Romania 4/4: Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to Television

Libération, 4 Apr 1990

Fourth and last text of the Romania series. 

Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to Television

While we might fault Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu for having ruled Romania so poorly when they were alive, we can only congratulate their corpses for appearing so frequently – and with such success – on television. Monday night they astounded us once again with the chilly hauteur of seasoned professionals, turning up their noses at the pale extras who shot them all over again. 

In the same way, if we might fault television for having kept us so poorly informed about the Ceaușescus during their rule, we can only congratulate it for giving their corpses the opportunity to debut on the global market of emotion. Deader and deader, more riddled with bullets, bloated and stained, the terrible couple seemed poised to become the most underpaid extras in television history. Fortunately, some people have stepped in at last (Sulitzer!) to demand a cut and restore things back to normal, meaning to a normal level of squalor.  

How did we reach this point? This is what has been thoroughly discussed at many conferences (the most recent one in Valence, Drôme) devoted to how Romania and Television ended up manipulating one another. This raises at least three questions. Why did the Romanians make such a mess of the symbolic gestures that should have allowed them to turn the page on Ceaușescu without too much damage? To what extent might this failure have been worsened by the morbid workings of Western television stations? Is it not futile to expect that television can achieve any kind of symbolic effectiveness?  

We can begin to answer the first question. Accustomed to lying for bad or wrong causes, the Romanians didn’t imagine that anyone would mind very much if they laid the news on a bit thick the day their cause became a just one. Hence the sham summary trial and the Timisoara mass grave hastily presented to foreign journalists. The cost of this operation: high. Forced to retract the mass grave and finish the trial, the Romanians not only gave the impression of having missed the “unique televisual act” of their revolution, but instead offered a macabre soap opera, a sloppy production, full of gaps and thick with hidden truths and ulterior motives. The exemplary nature of the freeze frame on the Ceaușescus’ fall had been too quickly glossed over; like a revenant, the video phantom of that image continues to haunt us. This is a genuine failure.  

The second question can be answered as well. And all the better, since our television is known to us and obeys a regime of truth specific unto itself. A strict regime that we can break down as follows. 1) There is no other truth on television than the live image. 2) The only live image worth anything – at a push – is death. 3) The only proof of death is the possibility of producing a corpse*. In this sense, the perpetual return of the Ceaușescu corpses to the screen is the ultimate event, and there was no genuine interest when commentators Monday evening (poor Cotta!) pretended to find value in the long version of the trial beyond pure voyeurism.  

The third question, by contrast, is so serious that it demands extreme caution. If a symbolic act is one that emphasises duration and sets the time for a group of individuals who thereby achieve a common recognition of being in the same situation, then television struggles, now, in the past and in the future, to create such acts. Paradoxically, its very omnipresence renders it powerless. Being global and continuous, it no longer stresses anything. Overworked and easy to ignore (remote control in hand), it knows no catharsis. Stripped of any off-screen, it also lacks an Other. Hence the fearsome perversity of its effects. An event that would have passed as “symbolic” just yesterday (let’s say the Pope’s visit) becomes pure parody in the great deadpan tradition of late Bunuel films. Conversely, what would have been a product of raw “realism” just yesterday (let’s say the execution of the Ceaușescus) becomes, once televised, the frenzied simulation of a symbolic act that has not “taken hold”. 

Today, this frenzy can be felt everywhere, especially on television. Let’s return to the Ceaușescus: the fury of the victim-spouses, the stunned fury of the executioners, the incompetent fury of commentators, the obscene fury of audience ratings, the virtuous fury of those feeling manipulated. What is this fury? Isn’t it the fury born of definitive disappointment, the fury well known to the deviant who, condemned to endlessly replay the same film, forever unable to see or capture everything of the decisive moment that obsessed him (small or large death), knows himself doomed to invariably stumble over the refuse of his jouissance and the remains of his fantasy: a stupid body after sex (a sad animal) or an obtuse corpse after the burst. One more step and he will stumble over what he is already stumbling on. It is precisely this attempt to inscribe the symbolic into the real and to expect god knows what unobtainable truth from the bloodiest acts that led once to fascism. How could we be certain that the desire for such acts isn’t returning today? 

For the more we abandon interpreting the world, the more we turn against the bodies that populate it. The body is not the prop of an individual's history but the scorned refusal of a dream. The less we understand Lebanon, the more Lebanese corpses become filmable. The more opaque Romania becomes, the more the Ceaușescu corpses are back in service. This is humanity’s phobia about its own image; this is this tautology gone wrong which television has chosen to embrace. For worse rather than for better.  

This phobia is the only possible explanation for the contorted rage with which moralists of every stripe attacked the program by Karlin and Lainé – L’Amour  en France – who are guilty only in bringing within reach of the average TV viewer the human interest of the average guinea pig – you and me. It is urgent – lest matters worsen – that, with these beings and things now within our grasp, so close, obscene and threatening by virtue of their availability, we begin to learn to do something other than count the bullets striking their bodies.   

It is well known that cinema often serves as the displaced conscience of those without conscience, namely the television clergy (which, if it has nothing else, has a price: Guillaume Durand’s thoughts, for example, cost seven million centimes an hour, for those interested). Thus a film coming soon – the new “last Fellini” – says, in its own equally frenzied way, two or three things about the disaster that may be threatening us. What is The Voice of the Moon about? As always with Fellini, many incomplete events culminate in an one all too final. One day, in a small Italian town, workers manage to capture the very symbol of what is remote: the Moon. So the Moon is on earth, a huge, pallid disc of light, a prisoner amid gawkers, dignitaries and onlookers. First they look at the Moon and then they talk to it, asking it for explanations, the meaning of life, things like that. Since the foolish Moon stays silent, some hothead fires on it and you see a little black hole on the moon’s left side. A disaster.  

Fellini has long been describing the world we inhabit, a world where the object of desire is present even before the desire itself arises, a world where, as Virilio says in his splendid new work (Polar Inertia): “From now on, everything happens without the need to go anywhere.” The moon that is shot at is like Mr and Mrs Ceaușescu: brought to us through a kind of availability that is at first marvelous, then unexpected, then astonishing, then disturbing, then panic-inducing, then bent on every outrage.  

How are we to reinvent distance?  

* Is there really a difference between this macabre Romanian and the subsequent surgical Iraqi? They are rather two external edges of the world of images. On one side, gore, relentless action on the bodies; on the other, video erasure of the same bodies. Two ways to put an end to what resists.  

First published in Libération on 26 April 1990. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Cinéma, télévision, information, Aléas éditions, 1991.

Romania 3/4: Romania, Year Zero

Third text of the Romania series.

Romania, Year Zero  

“If there is such a thing as history, and if man is indeed a historical being, it is only because there is a childhood of man, because language does not identify with the human, because there’s a difference between language and speech, between semiotics and semantics.” – Giorgio Agamben. 

At which point did it become clear (to me) that cinema had nothing more to gain from keeping pace with the great events of History? It was in 1981, already in the East. One of the fastest filmmakers in the world, Andrzej Wajda, was leaving the shipyards in Gdansk to make a topical film, Man of Iron, an improvised sequel to Man of Marble. All the ingredients for success were present: Poland moved public opinions, Wajda was well-known and the film had won the Palme d’or at Cannes. Despite all this, Man of Iron had only a modest reception and was forgotten as quickly as it had been made. Toward the end of the 1980s, Agnieszka Holland’s film about Father Popieluszko (To Kill a Priest, starring Christophe Lambert) confirmed this simple observation: cinema and history were no longer on the same trajectory. 

But if it’s clear that news was now in the realm of television, the latter had not yet – in Europe at least – faced its true baptism of fire. It took Tiananmen and especially the events of 1989 (a seriously fractured iron curtain and a completely collapsed Berlin Wall) to test it for the first time. Euphoria was rising as we watched highly symbolic places (the Berlin Wall, Wenceslas Square) transformed into studio-camps where one would go and be seen (in that way, television definitely killed that old expression: “go over there and see if you can find me”). But it was Romania, a country without symbols, without faces, in short without images, that made things fascinating, in every conceivable way. There was the true baptism of fire. 

For we have just witnessed a real tele-invention of Romania. Rarely had a tyrant as little known as Ceaușescu become so quickly such a familiar “figure” (albeit a rather iced one). Never before had the various TV channels competed so willingly with one another or so readily disrupted their schedule. Never before had the ordinary difficulties of a journalist (knowing who is who and who wants what) been so simply shared with the audience. And finally, never before (and this is the bit that must interest us) had the jargon of image-makers, the language of the audiovisual world, been so quickly adopted and picked up by the same audience. 

It’s as if everyone had suddenly become a “film critic”. Not through cinephilia, but because the need for it was acutely felt. It was as if, watching the confused images of the Ceaușescus’ filmed trial and execution, concepts like freeze-image, slow motion, off-screen space and ellipsis were no longer mere stylistic devices but were also information to be deciphered (with all the risks of lies, falsification and omission). We witnessed a sort of democratisation of the cinematic language, or at least of some of its basic grammatical elements. Suddenly, the old television news, with images from nowhere (images we had grown blasé about and stopped questioning), with smug anchormen who talked “over” and “instead of” the images, seemed terribly dated. Between the Romanian protagonists and the French viewers, media professionals made themselves scarce, and we quickly forgave their mistakes since we were making the same ones (like George Marchais, none of us imagined that something would ever happen in Bucharest). 

Before the events in the East become again inextricable and entangled with passion and ideology, it is worthwhile to assess the impact of this Romanian event of images. And it must be done in Cahiers, which when they were “yellow” were Cahiers of cinema and television. For we know only a few milestone moments in the long progression toward ever greater visibility, along the themes of transparency and live broadcasting, all the Bazinian ontology (which holds that to film is not to signify, but to show). What is being concluded today, right before our eyes, is both the first forty years of Cahiers and the fifty years following Yalta (acknowledging that the latter is far more important than the former). 

A very interesting symposium has just been published by the University Press of France under the title How to Live with Images. An extraordinary title to which I would add the slight anguish of a question mark. This title implicitly accepts that it is now illusory (or at least greatly exaggerated) to reject the image, this “object both mundane and present in our daily environment, yet singular and a collective fantasy”. Only the servants of a dogmatic truth (we’ve seen it before and it could resurface) have no interest in testing that truth against the image. Why? Because they vastly overestimate the powers of images. All the clergy of the world have forever sought to control images, to diminish them, to silence them, to read them, in short to force them into the meaning they assign to them. This is well known. 

How to live with images? Probably by not expecting from them too much or too little of this “truth”. By not fighting too much against their necessary ambiguity. And by understanding, once and for all, not only that “just an image” is not “a just image”, but that it now falls to us to confront that image (meaning to “show” it) with another. And let’s not forget that what could, in the best scenario (let’s not take anything for granted), constitute a sort of collective ecology of information was, not so long ago, the passion and ethical commitment of two or three passeurs who had made it their personal mission. So let’s say that in the snowy streets of Bucharest, there were the footprints of Bazin, Rosselini and Godard. 

Bazin taught us to live with our voyeurism, our insatiable and perverse hunger to “see more”, undeterred by the knowledge that, like any object of a drive, it is, as Lacan said, a “failure”. On one side, voyeurism that collapses distances; on the other, the theory of mise en scène that creates other distances. Rossellini transformed cinema by keeping his attention fixed on the duration of things and beings, in the suspension of meaning. On one side, the hypnotism that ends judgment; on the other, a method of telling a single event through multiple simultaneous, fragmented, small stories. Godard began to interrupt what had seemed obvious before him, only to stumble upon the enigma of the untied knot, the isolated image, the obligatory montage. On one side, melancholic and morbid contemplation of stopped cinema; on the other, an appeal to the off-screen space, where other movements, images and montages can be found. Among these three, we can see the same inner contradiction between excess (the mystical aspect of the image) and reason (the morality of the spectator). This was yesterday. And it has been the common thread of Cahiers’ history. Is this the case today? Are we seeing a new “television and History” trajectory taking shape? Or is it an illusion? Let’s examine some of the Romanian moments. The incredible discovery of the Mabuse-like subterranean tunnels beneath the capital, this way of encountering the unknown, is truly on the side of Bazin. But Hervé Chabalier’s remarkable documentary on daily life in Bucharest (“24 Hours”) simply adopts Rossellini’s approach in Rome, Open City. As for the trial of the Ceaușescus without off-screen space, and the fixed images of their corpses, it resembles a school exercise, graciously offered to Godard’s voice over. How to live with the images? We must live with all of them. This is the price to pay for information to finally become somewhat less dogmatic and achieve – at last – a certain dignity. 

An image is born at the intersection of two forces: what watches and what is watched (and vice versa). In the seventies, we saw television emancipate itself from political control and grapple with a reality it quickly transformed into “hyper-reality”. We knew enough about the subconscious to know that this scoptophilia would “yield” nothing and that this voyeurism verged on pornography or the distinct televisual feeling of “failing to assist a person in danger”. With hindsight, we realise that television may have been, at that moment, like a telescope (or a microscope) being adjusted but only when there is nothing to see, or at least nothing that truly concerns us. As Godard (him again) essentially said, documentary is what happens to others, while fiction is what happens to me. And fiction was what was most desperately missing the most – this was the recurring theme of the “crisis of the screenplay”. We had forgotten to consider that one day there might be something worth seeing. A major historical event, for instance, in Communist Europe. 

There will always be a kind of deflation in the midst of historical events, a revenge of Barthes’ “third meaning”, a hasty banality transforming the “great moments” of History in lame, inevitably disappointing spectacles. Modern filmmakers had already warned us: when Godard and Rossellini made The Carabineers, they set themselves against everyone by filming acts rather than a spectacle. Thirty years later, the emotion of the French viewer watching the Berlin Wall finally being climbed up, chipped away or straddled is of the same nature: it’s nothing and yet it’s everything. There are only insufficient answers to Beckett’s question, “how it is”. But we have learnt to value these images which are “better than nothing”, just slightly better than nothing. And we no longer expect anything (except perhaps the worst) from an absence of images or from a single Image. Television people must have long feared this void of reality (what Lacan called a hole), just as a genre painter feared photography. Photography is neither more accurate nor more precise; it simply says something else (we recall the smile on John Paul II’s face at the moment the bullet hit him). This is why television professionals work so hard to substitute complete figures for the absence of events. The eighties perhaps saw them push furthest their research into advertising and the promotion of the “brand image”, the trademarked image containing within itself the memory and meaning of the event. 

So it is no longer the “how it is” that matters, but the “how it would have been” that is archived (via slo-mos, freeze-frames, logos) at the very moment the event occurs, following the ideal model of sport coverage. But this is because the meaning of the event seems unproblematic, because in the studios of Cognacq-Jay “everything is absolutely known” and because – even if the theme hasn’t yet resurfaced – they behave as if History was well and truly over. 

Romania is something different. It tells us neither “how it is” nor “how it will have been”, it shows us “how it was”. For if it closes off what began with the hypothesis of modern cinema (Italian neorealism and its French theorisation), it’s for a very simple reason: modern cinema was born in Europe, Romania is in Europe, and we would not be so moved if we were not suddenly far more European than we thought ourselves to be (and perhaps, as a consequence, less lazily “universal”). 

Ceaușescu’s Romania so closely resembles the destroyed and traumatised post-war European countries, the poor, armed folks who may be either the population or former persecutors, that we see our own past in them, as if by superimposition. I mean both the past from which we necessarily descend and the past witnessed by certain already televisual films (or by some photographers who documented what French cinema refrained from showing, like the unforgettable shaved woman of Chartres, caught between the vengeful town and Robert Capa’s camera). 

This is the price of the return of the fiction. In the backward movement that draws me from the domesticated impossibility of the “how it is” to the forever open question of the “how it was”. 

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 428, February 1990. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 3, P.O.L., Paris, 2012.

Romania 2/4: The Judges and the Assassin

Libération, 27 Dec 1989

Second text of the Romania series.

The Judges and the Assassin  

At which point is there a need to show? At the point where others need to see. The new authorities in Bucharest had therefore a need to show to the people of Romania (and to the world) the proof that a trial had indeed taken place. To show became the symbolic condition of their new and fragile power. One had to rearrange the film in the right order and ensure that shaky or fixed shots from the trial succeeded the fixed image of the Conducator’s corpse. A military trial which, even if summary, could come across as an “act”. The message of the judges is not directed to Ceaușescu but to the TV audience: yes, this trial is not only legitimate but legal. So we, who are not Romanians, will have seen the Ceaușescus in the spotlight of the media only once, the last time. We, who more or less ignored the idealised icons of the Conducator, will have watched for a short while a bitter old killer with a wily air and dry gestures, and accompanied by a shrew. And in case we doubted it, we were reminded that great moments of History – providing they are followed “live” – contain their share of dead times and embarrassment. Given the progress made by television in its “duty of interference”, we should expect other scoops that will resemble – that’s life – monstrous trivial events where all the actors play badly. 

At which point is there a desire to see? When something is hidden from us of course. Paradox: at the moment when, for the first time, we see a dictator having lost power and soon his life, it is quickly no longer him that we want to see. We want to see those that judged him, and were well in their right to do so, but not necessarily in their right to avoid images. The off-camera is a reserve of the imaginary that must never be left fallow. Yesterday, the images of these off judges, of whom we sometimes saw an elbow or a shoulder, were missing. And the freeze-frame this time no longer had the value of an absolute signal but came across more as a poor ruse so that we wouldn’t see what we were nevertheless hearing. The act which consisted of improvising and filming this trial was suddenly no more than half an act. It’s as if the judges had been too close, even in the off-field of a camera, to continue to compromise themselves. The solitude of the Ceaușescu spouses in the image has perhaps no other off-screen than the solitude of the Romanian people facing themselves.   

First published in Libération on 27 December 1989. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 3, POL, 2012.

Romania 1/4: Freeze-Images

Libération, 23-24 Dec 1989

The television coverage of the 1989 Romanian revolution was intriguing enough to Serge Daney that he wrote four texts about the topic.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, regime change swept across several East European countries, with things turning violent in Romania. In the final days of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, after the army violently squashed protests in the town of Timișoara mid-December, the revolt spread to other parts of the country leading to Ceaușescu being arrested, put through a mock trial and executed with his wife on December 25th. Initial media reports of the events in Timișoara claimed mass graves and thousands of deaths, something that will later prove false. And the trial and execution were broadcast on television.

Daney's four texts include two short pieces written for the newspaper Libération at the time of the events and two longer articles written a few months later. 

• "Freeze-Images", written in Libération on 25 December 1989.
• "The Judges and the Assassin", written in Libération on 27 December 1989.
• "Romania, Year Zero," written in Cahiers du cinéma for the February 1990 edition.
• "Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to TV", written in Libération on 26 April 1990.

These events, along with the television coverage of the first Gulf War in 1990-91, were critical in informing  Daney's thinking on the evolution of the image.

Here's the first text. 

Freeze-Images*  

Among the countless reasons to consider 1989 a landmark year, there is this one: television has finally come of age. Not the television that believes it is capable of creation, but the one that, more modestly, transmits information. It is highly symbolic that it should be Romanian television turning against its masters that has given both the signal and the significance of the events in Romania. Semiologists, long fascinated by the freeze-frame, couldn’t believe that this rhetorical figure which had become horribly commonplace, could return to service, and mean everything. It is the “frozen” image of the tyrant that informed us of his downfall and the defrosting of the country. Not so long ago – for the liberation of the hostages in Lebanon – only the dauntless Channel 5 dared to alter its (admittedly rather thin) schedule to share with the audience the run up to the event. Today, it didn’t take long for all channels to accept to be disrupted by the events from Romania. This is a huge progress. Not only because as a result more images have been captured, deciphered and seen, but also because television revealed itself for what it is, not a mysterious and arrogant place that “knows it all”, but a precise location from where all is done to know. More so than with the events in China (which is after all on the other side of the world), this injured Romania situated “two hours from Paris by plane” made one aware of the cowardly neglect in which it has been held for years. When it comes to Romania, a lot of people have a lot of things to be forgiven for. Of course, the still rather archaic French television is no firebrand when it comes to collecting information. How did the Japanese at NHK manage to get all the necessary equipment in place? And the Dutch? And the others? Never mind, for once the information channel was perceived by the audience as a reality, a reality that was the result of work.   

The work of journalists who confronted themselves to unidentified images coming live from satellites, who were left frozen in front of the Romanian TV test card, reduced to humble watchers and forced to wonder who is who and what is what, had the minimal virtue of being communicable. For, it will never be said enough, communication only works when the passion of the communicator is also communicated, as an extra layer. Television only had to accept the risk of being late compared to the events for it to become, quite simply, a human instrument, and regain its advance. What would we have thought in the late sixties if television had “covered” the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China? How long would the pro-Chinese utopia had lasted? The question applies to all the dictatorships of the century whose visible faces, we mustn’t forget, were bribed hirelings and waged liars. It is at the moment when Communism is being wiped out in front of our eyes that we discover that it would have disappeared less quickly without the images. For the image – even approximative or unbearable – has to do with peace (as Godard reminded us). War is born out of fear. And fear is born out of such a lack of images that a single image, usually the face of a “father of the people”, begins to replace all the others.  

1989 was firstly the year of Tiananmen. We had never seen China. I mean China day-to-day, a regular coverage. Let’s remind ourselves of the image that remains and undoubtedly will remain in our memories: the image of a small man in a white shirt, seemingly coming back from the market, and who, with a single gesture, stops the tanks for a moment. It was already a stop on the image*. The man on which the image stops, is himself attempting to stop what is designed to kill, to parade, to “make an image”: the tanks. It’s as if, after a period of pompous mannerism and empty enthusiasm, television journalists have begun to understand that, in order to make the way the world works intelligible, one must accept to step out of line. Thanks to these freeze-images, we witness the sudden rebirth of, not only the emotion of what touches and concerns us, but also the idea of a different rhythm of information. 1989 will therefore have been a vintage year. Suddenly human beings will have been more interesting than the way we “covered” them, and television will have known its true baptism of fire.  

* Alternative wording for “freeze-image”. See this other translator’s note. 

 First published in Libération on 25 December 1989. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 3, POL, 2012.