The prevailing artistic medium of an age has always had a determining influence on history. This is clearly the case in the Modern European Age. It has been influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and then by the novel, until Tolstoy. We know that the twentieth century is filmic.

Andrei Ujica's latest film, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, caps a twenty-year quest to forge a new kind of non-fiction cinema – part historical chronicle, part essayistic reflection – using archival footage from Romania and the Soviet Union to trace the collapse of state Communism in those countries. Autobiography joins two previous films, Videograms of a Revolution and Out of the Present, to make up a trilogy of fascinating and groundbreaking documentaries about these historic changes.

Born in Romania in 1951, Ujica began writing fiction as a young man before immigrating to West Germany in 1981 to study literary and media theory. Just after the fall of Ceausescu in 1989, he returned to Romania and edited a collection of essays entitled Television/Revolution: The Ultimatum of Images which caught the attention of German director Harun Farocki. The two collaborated on Videograms of a Revolution, a film about the events in Romania and the images it produced. Following this auspicious beginning, Ujica devoted himself fully to filmmaking.

Like Farocki, Ujica uses found footage to craft works that are as much poetic essays as documentaries, investigating the interpenetration of history, politics, and technology as well as the production and circulation of images. Viewed as a whole, his trilogy takes on the form of a series of expanding circles in which each film tells a specific story, the stories of individuals and discrete events giving way to the narratives of governments, of nations, of ideologies. Underpinning Ujica's films is his close attention to the conversion of 20th-century history into cinematic and televisual imagery, and the ways in which these images determine our narratives of the present and of history itself. – David Pendleton