ACTA UNIV. SAPIENTIAE, FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES, 14 (2017) 95–130 DOI: 10.1515/ausfm-2017-0005 Multiple Revolutions. Remediating and Re-enacting the Romanian Events of 1989 Mónika Dánél Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract. This study proposes a twofold analysis: the presumable strategies of the December 1989 events in Romania and their complexity as it appears in later filmic re-enactments. These re-enactments as theatrical “translations” offer a rhetorical reading of past events, and can also be seen as practices of memories inscribed in the body. The events are interpreted in the duality of the archival image and the acoustic/gestural memory, where the latter is understood as an atmospheric (bodily) memory. The disorientation or disinformation caused by the technical conditions, the circulation or lack of images, the alternating silences and chanting on the street make the past events incomprehensible and medially dissonant.1 Keywords: re-enactments of historical events, films about December 1989 in Romania, the experience of space, body and memory. Simulation, Collective Imaginary, Inner Strategies In relation to the Romanian events, there is a consensus regarding three particularities: this was the bloodiest regime change in the Eastern European bloc; the television was a medium that influenced the events – and thus its historicity appears as a media event –, and the events were dispersive. The documents, interviews, hypotheses ever growing in number, the different narrative versions nuance and modify today’s memories. Their contradictory, dissonant nature indirectly also stages the reflexive understanding of the past event. Borrowing Michael Rothberg’s idea, the 1989 Romanian events become comprehensible today as an event that takes shape at the crossing point of the 1 This work was supported by the project entitled Space-ing Otherness.