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.