. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica show how images inevitably tend towards a mise-en-scène. The questions are abyssal. Does making something visible, incorporating it into a filmic device, mean handing it over to an ideology? Can an image be both visible and authentic? Arnaud Hée, mars 2009, Critikat.com