Széthangzó forradalom. Az 1989-es romániai történések újrajátszásai, remedializációi

Dánél, Mónika (2016) Széthangzó forradalom. Az 1989-es romániai történések újrajátszásai, remedializációi. Metropolis. ISSN 1416-8154

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Abstract

The historical event and the media event are inseparably interwoven in the Romanian “first televised Revolution” (PetrovszkyÞichindeleanu). Documentaries and films try to (re)create this EastEuropean event, displaying the way the “real“ event intersects with its technical mediation. Occurrence and transmission have become inseparable. As Vilém Flusser describes the Romanian “turning point:“ “There is no reality behind the image. There are realities in the image.“ The article examines the re-enactments connected to the 1989 events which reflect on the relation between the media images and the “real“ events of past and present. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica ( Videogramme einer Revolution , 1992) compiled archival recordings revealing that the “turning point“ is also discernible in the transition from the static camera to the handheld camera and in the multiplication of perspectives. Irina Botea’s Auditions for a Revolution (2006) and Petra Szõcs’s The Execution (2014) combine media images of the past with the present perspectives of reenactment by foreigners and children. In Petra Szõcs’s short film set in the Romania of the 1990s three Hungarian children repeatedly reenact the scenes of the execution of the dictator couple transmitted on television. From the children’s point of view the media image becomes reenacted and the historical image turns into present in the intersection with their own family story. Irina Botea’s performance created in the United States, emphasizes through reenactment the theatricality and (visual) masculinity of the recorded scenes. The text fragments read aloud in a foreign language by the young people not knowing the Romanian language and culture remediate the intonations and gestures of the “Romanian revolutionary language.” Their “acting” performance stages the historical/theatrical event through both distance and (physiological) identification. Re-enactment becomes “an attempt to re-live a specific historical situation which is only indirectly accessible to us, or conveyed only by media images, in order to develop a feeling of empathy for the voluntary or involuntary protagonists of history” (Inke Arns). Corneliu Porumboiu’s film 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) stages the tension between the revolution as media event and the revolution as personal occurrence/one’s own past. While it presents the medium as the prosthesis of the event, the TV show turns into a trial, evoking the past. Milo Rau’s Die letzten Tage der Ceausescus (2009) and Radu Gabrea’s Three Days before Christmas (2011) operate with the (intimate) point of view of the executed Ceausescu-couple and turn reenactment, through the parallels and tensions of perspectives, into a spect-actorial event.

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