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Two different views of the execution of Romanian wartime dictator Ion Antonescu confront one another. On one side is silent footage recorded in 1946 by cameraman Ovidiu Gologan, and on the other side are scenes from a biographical film shot five decades later by director Sergiu Nicolaescu.
This isn't really a film so much as a contrasting presentation of two versions of the execution, by firing squad, of the wartime Romanian leader General Antonescu. It's quite a testament to the vision of the archivists that the original photography has been preserved as completely as it has been, but without any context to illustrate the history of the men facing death, it comes across as a rather gratuitously filmed exercise in 1946 propaganda designed to convince everyone who cared at the time that he was most definitely dead. It is quite interesting also that the Church appears to ceremonially sanction these killings - a Church that was surely every bit as complicit in the Nazi persecution during WWII as anyone in front of the rifles here?
October 25, 2018
This isn't really a film so much as a contrasting presentation of two versions of the execution, by firing squad, of the wartime Romanian leader General Antonescu. It's quite a testament to the vision of the archivists that the original photography has been preserved as completely as it has been, but without any context to illustrate the history of the men facing death, it comes across as a rather gratuitously filmed exercise in 1946 propaganda designed to convince everyone who cared at the time that he was most definitely dead. It is quite interesting also that the Church appears to ceremonially sanction these killings - a Church that was surely every bit as complicit in the Nazi persecution during WWII as anyone in front of the rifles here?
Similar to The Marshal's Two Executions
