Videograms of a Revolution

Built around amateur videos, demonstration footage and excerpts from a demonstrator-controlled Bucharest TV studio in late December 1989, this rigorous chronology of the Romanian uprising that overthrew dictator Nicolae Ceausescu shows clearly, and often with real suspense, how the mediated image not only records but engenders historic change. The studio was occupied for 120 unbroken hours and became a courtroom/interrogation centre/report hub for the seismic events unfolding outside. A Marker-esque voice-over occasionally guides our reading, but it's left primarily to the images to narrate themselves, and they offer a ringside seat for this revolution of the image. Watch out for the extraordinary moment early on when the state newscaster coughs slightly after reading out some blatant double-speak a ministerial suicide, marking perhaps the moment when it all starts to unravel.