Rico's rants: Ceausescu, gone and (almost) forgotten

09 September 2011

Ceausescu, gone and (almost) forgotten

Manohla Dargis has an article in The New York Times about a new movie about Nicolae Ceausescu:

It’s impossible that The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is the monument that the former Romanian dictator would have produced in his own honor. Among other things, it has an unhappy ending, at least for him and his wife, Elena, who were executed on Christmas Day in 1989. Yet, in many respects, Ceausescu turns out to be as much the author of this brilliant documentary as the director, Andrei Ujica, who waded through more than a thousand hours of filmed state propaganda, official news reports, and home movies to create a cinematic tour de force that tracks the rise, reign, and grim fall of its subject.
A Romanian who was born in 1951 and fled the country three decades later, Ujica has made several movies about the 1989 Romanian revolution and the collapse of Soviet-era Communism (Videograms of a Revolution and Out of the Present). The title of his latest was inspired by The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, a novel that in turn took its name from Gertrude Stein’s famous Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Like the Stein book, a mock memoir that mixes fiction and nonfiction and was written by Stein from Toklas’ point of view, Nicolae Ceausescu is something of a rarefied ventriloquist act. It uses one body— here, the public and private Ceausescu— as a way to reveal the truth about another life, in this case that of a country under his totalitarian heel.
Written and directed by Ujica, the documentary opens with smeary, jerky color images of the Ceausescus during their hastily convened and administrated trial, shortly before their execution. Seated side by side, their backs to the wall, they look frail and shrunken. Accusations are announced, and denials, too. It’s all very fast and, for the uninitiated, perhaps confusing, especially given the lack of a voice-over or other explanations. Whether or not you’re schooled in Romanian history, though, it’s hard to reconcile these crude visuals with the pomp and parades that follow, which is the point. For decades, beginning in 1965, these two Lilliputians— Ceausescu hovered in the vicinity of five foot five— ruled a country that they turned into a projection of their self-mythologizing, a Potemkin village for two.
After the opening trial, the movie shifts back in time, and to extreme overhead images, filmed in sumptuous black and white, of hundreds upon hundreds of people running toward some unknown destiny. From this lofty perch you can’t see the faces of these men, women, and children, who take the beautifully abstracted, metaphorically potent shape of an undifferentiated, surging mass. Those faces come into clearer view in a later sequence with a state official that the historically minded (and Google researchers) will recognize as Ceausescu’s predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a revolutionary who rose to power after World War Two and held on until his death in 1965. And the small man helping carry out the Gheorghiu-Dej coffin? Why that’s the young Ceausescu, doing his best to look downcast.
Whether he was shedding real tears or keeping a smile at bay, Ceausescu rarely seems to have done anything without a camera whirring nearby. Here he is in black and white and there in color; here with sound and there without. Here and there he kisses gaga, swooning women; dances with villagers; claps old-timers on the back. Always, there are the people, massing and waiting and waving. Sometimes those masses gathered in Romania and, at times, in China and North Korea (both countries put on jaw-dropping shows) and also farther afield in Western countries like Britain that were willing to roll out the red carpet for Romania’s peripatetic first couple.
Did the Ceausescus see what we see, what Ujica, working with his terrific editor and sound designer, Dana Bunescu, makes us see and understand? It’s unlikely, though it’s hard not to notice the difference in Ceausescu’s posture during an early visit, filmed in black and white, to a food market, its stocked shelves groaning with proletariat bread and Party promises, and a later, grimmer visit to a market shot in color. He’s older, of course, and grayer, though the hair still towers longingly upward. But by then even the Romanian propaganda machine couldn’t obscure the despair hanging over the increasingly desolate cities and a people whose early smiles had long disappeared, along with the promises.