The award for the career awarded on the occasion of the 50th edition of the Golden Laceno in Andrei Ujică, also president of jury for this edition, closes with a masterclass an ideal trilogy opened by Leos Carax and continued with Victor Erice. Different methods of struggle and resistance, a common vision ability. For the Romanian director, the look often looks behind to see what will happen in the future, to signal the moments of landscape, the moment in which in history there is a discard that changes the space and the perceived time. Videograms of a Revolution does this, collects the fragments of a nation in the moments of its dissolution and tells the end of an era.
“When Harun Farocki and I started thinking about Videograms of a Revolution was 1991, the question we made was about what kind of pictures, what kind of videos to use for this movie. The first thing that came to mind was to do a research on television, just for the huge role that had television during those days of December 1989, when the headquarters of Romanian national television was occupied by the insurgents and for 62 hours, three days and three nights, there was a direct of these revolutionaries to communicate what was happening. Then we appealed to the private citizens, the ordinary people who in those days had taken pictures, and we bought them, because we were interested in returning this double look. When we completed the first part of the film, which corresponds to the deconstruction of Ceausescu’s last public speech, we wondered how to move forward. And I have advanced the proposal to reverse the perspective, put back in line and rebuild those five days through a double movement, the deconstruction of man and the reconstruction of events.”.
All the films of Ujică are reflections on the 20th century, especially on the second half of the twentieth century, when the analogue had a power that after the explosion of the digital lost. Above all, there was still the possibility to put order in the images and use them as a historical document, which is now impractical. Now with surveillance of the cameras and cell surveillance, privacy has disappeared, there is no longer private life. We are overwhelmed by billions of images per second and it is impossible to distinguish what can be considered a legitimate historical document. “I also think of similarities and differences between the 1989 revolution, where the impact of television played a decisive role in the history of Romania, and the failure of Arab primaveres, where it was thought to subvert the regimes through mobile phones, but it did not actually go as we believed. ”
Our perception of history is inseparable from the medium that tells it, one cannot think of the great historical events without considering the medium that has told them. From Homer to Dante the story was that transmitted by the great epic poems, then passed to the theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, then to the novels, to the history in chapters, to Tolstoj, then to the cinema that turns it into images before the advent of TV. There was a precise moment when this last phase began, which coincides with the landing in Normandy, with Ford and other 420 machines to follow the event, and ends with the events of Bucharest in 1989. But how do you tell a story, what is the right distance, where is the perfect point of observation? “The distance to look at things depends on the subject observed, everything is different, what unites them is a macroscopic perspective, a look I investigated in Out of the present through the story of Sergei Krikalev, the last cosmonaut of the Soviet era, which stands ten months in the space station Mir, while in the meantime the world changes with the dissolution of the USSR. Return to another historical era. I was interested in investigating his almost divine perspective, a position that in the omeric poems assumed the gods of the Olympus. Now with the proliferation of recovery devices, which are everywhere, it is as if paradoxically we are going back to an oral phase, before the invention of the alphabet, with billions of eyes looking and telling. We do not yet have the coordinates to read what is happening, because a new order is emerging to decrypt and organize, a phase of entropy.”.
Unknown quantity, another pearl of the filmography of Ujică, staged a conversation about Chernobyl between Paul Virilio and Svetlana Alexievich on major themes related to the crisis of the world and the thought that had triggered Chernobyl. Virilio has an eschatological fascination for the end of the world that comes from a dual background, from left intellectual with a Catholic formation, like Pasolini. “This often makes him say phrases to effect, but I don’t know how true they are. Malraux also said that the 20th century would be a century of great religion and spirituality, we saw how it went. I personally think that with Marx the time of philosophers is over.” The possibility of making revolutions today through the images appears very limited, because of this uncontrolled dispersion of the gaze as it was a changing organism, which continually reproduces. “On the possibility of revolutions in itself, I think we will have them until the end of time, as it was an innate drive to have fires towards change. The important thing is that there is one of the irrelevant conditions, i.e. identifying well what our enemy is, which does not always happen.” The great revolutions, that of 1789, that of 1917 and that of 1989 all started in a heroic way, with the hope of a better world that then dissolved and trivialized in a trivial comedy, in a farce. “Revolutions are divided into three stages, initial conviction, terror and finally insignificant ideas. Democracy itself can start with great ideas and then end up in a farce, which is what we are experiencing right now. ”
Another important chapter addressed during the masterclass, closely associated with the development of the digital age, is that related to the sphere of information. “The traditional media, I think of the newspapers, had a credibility they no longer have. With the 1980s there was the advent of a type of communication carried out by characters such as Berlusconi or Murdoch, then there was the explosion of social media, which radically changed the view of how they could receive and tell the story and topicality, a real nuclear bomb that tipped the table and that at the moment makes it very difficult to make a serious debate on political issues, also because we live all in our bubbles, big or so The hysterical polyphony makes any serious speech impossible.”.
The meeting ends with 2 Pasolini, a short that is a tribute to one of the most intellectual ends of history and to what the director considers his masterpiece, The Gospel according to Matthew: “It is an extraordinary film at all levels, for the philological approach of the text and for the importance given to the faces of the characters. I then discovered the documentary Sopralluoghi in Palestine, where he wanted to set the film, before giving up because those places had traces of modernity. These images of Pasolini before the desert immediately made me think of Jesus who casts and shouts against the Pharisees.” The Gospel according to Matthew is extraordinary also from the musical point of view because it has a particularly complex structure, which starts from the classical spiritual scores of Bach, to popular music, to jazz. “There are two extremely provocative passages, where he puts the revolutionary songs of the red army, precisely because he sees in Jesus a revolutionary proto figure. And that is why I chose to put a remixed tupac Shakur, Hit ‘Em Up, on the titles of the tail, because he also considered himself a prophet for his generation.”.
L’articolo Golden Laceno 50 – Meeting with Andrei Ujică proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
