Films 1992

1992

Videogramme einer Revolution
Videograms of a Revolution
In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica's "Videograms" shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu's last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. 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. As we know, the 20th century is filmic. But only the videocamera, 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. (Andrei Ujica) Harun Farocki conceived of and assembled Videograms of a Revolution together with Andrei Ujica. Ujica, who was born in Timisoara in 1951, is a Rumanian writer who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he is a lecturer in literature and media theory. View More »

1992

Kamera und Wirklichkeit
What a television critic has always wished to see and never got to see: the continual flow of images just occasionally being stopped, so as to examine them more closely, to discuss them, to analyze them, look at them again; to see through the images to the reality of which they tell. Kamera und Wirklichkeit, Rumänien 1989 is the title of a three-hour documentary by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica and is one of the most exciting productions to be screened in recent months. Farocki and Ujica assembled material from over 120 live broadcasts by Rumanian television from the days of revolution in December 1989 as well as a similar amount of amateur video and material shot by cinematographers from Rumanian state film studios, so as to produce a chronicle of events, subdivided into chapters and captioned.The media theorists brought together to discuss the sequences in the studio (Friedrich Kittler, Bochum; Andrei Plesu, Bukarest; Manfred Schneider, Essen; Peter M. Spangenberg, Mannheim) do so in detail, thoroughly and on occasion with the concentrated vanity of the professionally far-sighted. (Fritz Wolf, epd, 9 Januar 1993)