The Rest is Silence - Movie interpretation

The Rest is Silence. Dir: Nae Caranfil. Seen at the Jerusalem Cinemateque Thu 3rd Dec. 2015

One of the reasons why National leaders, especially dictators, love cinema is because cinema has the ability to perpetuate historic events, like great battles, that inspired the people to pride in their nation and their leader at the time when they happened. A film showing a great battle, for example, can be shown again and again and each time the people will be inspired as they had been at the time of the actual battle. This is the power of the cinema.

The director in this movie succeeds in demonstrating this power to the king of Romania and the cinema industry is set on its way to success. This is why my association with the title of this movie is with the phrase “and the rest is history”.

But it seems that I’m wrong and that its actually taken from the last words of Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. This is suitable for several reasons, but mostly because the theatre sees cinema as its death knoll. In fact the movie ends when the most ardent supporter of cinema, realizing the disaster that cinema, that he has ardently supported is going to bring an end to theatre, sets fire to the store of films, kept in a storeroom of the theatre, and inadvertently burns down the theater and the heroine, an aspiring actress burns to death in the conflagration. She is the sacrifice for the success of cinema.

O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.