Tag: Sergei Loznitsa

The Natural History of Destruction

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES!

The Natural History of Destruction asks a simple question: is bombing civilian populations justified in the name of war? It seems to be the only question in the film, asked again and again and again, as Sergei Loznitsa shows us endless images of the mechanics, banality and brutality of war: leaving endless, merciless destruction in its wake in search of a bigger cause. Ostensibly about the allied bombing of Germany — which is estimated to have killed between 350,000 to 635,000 people while crippling the country’s armaments production — the film’s timely premiere resonates in the current moment, with Russia’s campaign of terror demolishing cities in Ukraine as this review is being written.

Created exclusively with archive footage courtesy of both British and German collections, Loznitsa’s latest is a WW2 film that feels contemporaneous, mixing black-and-white observational footage with painstaking re-recordings to show us the total dehumanisation of war.

We start with sketches of everyday German life, people out and about in town, heading to biergartens and cafes, singing songs and going to work. Evening arrives, the picture zooms out and these scenes are reduced to momentary lights in the ground, strikingly light up by the advent of cluster-bombs.

I didn’t just see Rostock, Lübeck, Cologne and Berlin while watching this film. I saw Mariupol, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Further back, it evokes NATO campaigns in Baghdad and Belgrade, or Putin’s levelling of Grozny, all committed in the name of the “greater good”. No matter who is waging war and who is on the so-called right side of history, the final effects are the same: dead people, flattened buildings, the complete vanquishing of hope and humanity.

Occasionally the silent-film-like images are punctuated by speeches. One British army official asks the German population to simply leave the cities and camp out in the countryside, a simplistic solution that betrays the reality of living in a country during the war. He goes on to say that although a campaign of bombing on this scale has never been tried before, it will make an “interesting experiment.”

And while war historians might agree that the bombing itself was justified in that it ground German production to its knees, allowing Soviet Union and American forces to sweep in and take Berlin, absolutists can claim the moral high ground: no victory could possibly be worth this much death and destruction. But Loznitsa avoids any editorial process — no talking heads, no narration, no moral grandstanding — and allows us to come to our own conclusions; starting debates instead of finishing them.

It’s this complexity, as well as seeking the humanity in a people that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis, that make him a complex figure. Only recently was he kicked out of the Ukrainian film academy for his ties to Russia and for speaking out against a widespread boycott, while at the same time, many of his fiction films have also been accused of Russophobia. In my view, this controversy is probably the sign of an independent filmmaker.

One thing you can say about Loznitsa is that he’s both a deep thinker and a prolific filmmaker (this is his third documentary in two years). Nonetheless, clocking in at just under 110 minutes long, his images are exhaustive and enervating, at once deeply terrifying and rather monotonous. His documentaries, like Victory Day, which stretched to over an hour despite only having enough material to justify a 20-minute short, has the habit of just making the same point over and over again. While the intention is to conclusively batter home the horrors of aerial warfare, the length and duration of certain images, which repeat themselves without revealing any new layers, struck me as unnecessary. The deeply-felt moral question the film raises is a highly important one, making it even more disappointing the finished product makes this such an alienating picture to sit through.

The Natural History of Destruction plays in the Official Selection as a Special Screening at Cannes. No UK release date yet.

Babi Yar. Context

Posted on by victorfraga

As the title suggests, Babi Yar. Context seeks to provide the full picture behind the Nazi massacre of some 33,000 Jewish people in a Ukrainian ravine in 1941. But the odd phrasing could also mean contextualising where we are today, with antisemitism on the rise in Europe and the US. Atrocities do not occur in a vacuum, and Sergey Loznitsa’s taciturn documentary shows the events before and after the eponymous monstrosity.

Mining a wealth of incredibly restored footage from Russian, German and Ukrainian archives (itself a sign of cooperative progress), the Ukrainian director presents the Nazi occupation of Kiev and its aftermath in a chronological narrative. The helmer mostly lets the images speak for themselves, though the inclusion of contemporary testimony and Vasily Grossman’s famous essay Ukraine Without Jews are extremely moving.

Other passages require little comment, as the locals greet the German occupiers with flowers and proudly replace Stalin posters with Hitler banners (only to swap them back again when the Soviets reclaim Kiev two years later). The footage reminds us how easily extremism breeds extremism, trading one ideology for another with a smile, a song and hope that they can’t possibly be as bad as the last lot.

The titular context does not cover the pogroms, which would provide even greater insight into a society that consistently allows atrocities against the Jewish people. We see them rounded up at gunpoint as supposed Soviet sympathisers, beaten in the streets, their homes firebombed, paving the way for the mass executions. Title cards tell us the slaughter occurred without resistance from the citizens of Kiev; a newspaper article implies it was the will of the people.

Babi Yar. Context is hard to watch not solely because of the massacre, of which limited photographic evidence exists (the bodies were dug up and incinerated). What makes it chilling is also what makes it essential: the focus on the conditions that permitted the atrocity, eerily familiar warning signs to take a stand before it is too late – which it is by 1946, when the Soviets put the Nazis on trial for the mass killings.

Here we witness first-hand accounts of Babi Yar survivors, including one woman who escaped by lying in a pile of corpses for eight hours and another who was buried alive. The SS officers are hanged for crimes against the Soviet Union with no mention of the Jews, then in 1952 the ravine is unceremoniously filled with industrial waste; a toxic sign of Jewish erasure that continues in public discourse to this day.

Babi Yar. Context has just premiered at the BFI London Film Festival.

Donbass

Posted on by victorfraga

The War in Donbass is now five years old. In March 2014, protests by various pro-Russian and anti-government groups took place in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of the country, which are collectively described as the Donbass region. More than two thirds of the population of Donbass are ethnically Russian, and Russian is the de facto language of region. The protests quickly morphed into an armed conflict, and Moscow has been repeatedly accused of supporting the separatist struggle (something which they deny). Donbass is a fictionalised account of the conflict divided into 13 very peculiar and mostly unconnected segments.

The film has some very good moments. An angry mob humiliates an alleged “exterminator” tied to a lamppost in a town square in broad daylight. They punch him, they kick him, an old woman beats him up with a stick, they shout profanities. They demand answers, but the man simply refuses to speak. A woman dumps a bucket of faces on the head of a newspaper editor who wrote an article stating that she received a large bribe. She wants him to feel as dirty as she did (when the libel was published).

A German journalist is confronted about Hitler and his “fascist” past. The separatists too are often described as fascists. A well-dressed woman tries to convince her haggard mother to leave an overcrowded shelter in favour of a safe and salubrious dwelling, but she refuses to budge (presumably in solidarity with her people, or attachment to the land). The images of the filthy and jam-packed shelter, with the walls covered in mould, are very realistic. And so on.

The first two thirds of Donbass feel a lot like a documentary, until the movie descends into the farcical and allegorical in the last few segments. A very peculiar wedding takes place (pictured at the top). This is the ugliest and also most absurd part of the film. The ceremony is conducted under the flag of Novorossiya (literally, “New Russia”, a proposed accolade for separatist entity). The guests laugh. No one is taking the sacrament seriously, particularly the bride and the groom. It’s as if the director was saying: “a union between Russia and Donbass is laughable, hideous and extremely undesirable”. This is an anti-war movie and a very anti-Russian statement. Loznitsa is Belorussian by birth, but has studied and lived in Kiev most of his life, and his affiliation clearly lies with the Ukrainian government, who also helped to finance the film.

Donbass is interesting enough to watch, and the anti-war message is is very clear. But it also gets a little confusing. Nothing is contextualised (the information in the first paragraph of this review is not described in the film). It’s not always possible to determine which side is side. Perhaps I lack the cultural and political knowledge. Or perhaps the director intended to confounds his viewers in order to emphasise the pointlessness of war. I’m not entirely sure. One way or another, the outcome is a little disjointed and incoherent. At more than two hours of duration, the narrative gets jumbled up. Overall, Donbass lacks the lyrical excellence of Loznitsa’s previous film A Gentle Creature (2017). And it also lacks the punch-factor. The violence, the explosions and murder sequences feel a little contrived and banal.

Donbass won the Best Director prize of the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes International Film Festival in 2018. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 26th, and then on VoD on Monday, April 29th.

A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is the side of Russia Putin doesn’t want you to see. There are no monumental buildings, no glittering cathedrals, no military show-off, no glitz and glam whatsoever. Instead you will see derelict buildings, dirty roads, poverty and corruption of every conceivable type imaginable: of the establishment, of the individual and of the soul. Of the Russian soul.

A beautiful and unnamed woman (Vasilina Makovtseeva, pictured above) receives the parcel that she sent to her husband in prison, but she’s not given a reason why the item has been returned. She sets off to the prison in search for an explanation as to what’s happened to her spouse, but she just keep hitting metaphorical brick walls along her way. Along her journey she encounters pimps, hookers, crooks, villains, racketeers and swindlers. Mostly people with a rotten soul, with no sense of kindness and solidarity. They don’t smile, don’t make eye contact and they only act in their own self-interest. The police and the prison officials are the most objectionable characters, extremely rude and brutal.

According to Dostoevsky, “the most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, ever-present and unquenchable, everywhere and in everything”. There’s plenty of suffering in A Gentle Creature. But he also talks of depth and compassion, and the people whom the woman meets are completely devoid of such sentiments. A Gentle Creature is about the search for kindness in a country that has no time for sentimentality; this is the collapse of the Russian soul.

The fact that the woman and her husband are never named is symbolic of a nation that has stripped its citizens from their individuality. Instead her husband is known by a very long number that’s impossible to memorise. This is very common in Russia, a country where many schools and airports have numbers instead of names, and where bureaucracy is such that citizens are forced to carry a passport even when they travel internally. The town and the region where the story take place are never named either.

In the most beautiful moment of the movie, the woman is ridden to see her husband on a bizarre police rickshaw, to the sound of the Russian song “By the Long Road” (which you may recognise in the voice of Mary Hopkins “Those Were the Days” or Dalida’s “Les Temps des Fleurs”). Will she finally find out what happened to him? Was it all just a bad dream?

The photography of A Gentle Creature is breathtaking, in a very dirty way. There’s a misty and ethereal quality, which combined with the crumbling and yet inhabited buildings may remind you vaguely of Tarkovsky. The film wraps up with a vivid nightmare of the failure of Russia, thereby highlighting the enthusiastic complicity of its citizens in the process.

A Gentle Creature showed at the 70th Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It received a long ovation from critics, but there were also a few boos. I can only assume that the disapproval came from disgruntled Russians expressing their indignation regarding the negative portrayal of their country. This is indeed a very good piece of filmmaking.

It is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 13th. It’s available on all major VoD platforms from December 3rd!