VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION (VIDEOGRAMME EINER REVOLUTION), the 1992 film by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, details the five days in December of 1989 during which a popular uprising in Romania deposed and executed the Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu. The nascent revolt was first propelled onto international television news by images of corpses reputed to be victims of the army's recent attack on anti-government protestors in the western town of Timisoara. The bodies were laid out for display to the television cameras and the images of the dead helped publicize the incident abroad. Although the images were not seen on Romanian state television, reports of the massacre spread the uprising through the capital of Bucharest and to other towns. It was later disclosed that the bodies in the mass grave, although possibly victims of state terror, had in fact been buried too long ago to be victims of the Timisoara crackdown. On a larger scale, the fear and uncertainty surrounding the repressive power of the fallen regime produced estimates of those killed in the uprising that turned out to be grossly inflated. The confusion surrounding the revolution, and the swiftness with which the army turned against the regime, led many to suspect that the apparently spontaneous revolt had been a coup engineered by dissident Communist generals and politicians. Although this incident and its international press coverage are only briefly cited in the opening voice-over of the film, the questions it raises regarding the use and abuse of images for politics, as well as the intersection of television, violence, and democracy, all structure the terrain on which VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION unfolds.

Limited to the five days of the revolution that it explores in chronological sequence, VIDEOGRAMS is constructed solely from recordings of Romanian state television broadcasts and what was captured by nomadic video cameras in and around the streets of Bucharest during that time.