Videogramme einer Revolution

“Television is on our side! We have won!” This chronicle of the 1989 revolution in Romania is put together from live coverage by the state broadcaster TVR and video recorded by numerous amateurs. Harun Farocki and Romanian writer and director Andrei Ujica had access to 125 hours of material, from which they compiled a minute-by-minute account of the period from December 21^st to the 25^th. Seen from multiple perspectives, these videograms cover the rapid succession of events from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last public speech in Bucharest to the execution of the dictator and his wife four days later. The digital images are condensed to shape a historical drama, and the audiovisual historiography takes on the form of a classic stage play: “The people revolt, power is overthrown, the rulers are executed.” In 1992, the directors said: “Our goal was to untangle the existing bundle of images and edit them into sequences so that the viewer has the impression that they are moving through the same film loop from one camera to the next for five days.” The work has been presented as an installation in museums, including in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2023.