Reconstruction
USA, 2001, 90
min.
'Eighty
percent of US documentaries today are in the me-and-my-grandmother category,' a
fried told me the other day while referring to the noticeable 'dictatorship of the
personal' in recent documentaries. Although I almost agreed with him (though
skeptical about the accuracy of the percentage), I am wiling to say that
Lusztig's film definitely transcends this fashionable category.
Reconstruction is an unsensational approach to a sensational story about the so-called
Ioanid Gang bank heist of 1959. It was a rather unusual hold-up in which all
the perpetrators were Jewish intellectuals who occupied positions of authority
within the Romanian state apparatus when they committed the robbery. The only
woman involved, also a Jew, was married to one of the 'robbers' and later
became Irene Lusztig's grandmother. All of the men were sentenced to death. The
woman's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because she was a mother. Before
the sentences were carried out, the convicts were forced to play themselves in
a strongly fictionalized account of the events commissioned by the Romanian Ministry
for Internal Affairs.
With
initial focus on profiling the grandmother, Lusztig's version of the 'facts'
unfolds as a sophisticated, somewhat poetic reflection on portraiture and historical
detective work and on the way in which specific cultural and historical conventions
of visual representation (and visual cliches) filter the information about the
world contained in images that are broadly labeled as documentary.
A
bank robbery in a communist country represents a clash of imaginary systems
that also intervenes in a visual documentation of such an attempt: its very
representation implies the juxtaposition of images usually located at opposite
poles of the Euro-American cultural imagination: in this case, the American
myth of the bank robbery with the Communist cliche of the responsible citizen working
for a cause: the Party and the People. At this level, Lusztig's talent is
expressed in the intelligent and sensitive use of the archive footage to make
it fit the personal and collective moods (love, collective enthusiasm, disappointment)
associated by her to certain historical circumstances.
While
it may appear to be a 'fashionable' personal approach, this film was shot in a
country where documentary was controlled for decades to conform to ideology.
Nothing personal was allowed - and still isn't unfortunately. In this
particular context, Lusztig's 'grandmother film' is a long-awaited gift. In a
broader context, Reconstruction
is a 're-writing' of history through her story that has become
necessary in recent years.