State Funeral [2019]

 On 5^th March 1953, upon the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the massive erstwhile nation descended into 4 days of state-enforced grief and mourning. The spectacle – at once solemn and carnivalesque – was filmed in extensive details, in both colours and B/W, by a cohort of 6 Soviet filmmakers, and turned into a eulogistic documentary titled The Great Farewell; ironically, as de-Stalinization commenced soon after, it was buried. Sergei Loznitsa – the great purveyor of Soviet and post-Soviet experiences and identities, frequently through extraordinary found-footage and archival documentaries – discovered over 35 hours of the original material in the Russian State Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk, and transformed that largely unseen stash into State Funeral, a simultaneously droll, kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing observational reportage bordering on the surreal, on the final climactic gasp of the massive cult of personality that defined the Soviet tyrant’s dictatorial rule that lasted nearly three decades. The gorgeous Agfacolor images, with their striking maroons and greens, contrasted with muted B/W and a slyly designed soundscape, as we’re given a tour through the unfolding exhibition. The remarkable assemblage crisscrossed through the grand streets and buildings of Moscow, multiple cities and villages across the USSR, and even desolate landscapes and offshore oilfields, accompanied by drone-like voices from loudspeakers extolling the generalissimus’ greatness and providing excruciating details on how he died, alternated with absorbing classical music. The faces and gestures of the teeming crowds – both candid and performative – formed the most fascinating aspect of this symphonic montage, while the underlying disingenuity that underline the dry speeches made by Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov and Molotov gains additional meanings if one has watched Armando Ianucci’s terrific black comedy The Death of Stalin.

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Reportage

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine

Two Prosecutors [2025]

 Sergei Loznitsa’s stark, gripping and viscerally crushing film Two Prosecutors – a rare narrative feature by the exiled filmmaker and politically outspoken activist-archivist who’s best-known for his formally rigorous found-footage documentaries – delivered a devastating parable on the horrors and banality of totalitarianism. The Kafkaesque work, with Gogolian and Orwellian undercurrents, is set in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge, and was adapted from a novella by Soviet nuclear physicist Georgy Demidov who was himself a political prisoner for eighteen years on charges of being a Trotskyist. However, its Stalinist period setting notwithstanding, it powerfully speaks to all totalitarian bureaucracies and nation-states across eras, geographies and political spectrums. While destroying evidences of protestations by political prisoners, the man ordered with the task carries out a small act of disobedience by sneaking out one of the letters. That triggers the arrival of doggedly idealistic prosecutor and young Bolshevik Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) to the Bryansk prison, who obstinately believes in the ideas of truth and justice much to the detriment of his physical wellbeing. After overcoming psychological gamesmanships by the brutish prison authorities and labyrinthine prison corridors, he meets an old Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko) who’s been dubiously imprisoned and tortured by NKVD. Kornyev decides to travel to Moscow to meet the country’s real-life Procurator General Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), hoping for his intervention… he does intervene, but not in the manner Kornyev had hoped for. Shot in desaturated colours, long takes and austere framing which amplified the oppressive, claustrophobic and ominous atmosphere, it comprised of two particularly nerve-racking waits and two darkly funny asides – viz. a rambling monologue by an amputee Leninist (Filippenko again) and a deliberately incongruous song by two ominously effusive men.

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Drama/Political Thriller/Historical Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Germany/Ukraine

The Long Farewell [1971]

 Iconoclastic feminist filmmaker Kira Muratova’s second solo directorial endeavour, The Long Farewell, was a daring, dazzling, hypnotic and radically experimental work that was informed as much by the Soviet montage theory of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as Godard’s love for playfully shattering the conventional inter-relationships between audio and visual grammars. Thus, while her previous film Brief Encounters – the two often considered as companion pieces – earned the displeasure of the censors, this was treated by them as a downright expression of mutiny; consequently, not only was it shelved and released only with the advent of ‘Perestroika’ in 1987, Muratova’s directorial career too was impacted for years, forcing her to shift from Odessa to Leningrad and work outside the industry until her rehabilitation; the parallels with between her and avant-garde Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová are unavoidable. Yevgenia (played by renowned theatre actress Zinaida Sharko) is a well-off, vivacious middle-aged woman admired by her colleagues and friends. She’s also a domineering single-mom who dotes on her teenage son Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) to the point of extreme emotional dependence and exasperation. Hence, when he decides to move in with his dad in Novosibirsk upon experiencing a growing sense of estrangement with his mother, she begins to unravel. Her discontentment and Sasha’s disconnectedness were portrayed through splendid impressionistic bursts, interspersed with moments of quiet candour, and made particularly haunting by Muratova’s use of off-kilter formal choices – elliptical editing, repetitions, syncopated dialogues – along with stunning camerawork, moody B/W photography and a jangling, brilliant piano-based score. Yevgenia’s escalating inability to communicate with her son, ironically, stood at odds with her vocation as a successful translator, while the film’s freeform style underlined the duo’s unnerving push-pull relationship.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

Brief Encounters [1967]

 Kira Muratova, best known for Asthenic Syndrome, made her solo directorial debut with Brief Encounters, after a couple of films co-directed with her husband Aleksandr Muratov. Made at Odessa Film Studio during the “Khrushchev thaw”, this freewheeling, idiosyncratic and loosely-strung work exhibited her love for the French Nouvelle Vague and its radical figurehead Jean-Luc Godard. Like her dazzling next film The Long Farewell – which was even more avant-garde and formally eccentric – this earned the displeasure of the state censors for being too individualistic, and remained suppressed for the next two decades. Its delicately weaved love triangle – between pragmatic, unsentimental and bourgeoise city council planner Valentina (played by Muratova herself with deadpan poise); her free-spirited, vagabond husband Maxim (played by legendary Soviet folk singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotskiy), a traveling geologist who loves strumming his guitar; and Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman from the countryside who Maxim met at a roadside café, and who’s incidentally now hired by Valentina as a domestic help at her sprawling apartment – is told through a mosaic of impressionistic perspectives, flashbacks and digressive allusions. The diffused B/W images, along with music splashes and fragmentary conversations, imbued the film with poetic-realism and a meditative air. These, in turn, were complemented by sardonic moments, like when Valentina is coaxed into attending a conference bearing no relevance to her work, or when she muses “To wash [the dishes] or not to wash them? – turning the grand Macbethian dilemma into comically banal – or when she adamantly ignores the pleas of families to classify the newly constructed public housing buildings as hospitable. Most interestingly, Muratova impishly subverted expectations by never having the two women find out about their shared love interest.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

Babi Yar. Context [2021]

 “The past is never dead” in Sergei Loznitsa’s bleak, deeply unsettling and incredibly powerful documentary Babi Yar. Context. In 1941, Nazi Germany committed the horrific Babi Yar Massacre – so named because it was carried out in the eponymous ravine near the Ukrainian city of Kiev – wherein nearly the entire Jewish populace was clinically wiped out. The Einsatzgruppen death squad, with assistance from local militia and police force – alongside complicity of the residents – murdered 33,371 Jews over a 3-day period, while the overall toll during the Nazi occupation is estimated to be upwards of 100,000. Loznitsa, making extensive use of found amateur footage – immaculately collected from various archives where these were buried for decades, and extraordinarily restored over several months – composed a devastating picture of war, violence, destruction and human suffering borne out of fascism, prejudice and hatred. And, in turn, he took a defiant stance on his country’s culpability then and the convenient act of forgetting subsequent to that; in fact, he’d encountered uncomfortable silences all around him surrounding this massacre right from when he was a kid, and that cemented the need to remember and remind through this film. Structured with chronological linearity and presented with a startling sense of here-and-now that placed its viewers right in Kiev eight decades back, it persuasively covered what preceded the genocide and what followed it, including gut-wrenching shots of helpless men and women being beaten and rounded up, the brutal remnants of the horrors, reminiscences on concealment of the crimes and miraculous escapes, and the trial and public hanging of the SS perpetrators by the Soviet Army. This therefore remains a work laced with bold urgency, stark contextualization and profound remembrance.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine