Telecinematheque TVR 1 scheduled the film last week Dantona French-German-Polish co-production inspired by the play The Dunton case by Stanislava Prshbybyshevska, directed by Andrzej Wajda. The film, which had its world premiere in January 1983, and was immediately said to exploit the conflict between Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre, as well as recalling the great terror that marked the second part of the French Revolution, X-ray in depth communism, totalitarianism of the Soviet type.

So, a Polish playwright wrote a text intended for a stage in the communist period, a text that became the raw material for a film created jointly by the French, Germans and Poles, and the said author participated in the writing of the said script. The director of the film is the Polish Andrzej Wajda, who involved the same number of actors from his country in the cast. Wojciech Psoniak from Warsaw does not transfer his French brother Gerard Depardieu to the role of Maximilien Robespierre. Both Wojciech Psoniak and other Polish colleagues in the cast received from the communist authorities of their native country the right to work abroad in order to appear in the credits of the film, which, as it turned out, does not in any way contradict the communist ideology, and after the end of filming, they returned to their homeland without problems. And all this happened after General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981.

Could this have happened in Ceausescu’s Romania, a country that, like Poland, belonged to the Soviet bloc? No nothing. I believe that we are dealing with a clear indication that socialism was not identical in Eastern Europe, and that the terror, which was its own and defined as such since the time of Marx and Engels, was not identical either. As well as a possible answer to the question why in Romania the changes in 1989 were different.

Vaida’s film begins and ends with a scene in which a child is forced to recite empty words about freedom and the rights of a person and a citizen. Everything that happens during almost two hours of projection only proves how much demagoguery and lies were hidden behind these words. The only rights in the time of terror, the terror during which the revolution failed (and this fact was realized by Danton and Robespierre) and which turned out to be specific to communist regimes, were cold and hunger (here it is symbolized by the tail), lack of bread and sugar (the latter also began to lack leaders), denunciations that could quickly sentence citizens to the death penalty, show trials, falsified trials, sentences ordered by political figures, manipulations, all in the name of the so-called higher interests. Proclaimed, established leaders of revolutionary performances and victims of which they themselves become.

This is what happened in France during the last two years of the revolution, the years of the great terror, this is what happened in the Russia of Lenin or Stalin or in the Romania of Deja or Nicolae Ceausescu. Dunton in Wajda’s film was the first to realize his failure. Danton predicts the defeat of the revolution. He is a weary creature (Depardieu’s increasingly raspy voice is important in this sense), but a rational being who realizes that he has turned the Revolution into a terrible feast of death and blood. Did Stalin, Day, Ceausescu, Hoxha, Honecker, Husak, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong understand the same thing? No, probably read the rest of the article on Contributors.ro