Word: lusztigã
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When moviegoers receive history lessons from film, they are often given with a journalistic detachment, whether fictional accounts or documentaries. But Irene Lusztig??s ’97 first feature-length film, Reconstruction, achieves its historical perspective through exactly the opposite methods. Made with a uniquely personal purpose, Reconstruction gives a fresh approach to documentary filmmaking. It is a historical account told with a wonderfully subjective self-awareness, as it is the story of Lusztig??s own family, not just the powerful story of a politically motivated bank heist in Communist Romania...
...title refers to a propaganda film made by the Romanian Communist Party in 1961 entitled Reconstituirea (Re-Enactment), which was a literal re-enactment of the bank heist using the actual robbers, who by then had been condemned to death by the government. Two of these six were Lusztig??s grandmother, Monica Sevianu, and her husband Gugu. Gugu, along with the other four men, were later executed, while Sevianu was given life in prison and eventually released in 1964 due to the political amnesty. The film uses archival footage from the original Reconstituirea, interviews with Lusztig?...
...detective” work. Lusztig juxtaposes the plot of the propaganda film to her own work on Reconstruction, essentially comparing herself to a detective, digging for clues to piece together an unknown. This thematic framing device is used throughout Reconstruction, and helps to add dramatic weight to Lusztig??s search for her grandmother, the absent hero of the story...
Probably the most important “character” in Lusztig??s film, however, is her mother Miki (Sevianu’s daughter). Her recollection of the subsequent arrest and imprisonment of Sevianu, which left Miki virtually abandoned, is an important part of Reconstruction’s modern-day framing. Watching Lusztig??s mother return to Romania for the first time in 30 years is one of the film’s highlights, a touching and intensely personal sequence of remembrance that resonates strongly with the historical background given on Romania. Lusztig also showed...
...phantom nostalgia,” a sense of longing for what had once been a charming cosmopolitan city, the “Paris of the East,” until it was demolished during the last Communist regime in Romania. One rather humorous comment in the film from Lusztig??s mother describes modern-day Romania as “ugly...
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