The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu

If you are a football person, obviously you are spending the day cheering for Oregon to defeat Florida St and its rapist quarterback. By the way, comparing Winston to Ben Roethlisberger in a positive way, even if their games are similar on the field, is going to invite comment.

If you are not a football person however, let me sugges an alternative entertainment to ring in the new year. How about The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu? I watched this recently and found it utterly fascinating. It consists of nothing but Romanian state footage of the quarter-century Ceausescu regime. No talking heads, no commentary, no interviews. Just state footage. At three hours, it seemed daunting and too long on the face of it. And I suppose it is a bit long, just like every Romanian film it seems. But it really comes together because this regime constantly filmed itself. It includes both sound and silent footage, scenes of Ceausescu hunting some of the last big game in Europe, visits to factories, visits to food markets where Ceausescu showed his ardor for squeezing loaves of bread, state visits, official speeches, and many other varieties of how the state wanted to show itself to the world and to itself.

I had no idea that Ceausescu publicly rebuked the Soviet Union over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Because of that, he became the eastern bloc darling of the West for awhile. So Richard Nixon shows up. And Jimmy Carter. Most fascinating was Ceausescu’s visit to North Korea. The film really lingers on this, with those incredibly elaborate North Korean parades to honor their visitor. Plus how many times have you seen Kim Il-Sung on film? After Ceausescu returned to Romania, he tried to recreate the cult of personality around Kim for himself. He was truly smitten with North Korea. This certainly did not help him in the end. When one brave communist functionary dares question his consolidation of power at a party congress, you see him hooted down. I feared for what happened to the man. Of course, the film ends just before his assassination after the 1989 revolution, although it does not show his body, which I remember seeing on CNN when I was a kid. The last footage is the only non-state footage in the film, which is him facing questions from his captors and refusing to answer him.

To some extent, it probably helps to know a bit about the man and his years of rule, which I really didn’t. So there are a few issues in which I was a touch lost. But that’s easy enough to research. It is streaming on Netflix and I highly recommend it.