12:08 East of Bucharest · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The town's one television camera gets bored. At the climax of 12:08 East of Bucharest — three men at a table, litigating whether their town had a revolution — the amateur operator lets the frame drift off his subjects and wander to the window, where snow is falling on an empty square. Nothing is happening out there. That drift is the film's best joke and its whole argument at once. The apparatus we've hired to settle the truth would rather look at the weather.

The question the men are chewing on is deceptively exact. On 22 December 1989, Ceaușescu's helicopter lifted off the Central Committee roof in Bucharest at 12:08 PM. To have come into the square before that minute was to have risked something; to have come out after was to celebrate a done deal. So the host Jderescu, vain owner of the cable station, sets his test: did anyone here demonstrate before 12:08? Answer yes and the town has a revolution and heroes. Answer no and it has only latecomers.

Here is where Deleuze becomes a good companion. In his late work he describes what he calls the powers of the false — cinema's ability to make truth and falsity genuinely undecidable, not as a failure but as a creative principle. Ordinary movies live by an unspoken contract: the camera doesn't lie, what we see happened. André Bazin built a whole realist theology on it, and the Romanian New Wave inherited Bazin's instrument — the long, patient, unedited take that just witnesses, the ethic Cristi Puiu forged a year earlier in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Porumboiu picks up that truth-telling long take and turns it against the truth it was supposed to secure. The camera keeps rolling, honestly, in real time. And the honest rolling produces only fog.

Watch how it works as falsifying narration — Deleuze's term for mutually exclusive versions offered as equally true, with no arbiter to rank them. Manescu, the indebted history teacher, testifies that he stood in the square before noon, beaten by the Securitate. Then the phone rings. A caller was there and saw no such thing. Another saw him drunk in a bar. Manescu becomes what Deleuze calls the forger — le faussaire — the man who doesn't report a truth but manufactures one, his story shifting shape under each new call. He isn't simply lying. Sixteen years on, he may no longer know. The film refuses to tell us, and refuses to let him know, which is the sharper cruelty.

Around this sits something Deleuze names fabulation, or legending: people caught in the act of storytelling themselves into being. The whole town is doing it — deciding, live on cable access, what kind of place it was in history. And crucially there is no people here to ground the legend, only a few pensioners phoning in with grudges. The political doesn't arrive as heroism; it arrives as the impossibility of agreeing on any.

Structurally the film is a case study in what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image. In classical cinema a man perceives a situation and acts to change it. Here nobody can act. The revolution is sixteen years gone; all that's left is to sit and endure contradictory testimony — a pure optical and sound situation, in Deleuze's phrase, where the characters (and we) can only look and listen with no action available. The Czechs mapped this room decades earlier: Forman's The Fireman's Ball put ordinary people in a closed hall reasoning their way toward self-serving conclusions until the ceremony curdles. Porumboiu miniaturizes it to one studio and one wandering lens.

And the bodies carry what the words won't. Deleuze speaks of a cinema of the body and the gest — a posture that exposes a social relation better than any speech. Old Piscoci, hired only to fill the third chair, folds paper boats out of boredom while grand claims are made beside him. The talk-show table itself — host flanked by two guests, station logo behind — is a deadpan tableau of provincial self-importance. Nobody has to say the men are small. The low ceilings and the fidgeting say it.

The self-reflexive camera closes a long circuit. Vertov, in Man with a Movie Camera, filmed the camera filming to celebrate cinema's mechanical truth. Porumboiu inverts him: the in-world amateur camera, drifting and mis-framing, becomes the subject of the climax precisely to show that no recording device can adjudicate an event. Romania's 1989 was the first revolution staged for and partly by live television. This film hands that world-historical apparatus to an incompetent operator in Vaslui.

What did it do to film? It proved the observational long take — Bazin's guarantor of the real — could be an engine of the false without cheating once. That is a genuine invention, and it seeded a whole strain of deadpan post-communist reckoning. Next time, watch the camera, not the men. When it drifts to the snow, it's telling you where the truth isn't — and the streetlamps clicking on at dusk, the film's first and last image, mark the only thing anyone can agree happened: another ordinary evening.