Capturing the Romanian revolution: violent imagery, affect and the televisual event
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On December 21, 1989, the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu crumbled to its demise under the gaze of the video cameras filming the start of what was to become the 'Romanian televised revolution'. This dissertation analyses the visual representation of the fall of Communism in Romania, and more specifically, the mediatised footage of Nicolae Ceauşescu's execution, as it was broadcast in Romania and globally. The uprisings and the execution are examined here as a constructed "televisual event" (Morse 93) with important socio-political implications. One of the main assertions of this dissertation is that these images were produced and disseminated within an economy of emotions that circulated affect for political and ideological purposes. Furthermore, beyond their role as documentary representations and historical archives, these visuals offer a forum for discussing the way viewers experience a certain kind of pleasure in the consumption of violent images. In order to better situate the object of study, the project begins with a broad overview of current ways of thinking about death imagery and its circulation, before presenting the specific historical and political context of the visuals of the revolution. Then, through archival research on the news disseminated during the revolution and after, the study provides an examination of the domestic and international media coverage of the events. Subsequently, in order to examine the interplay between media technology, politics, and the public, the images are examined as particular audiovisual texts with their own aesthetic codes and style. Finally, the thesis considers the images as sites for the mobilization of affect, exploring their ethical and political implications, in their role as media performances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".