Re-Ro: Re-Enacted Scripts in and Around Alexandru Solomon's the Great Communist Bank Robbery (Critical Essay‪)‬

Take it with a grain of salt: Romania experienced a short period of relative liberalism under Communism. At its peak, the country's then most promising director, Lucian Pintilie, was allowed to shoot and launch his feature film, Reconstituitea (Reenactment). This was in 1968. The movie was shown in theatres for about a week, after which it was withdrawn and, officially, never spoken about until the end of the regime, in December 1989. Its story line has a bar brawl re-enacted so as to make it into a didactic short meant to warn against delinquency stemming from high alcohol consumption. As the movie is being shot, one of the brawling lads is repeatedly hit by the other--the director requites many takes--until be accidentally bangs his head against a rock and, bloodied in the mud, dies smiling ambiguously. In Pintilie's film, and somehow ever since, the standard of truth is shown to have split between the actual happenings and their re-enactment on film. The latter turned out to have more serious consequences. Someone dies--an unpredictable supplement poisons the attempt at minute mimesis; the properly sublime takes over verisimilitude. Pintilie's black and white, dark and ironic, hopeless-ending film has since been hailed as a masterpiece--oftentimes the masterpiece--of Romanian cinema, and a tall-order provocation thrown to younger filmmakers. Alexandru Solomon answered this provocation with his nonfictional Marele jaf comunist (The Great Communist Bank Robbery; 2004). Here he takes on another documentary, directed by Virgil Calotescu and produced by the "Alexandru Sahia" Cinema Studios in collaboration with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Popular Republic of Romania in 1959. This black and white documentary, titled Reconstituitea (Reconstruction) tells a gripping story.