Romanian Film Festival: Timisoara, December 1989

In Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves, several veterans of Radio Free Europe’s Romanian section complained their country was the last captive nation to break its Communist shackles, aside from Albania. That sense of impatience was also shared by many in Romanian, eventually igniting an explosive protest in Timişoara, which ultimately led to a full-fledged revolution. The events of that signal protest are remembered in Ovidiu Bose Paştină’s 1993 documentary, Timişoara, December 1989, which also screened at this year’s Romanian Film Festival.

A bold aerial shot of Timişoara’s gateway arch sets the tone for the distinctive, almost experimental, style Paştină brings to bear on this turning point in Romanian history. Filming interviews of witnesses and participants in the demonstration from odd angles in a grainy black and white, Paştină’s visual compositions match the chaos of the events under discussion. As witnesses recall, the military did indeed initially fire upon the crowd. However, as the crisis escalated, the Romanian soldiers turned against the Communist regime. One rank-and-file speaks on camera of a telephone conversation with his parents, warning him not to shoot his countrymen.

While Paştină captures some powerful oral history, December is as much a meditation on the birth of 1989 Revolution, as it is a historical narrative. At times almost impressionistic, it displays little resemblance to other (more conventional) documentaries of the period.

Unlike then Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, the 1989 Revolution was indeed a revolution—the only revolt against Communist authority which climaxed with the execution of the Party leader. December captures the courage and spirit of hope, so long deferred in Romania that finally came to the fore in 1989. It also represents what could have been. Tragically, Paştină was lost to cancer before he could follow-up on the promise shown in December and his well regarded student film, The Art of Individual Defense.

December is a rewarding film on its own merits and a sad reminder of what could have been. Given its high historical and artistic value, it deserves the full Criterion treatment and a long broadcast life on PBS. An excellent choice for the festival, it nicely complemented Solomon’s Cold Waves, which discussed the events of Timişoara from a slightly different perspective.

Romanian Film Festival: Cold Waves

It was a government program that worked. How novel. Of course, Radio Free Europe did not single-handedly win the Cold War, but it successfully built up a large audience behind the Iron Curtain. In Romania, it forged a particularly strong connection with its listeners that is documented in Alexandru Solomon’s Cold Waves (trailer here), which screened at this year’s Romanian Film Festival.

According to Solomon’s documentary, RFE was regularly heard by a staggering 65% of all Romanians—generating moon-landing level market shares on a daily basis. Early in the film Solomon states RFE was a constant presence in his home growing up, and on the rare occasions his family turned it off, they would still hear it through the walls from the flat next door.

As in the case of VOA’s beloved jazz program hosted by Willis Conover, music was a big part of RFE’s popularity, but the station’s news coverage during two times of crisis cemented the relationship between RFE and the Romanian people. The first incident was the disastrous earthquake of 1977. Since the Dear Leader was on a state visit to Nigeria at the time, a news blackout was imposed on government controlled media until his return, leaving a huge information vacuum for RFE to fill. The second incident was the start of the 1989 Revolution in Timişoara, which would be RFE’s shining hour, much as the 1991 Russian Coup was for Radio Liberty.

It was not just average Romanians listening—the Ceauşescu government was also paying close attention, dedicating a division of the Securitate, the so-called “Ether Unit,” to countering RFE. The premature deaths of three RFE Romanian section chiefs from cancer-related causes have long raised suspicions, but have yet to be substantiated with evidence. However, the film did uncover documents linking Carlos the Jackal (who was given safe harbor in Romania under Ceauşescu) and the Romanian Securitate to the 1991 bombing of RFE’s Munich facility.

Solomon employs many of the conventions of documentary filmmaking, like reuniting the surviving staff of Romanian section in the old RFE building outside of Munich, as well as interviewing plenty of talking heads. However, he periodically uses a visual motif of what looks like a three part soundstage or theater backdrop, consisting of a Romanian flat, RFE studio, and Securitate office, to evoke the feeling of Cold War Romania. In addition to the film’s distinctive look, Solomon also scored some impressive interviews. We hear from many of the surviving RFE staffers and listeners, but also from some critics, including a former Ether Unit veteran and current neo-Stalinist member of parliament, who Solomon forces to listen to RFE’s coverage of the attacks on the December 1989 Timişoara demonstrators. He even reached the incarcerated Carlos for a phoner (he denies everything, but says that Ceauşescu was quite the gracious host).

Scrupulously evenhanded, Waves is quite credible, both at recounting late twentieth century Romanian history and exposing new information about the past regime’s misdeeds. It is a fascinating film that deserves theatrical distribution beyond the festival circuit.

Romanian Film Festival: Gruber’s Journey

Given the slate of prestige pictures releasing soon for the upcoming award season, American and British filmmakers seem to have overcome their past reluctance to address the Holocaust cinematically (two such films will be reviewed this coming week). However, that has not been the case in Romania, where the notorious Iaşi Pogrom is a particularly delicate subject to broach. Director Radu Gabrea has been the rare exception, making both documentaries and dramatic features about the Jewish experience in Romania. His latest film, Gruber’s Journey, screening this weekend at the Third Annual Romanian Film Festival, presents the tragic events of Iaşi, from the perspective of an outsider.

Evidently, Journey is also notable as a rare Romanian film in which the central protagonist is not Romanian. In this case, it is the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, who was a member of the Italian Fascist Party, though not always in good standing due to his gadfly tendencies. He was indeed in Iaşi, or Jassy as it also known, immediately following the massive round-up of the city’s Jewish population. He later wrote a very critical account of the incident in his novel Kaputt. In Journey, Gabrea suggests a fictional story to explain Malaparte’s ultimate disillusionment with Fascism.

Assigned to cover the Russian front for the Italian news service, Malaparte is traveling east with Col. Freitag of the Wehrmacht and the deputy commander of the local Romanian garrison. It is all quite chummy and pleasant except for the severe allergy attack plaguing the writer. He has a referral from a doctor in Bucharest for a world-class allergist, Dr. Josef Gruber, but when Malaparte reaches Iaşi, Dr. Gruber is nowhere to be found.

After enduring a local hack doctor’s battery of sedatives to no avail, Malaparte sets out to find Gruber. What follows is a Kafkaesque story of bureaucratic runaround, as the sinus-challenged Fascist attempts to locate Gruber’s transport. It is not simply a case of Romanians lacking German efficiency. To produce Gruber would imply a level of knowledge and culpability that none of the local Romanians want to assume, despite earning laurels mere days earlier for their actions in the pogrom.

Journey is a deliberately bloodless and intellectual film. It helps to appreciate it if you understand the trajectory Malaparte life will follow. Gabrea shows the audience nothing directly. Instead, we watch Malaparte put together the pieces. Why is the local pharmacy a mad house? Because their two closest competitors suddenly shuttered their doors at the same time Gruber disappeared. Inescapably, a pattern emerges. Throughout the film, Gabrea slowly builds towards Malaparte’s final moment of epiphany. It is a subtle payoff, but nicely turned by Florin Piersic, Jr. Perhaps the greatest standout in the cast though is German actor Udo Schenk, uncomfortably convincing as Freitag.

Undoubtedly, some will be troubled by Journey’s antiseptic approach, relying on the audience to supply its own visions of the horrors that have happened in Iaşi. The attempts at absurdist humor did not seem particularly amusing either (perhaps because I have a very high degree of empathy for anyone trapped in the Hell of bureaucracy). It is a film pitched at the head rather than the heart, which is quite ambitious given the dramatic nature of its subject. It screens again today as part of the Romanian Film Festival at the Tribeca Cinema.