The Media Offsprings of the Romanian Revolution: A comparative analysis

Abstract

The Romanian revolution of December 1989 was a political event, a media event and a media-theoretical event. It provoked an impressive amount of speculation on the mere possibility of history under the new mediatic conditions, which reduced its images to a parade of symptoms of the ever-growing tendency of politics towards spectacularization and even self-annihilation. Instead of trying to develop a similarly encompassing theory on the audiovisual representation of the revolutionary fact, the present article concentrates on three different media objects made after 1989: (1) Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s documentary essay Videograms from a Revolution; (2) the YouTube clip December 22, 1989 Romanian Revolution Uncut; and (3) Corneliu Porumboiu’s fiction feature 12:08 East of Bucharest. These objects are analysed transversally and in shifting pairs, with a focus on their concrete audiovisual language, in connection with issues such as discursive and manipulation strategies, historical legitimation attempts and hierarchical media models. The aim is to transform these works into oblique, yet more empirical access points to the implications of the status of the events of December 1989 as the first full-fledged “televised revolution” for the collective memory, as well as for later audiovisual reworkings of that historical moment.