TEHRAN – “Videograms of a Revolution”, an acclaimed documentary about the December 1989 Romanian Revolution, will be reviewed at the Iranian Artists Forum in Tehran on Sunday.

Critic Amir-Hossein Siadat will discuss the documentary following a screening starting at 5 pm.

The film was compiled by German director Harun Farocki and Romanian writer Andrei Ujica in 1992.

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu gave his last-ever public speech on December 21, 1989, from the balcony of the enormous People’s House in Bucharest. Five days later he was executed, together with his wife Elena. Media images from the revolution that unfolded in a matter of days were sparse. Chaos and confusion reigned supreme.

Farocki and Ujica collected 125 hours of film made by both amateurs and official news gatherers. From this huge diversity of perspectives, they distilled a reconstruction of the popular uprising. With meticulous attention to the facts, they took each clip and indicated the moment it was shot, who made it and with what intention, camera position, image quality and anomalies.

Scenes of outraged demonstrators and the storming of the palace, recall October (1928), Sergei Eisenstein’s documentary-style story about the Russian October Revolution in 1917. Eisenstein’s revolution was staged, however, while “Videograms of a Revolution” shows images of a reality that remains difficult to disentangle.

“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,” Ujica has previously said. 

“As we know, the 20th century is filmic. But only the video camera, with its heightened possibilities in terms of recording time and mobility, can bring the process of filming history to completion. Provided, of course, that there is history,” he has added.

In 2004, the Austrian Film Museum selected the documentary as part of its Die Utopie Film program for the Best 100 in Film History list.

Photo: A scene from the documentary film “Videograms of a Revolution”.

MMS/YAW