Shot-reverse-shot as a political battle: two opposition leaders talk with their own consistuencies in two separate rooms (but probably the same building). Both are writing a speech, in other words setting up a programme, in other words setting themselves up as leaders to replace Ceausescu. The videos of these moments don't show any time codes, so there's no way of showing for sure the synchronicity of those two scenes. But Farocki and Ujica edit them as shot-reverse-shot, alternating moments from the two rooms almost symmetrically. The use of this now automatic construct (in fact, it might be possible to make the case that it was more automatic when the film was made than it is now) has rarely emphasized its own artificiality as much. These are two shots which clearly don't answer each other in narrative, geographic or maybe even temporal terms. What brings them together is, of course, their political significance. Which is not something that can be identified by a camera (as the commentary to the opening shot makes clear), only by those who wield them and edit the footage. While the whole film is concerned not only by the actual, concrete political moments of a revolution but also the breakdown of visual systems that accompany them, this scene shows Farocki and Ujica consciously attempting something else, something that as a gesture is pretty amazing: both a deconstruction of a pattern of commercial cinema, and a reconstruction of it, accepting its artificiality, as a formal expression of the plural possibilities opened up by the revolution. As such, it's a shot-counter-shot that owes much more to Eisenstein than it does to Hollywood.
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