This is truly the golden age of film documentaries - far too many good ones to mention here - and the genre has become my favorite kind of cinema. I see as many as I can. Generally they play on only 1 or 2 screens in town and usually never more than a couple weeks.
Such is the case with THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU now playing at the West End Cinema in D.C. It runs over 3 hours without an intermission and were I to recommend it (I'm not), I would urge you to have a sandwich and visit the restroom off the lobby before sitting down in the screening room (which isn't much larger than my living room) to view it.
The first time I attempted to see it, my sister and I left before it began after the projectionist came out and explained to the 12 of us in the audience that there had been a problem at the afternoon screening with the print and that there were moments during the film when the screen would go dark and the audio would go off.
We took it as an omen - a bad one at that - and got up from our padded folding chairs and departed, but not before we got raincheck tix to come back another time.
So today, since I had no other plans than to feed peanuts to my little squirrel friends at Dupont Circle, I
decided to bike down to the theatre and catch the 2:30 matinee. I snuck in a sandwich from Subway and a coke from CVS so I wouldn't have hunger pains at any time during the film.
After a couple trailers and a "let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby, and get ourselves some treats" trailer from the 1950s, the documentary began with Nicolae and his 'rifftica' wife
being interrogated by court officials shortly before their trial and subsequent execution on Xmas Day, 1989.
We then cut to the state funeral of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who ruled Romania with an iron fist from post WWII until his death in 1965. And what a funeral it was, judging by the size of the crowd - thousands of
people in line to view "G-G"s open casket and the thousands who followed it to the place of internment which sorta looked like the entrance to FedEx Stadium here in Landover, Md. Whatever.
So far, so good, I'm thinking, although I became acutely aware at this point that there was no narration.
In fact, there were moments where there was no sound at all and then there were moments when the screen went black. Then I remembered what the projectionist had told my sister and I when we were there a week ago. Can't say I wasn't warned.
I suddenly felt hungry and decided not to wait another minute before unwrapping my spicy Italian sub and biting into it. Not bad. I opened the coke bottle and took a big swig before giving my complete attention to the screen (that was barely bigger than my 60" flat tv screen at home).
For the next 60 minutes or thereabouts I watched a lot of hand clapping at Communist party rallies where Nicolae droned on and on and on about the virtues of Romania's socialist society and Communist rule, etc., etc., etc. I had read that director Andrei Ujica had viewed over 1,000 hours of film before editing and compiling this 3 hour pageant of handclapping and crowds. All I could think was - this was the best footage that he could come up with?
Now I have to be honest with you. I didn't make it to the end. Not even close. Despite the rave review of one of my favorite print critics - Manohla Dargis of the NY Times - and despite the fact that I wasn't hungry and didn't have to pee, I bolted towards the exit of the screening room just as Richard Nixon was about to speak standing next to dear ole Nicolae during his state visit to Romania in 1970 (or thereabouts) and left but not before yelling, "May they both be rotting in Hell."
Have a nice day.
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