The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu
Sep 23 - Sep 29, 2011
(Andrei Ujica, 2010, Romania/Germany, 35mm, 180 min)
In 1990, film essayist Andrei Ujica teamed up with Harun Farocki to document the media’s coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. The result was Videograms of a Revolution, one of Cahiers du Cinema’s "Top 10 Most Subversive Films of All Time." In Autobiography, Ujica returns to the catastrophic regime that led up to the Revolution, examining how the Eastern Bloc’s most brutal dictator fabricated his own public image during his twenty-five years of absolute power. Assembling three hours of footage from the National Film and TV Archives, Ujica crafts a fascinating portrait comprised of the bizarre pageantry and manifest delusions that characterized Ceaucescu’s Romania. In montage lies damnation, as Ujica’s reconstruction of official public images irreversibly deconstructs official public history.
“As monumental as it is ephemeral, and not without a certain ghastly pathos.” —J. Hoberman, The New York Review of Books