May 17, 2024

This isn't really a film so much as a contrasting presentation of two versions of the execution, by firing squad, of the wartime Romanian leader General Antonescu. It's quite a testament to the vision of the archivists that the original photography has been preserved as completely as it has been, but without any context to illustrate the history of the men facing death, it comes across as a rather gratuitously filmed exercise in 1946 propaganda d… read the rest.

This isn't really a film so much as a contrasting presentation of two versions of the execution, by firing squad, of the wartime Romanian leader General Antonescu. It's quite a testament to the vision of the archivists that the original photography has been preserved as completely as it has been, but without any context to illustrate the history of the men facing death, it comes across as a rather gratuitously filmed exercise in 1946 propaganda designed to convince everyone who cared at the time that he was most definitely dead. It is quite interesting also that the Church appears to ceremonially sanction these killings - a Church that was surely every bit as complicit in the Nazi persecution during WWII as anyone in front of the rifles here?

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