The reactivation of archival footage.
State Funeral
dir. Sergei Loznitsa, 2019, Ukraine/Lithuania
genre: archival
It’s become commonly noted that Sergei Loznitsa works in alternating documentary veins, one archival, the other observational. As Jonathan Romney describes,
In one documentary mode, he films observational pieces such as Maidan, Austerlitz and Victory Day, while in another he creates complex assemblages of archival work mapping the surface appearances and underlying complexities of modern Russian history; notably in The Event and last year’s The Trial. His new film State Funeral is in the latter vein, an epic, implicitly ironic evocation of the elaborate ceremonies that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953.
Indeed, the raw material is different, as the archival films are superb examples of repurposing a single moving image source. They work differently on spectators, who approach the films as records of pastness rather than presentness and who are inclined to reflect on the films as historiography.
State Funeral, for instance, is only partially removed from other recent archival docs that digitally alter archival footage in the name of realism (such as Peter Jackson’s World War I doc They Should Not Grow Old). Like The Event, The Trial, and Blockade, Loznitsa adds an enriched sound design to reactivate the footage and to lend a more visceral impact. In this instance, Loznitsa edits down 35 hours or so of footage shot of Stalin’s funeral. Most of the footage is documentary, but some has been staged for filming – and still more may lie in between, a documentary portrait of highly staged workers events.
In the process of watching State Funeral, though, these distinctions are not altogether clear – or even the main point. Indeed, the film avoids voiceover narration, testimony, or expository material that would situate the status of what we are watching. The broad development is clear: preparations are made, workers get a public holiday for mourning, Soviet citizens file visit Stalin’s public viewing, and the final memorial speeches.
My initial impression is that this may be Loznitsa’s most challenging documentary since Maidan. Not more formally challenging, necessarily, but one delving in nationally specific subject matter that only partly translates to an international audience. Yes, the film asks us to reflect on cult of personality and state propaganda under a totalitarian government. But it’s more than that, an interrogation of public mourning.
Beyond the interpretive challenges of the film, I find that that the two strains of Loznitsa’s documentary work are not entirely removed. The use of sound design, combined with Loznitsa’s emphasis on long take and refusal to add voiceover, does make B-roll and outtake footage feel remarkably like cinema vérité. However this effect is only partial, since we are missing casually recorded conversation, and some of the Foleyed sound is too canned or on-the-nose for total realism. As a viewer I found myself in an in-between space, both seduced by the spectatorial impact of the sonically enhanced footage and feeling the uncanniness of the documentary that might have been made contemporaneously, but wasn’t.