The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu

Rarely has the word "tacit" had such resonance in documentary cinema. The viewers finds themselves totally immersed in the national archives of the interminable Ceaușescu era, without any commentary or explanation to guide them (for that, there will always be Wikipedia). It's all there, though, implied in the excess of the communist mise en scène; in the tension of the long faces and dead smiles; in the outrageous pomp of the dictator's birthdays, etc. In fact, the filmmaker relies above all on the emotion that emerges from the dramaturgy that he brilliantly installs through the editing of the sequences (and the reassembling of the documents themselves) and through the sound design, with the collaboration of the great Dana Bunescu.

Thus, even without knowing all the details of History, one can fully feel the disastrous slide of this courageous champion of his country's independence from the USSR towards an authoritarianism and an immoderate nationalism that will find its inspiration in Mao's Cultural Revolution and in Kim Il-sung's Juche ideology. Beware, the images of the reception these two tyrants reserved for Ceaușescu, with hundreds of thousands of their "subjects" performing choreographed routines for miles, are jaw-dropping.

In this final part of his trilogy on the end of European communism, the filmmaker reminds us that, despite the apparent distance that separates us from that era, totalitarianism still slumbers in some place, be it left or right. In this, he makes his own the thought of Albert Camus, at the very end of The Plague.

"And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what these jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and book-shelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city."For he knew what this rejoicing crowd did not know, and which can be read in books, that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears, that it can remain for decades asleep in furniture and linen, that it waits patiently in rooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and paperwork, and that, perhaps, the day would come when, for the misfortune and the teaching of men, the plague would awaken its rats and send them off to die in a happy city."

Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant