NICOLAE CEAUŞESCU VISITS KIM JONG IL

Life at the top

In The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Andrei Ujică has put together a film that lasts three hours, composed almost entirely of government footage of the Romanian dictator who ruled (officially as Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party and President of he country) from 1965 to 1989, when he was deposed in a coup. There are also some slightly more personal home movies. Three hours is too long, but that is precisely the point: that makes the film a festival film, for festival devotees take watching the unwatchable or unendurable to be a badge of honor, and excessive length conveys a specialness an ordinary film doesn't possess. Moreover, with this length Andrei Ujică is also making several points of his own. He's showing what the Romanian people had to endure, and for how long -- and what Ceauşescu had to endure too, the boring rituals of playing the role of head of state. The film is book-ended by a few minutes of rough videotape of Ceauşescu and his wife Elena when the government has been taken over, and he is being held hostage and stonewalling all efforts to make him explain his brutal efforts to repress the revolts in Timişoara and Budapest.

Ceauşescu allowed himself to be routinely photographed for an hour every day of his regime, and Ujică has culled his film from that vast official accumulation, editing it in his own way. This is an "autobiography" by someone else, like those of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. The title, and the means of presentation, without commentary, of this for the most part bland, impersonal footage, express in some Orwellian sense the idea that Ceauşescu is barely a real person; that there was never any real difference between his public and his private self; that he was a cipher standing for a repressive regime. He is the state with no face.

This regime is shown by endless footage of public events, parades of shiny black limousines, tanks, troops marching, party officials high up on rostrums reviewing; on visits to China or the Korea of Kim Jong Il, thousands of costumed citizens moving smartly in unison; giant blown up photographs of Ceauşescu and his wife; drives along vast boulevards with no trees, only government buildings, stage sets where human beings have no extra-ceremonial function.

This Autobiography is enigmatic, yet revealing. It's grand, yet boring and mundane. Its subject is repellent -- or at best unappealing -- but after spending so much time with him we, like Andrei Ujică by his own admission, come to feel a certain sympathy. How can he endure the boredom of all the peasant handicraft fairs, the dances, the handshakes, the parades, the conversations with Eastern Bloc leaders about the weather, the ceremonial meetings with Nixon, Carter, Queen Elizabeth? He must be a very brave and patient man -- in some odd way, a good sport. (Rumor has it that he was ill-humored in later years, but not in public.)

Andrei Ujică points out in an interview that Ceauşescu was a peasant who spent a full seven of his earliest years in prison, which strengthened his intense, simple belief in communist ideology (he changed the country's official title from "socialist" to "communist." His pep talks about communism's virtues are without depth but enthusiastic, and he always has then at the ready. In speech-making he holds a sheet of paper up in the air in front of him but speaks without looking at it. This also reflects the fact that he can say whatever he wants. He is repeatedly renominated and reelected by the party by acclamation. Once, toward the end, an official manages to protest before a large party audience at the boss's being nominated for the central committee and thereby guaranteeing his own releection, but there is a roar of disapproval, a standing ovation, chants of Ceauşeacu's name: "Reelect! Reelect!" Where are the dissenters? Where are the planners of the coup? We don't get to see them. They're behind a wall of propaganda and monuments of Stalinist wedding-cake architecture. This film mesmerizes us with that wall. But we don't believe it. We know this is a long, careful charade.

A charade bought into by East and West. Besides state visits to China, some gleeful, Nixon came calling, and so did De Gaulle (in a Caravalle), and Ceauşescu stayed at Buckingham Palace and when Jimmy Carter received him in one of his four visits to Washington he called him "a great leader of a great country." His regime was more open toward the West than other communist countries, and we get glimpses of that.

When on domestic official tours, Ceauşescu often surveys wreckage, floods, acres of mud; but indoors, he gazes on vast miniaturized models of perfect, pastry-white cities. On indoor tours, he visits big food shops packed with goods and picks up loaves of bread. "The crust is too thick," he says, or "the quality is better outside the capital." The packed shops are a front. The empty ones aren't photographed. By what we see, we know what is hidden. The indifference to what was really going on in the country was going to catch up with Ceauşescu and lead to his execution (not included here).

Ceauşescu, Ujică says in the interview, was "like a peasant who suddenly became a great landlord." In private life he was exemplary, except for avarice: in his last years he kept up to 30% of the country's GNP for himself when the country was barely growing. All he was doing was hunting deer and bears and building palaces. Informal footage shows he and his wife were both terrible at volleyball and she was a sloppy swimmer. Could he do anything well? Yes, he could endure. He looked good in suits and overcoats and scarves and hunting tweeds. His hair was combed. His speeches were sprightly. He stayed there.

The minor Eastern Bloc regimes were vast events that were essentially non-events. Ujică celebrates that fact in this aesthetically pure exploration of the vast, epic emptiness and empty-headedness that is the life of a tyrannical head of state.

Shown at Cannes, where it had its world premiere, and other festivals, this was seen and reviewed as a Special Event of the New York Film Festival 2010 at Lincoln Center. I dare you to sit through it.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.