In early December Andrew and myself went to Ciné lumière for an exciting double-bill. I'll let him comment on the Finnish short, and focus my own attention on the 2004 film, "The Great Communist Bank Robbery". The background:
One quiet morning in August 1959, a car belonging to the National Bank of Romania was robbed in front of a central office in Bucharest. Four armed and masked men and one woman ran away with a huge amount of money, high-jacking a taxi. Less than a year later, a one-hour film on the robbery was already fascinating audiences throughout Romania. After they were caught, only months after the attack, the ‘gangsters’ agreed to play their own parts in this would-be ‘reconstruction’ scripted by Romania’s Political Police.
The 1960 film on the robbery, named "Reconstituirea" was aired for Communist Party members and was a bold move. At that point the Soviet Communists saw a Hollywood infatuation with gangster films as a reflection of the inevitable excesses of capitalism, and therefore there were no gangsters in Romania. As often happened, the "wish it were so" became an actual behavioural assumption, and it was simply considered impossible for bank robberies to take place. Consequently security was very loose, and the taxi was an easy target. Rather than cover up the robbery, however, they decided to turn it into a propaganda event.
It's not clear whether the 'gangsters' believed that participation in the reconstruction would reduce their sentence, but for several reasons the film is cloaked in ambiguity. Much of the content is Communist propaganda, from one of the most closed countries in Europe. Were they the real culprits? Why did they do it? What was the evidence? But "Reconstituirea" is a movie-within-a-movie, as another layer of documentary is added.
We see interviews with the original cameraman. We see interview with the children of bank employees who went missing during the night. We see interviews with a woman who was tortured. We also see interviews with prison guards, whose job it was to extract phantom information from innocent people. Have we reunited the tortured with the torturers? Why do they look the same?
Is the whole thing a charade?
The 'gangsters' were known as The Ioanid Gang, and at the time their fates were uncertain. All were sentanced to secret execution apart from one member, the female Monica Sevianu who was given life imprisonment, and later allowed to leave for Israel.
According to Nick Fraser, Series Editor of BBC Four's Storyville:
Alexandru Solomon's film is both a bizarre recreation of a crime of which the motive is still difficult to fathom and an astonishing evocation of a lost world of Romanian Stalinism.
It may not have been pleasant to live in 1950s Romania, but the images in the film have an eerie beauty.
In the sense that the sound of wooden planks rapping the bare souls of innocent people has "an eerie beauty", and ideological pornographers find solace in the depiction of the high years of history. This nightmarish portal raises many questions, not least how documentaries can exist within political repression. It's fitting that the BBC - an organisation that has voluntarily surrendered it's objectivity and search for truth - finds such beauty in a piece of theatrical brutality. The black and white camera work blends in and out of the original film, the voiceover hangs with an air of timelessness, amnesia, and possible regret. Eastern Europe's tragedy from the heart of the system.
“These people have nothing in common with the construction of socialism in Romania”.
Of course not.
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