The Reenactment

“I come from a country where reconstructions [are] among the most violent means of mystifying and violating reality. . . . [The authorities] banned my film because . . . I was questioning the very principle of a reconstruction,” said director Pintilie. The regimes in the Soviet satellites compelled citizens to participate in public spectacles to express their enthusiasm for an ideology in which no one believed. Through a film that takes the manipulations of a reconstruction as its subject, Pintilie and his collaborators undercut the public theater across the Soviet bloc. In tribute to Pintilie’s passing in 2018, we screen this early picture, which remains a landmark for both the cinema of the socialist states and the Romanian New Wave.