The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu

The only movie who is objectiv about the life of the greatest leade in the history of Romania

The point of the documentary should be to learn about Ceausescu. Well, this documentary wouldn't make any sense to someone that didn't know him very well. It's just footage edited together without any explanation whatsoever.

I watched this with my father, who is pretty much a romanian historian, and he had to explain it all to me. "this was in the year ... in the context of ... when ceausescu visited ... to talk to ... about ..."

However, unless Ceausescu wrote it himself, that is a biography, not an autobiography. Minor nitpicking aside, this is simply beautiful to watch. The progression of a man to a leader and then to a myth he believed too much in. The rise to power of a murderous regime is very insidious and can happen again.

"The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu" is an audacious, and to my eye very successful, way to tell a story. I should say to show a story, because nothing is told. No context or viewpoint is provided, other than the camera's. The filmmakers have drawn on a rich video archive concerning Ceausescu and Rumania from 1965 to 1989. No opinions are explicitly offered, and no history or explanation provided, beyond what the camera sees. And the camera sees a lot. As with the footage in Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia," the images are quite arresting, and one really doesn't want to move one's eye away from what the camera is seeing. I would offer three pieces of advice about the film. First, go and be prepared to supply your own context. I'm a historian and fairly wonky in these matters, but even so, it took me a good few minutes to get accustomed to the idea that the film's narrative was going to be simply what the camera was showing. I suspect this will catch many viewers by surprise, and it's better to know it in advance. Second: go with an open mind. Ceausescu is a controversial character. It pays to put your viewpoints aside --not forget them, just suspend them-- while you are seeing the film. And finally, by all means go. This is audacious storytelling and great cinema. The effort you expend on this journey will certainly be rewarded.

Andrei Ujica's film is an interesting mish-mash of documentary and archive material. Arranged progressively according to the timeline, we are treated to a very long and protracted story of Ceauseascu's life and role in the history of Romania. The film is done according to the very nice-sounding, but eventually problematic motto of "letting the archives and the evidence speak for itself". This proposition can achieve some moniker of success only among those, such as myself, who come from Romania, and know its history well, having studied it at the university level. But to foreigners or even young Romanians, lacking the context and the historical background, the film fails in documenting anything. An external viewer will not know who most of the people in the film are, what the background is for Ceausescu's reactions (such as his speech in 1968 in support of Czechoslovakia) as so forth. The film is also very long, almost three hours, and I admit that even I, who have a professional interest in the documentary material, had to give up half way through and resume later. Making an analogy, the film represents the difference between archive material and a book of history. The material, outside of its chronological arrangement, is raw, lacking subtitles, names etc. in many cases; a documentary based on the material painstakingly gathered by the director would have been much more interesting for the wider public. Still, the film is worth watching for a specialized audience, and shows never before seen material on a very important epoch and person in Romania's history.