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Still image from Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass( 2018)( image politenes Pyramide Films)
Sergei Loznitsa is a nimble chronicler of Soviet and post-Soviet society, attaining story and non-fiction cinemas alike, often to the point where such neat differences blur. His cinema provides social commentary with gallows humor. His task has an immersive you-are-there verite aesthetic that are able transform into a grotesque spectacle in the following panorama. Ever the workaholic, he’s attained 14 features and short films over such courses of this decade, three of which premiered this year at major festivals: Victory Day in Berlin, Donbass at Cannes, and The Trial in Venice. Audiences in New York City will get to see the latter two when they screen at the Museum of the Moving Image’s eighth First Look festival. They’ll get to see the different backs of Loznitsa, working with different methods for each cinema, examining past, present, and where they intersect.
With The Trial, Loznitsa showcases his knowledge as a found-footage filmmaker. In the past, utilizing archival records, he spotlighted the mechanical culture generated during the’ 50 s and’ 60 s with Soviet propaganda movies, TV depicts, and newsreels in Revue( 2008 ). In The Event( 2015 ), he applied handheld shots of bystanders at the time, replicating the end-of-an-era, in-the-moment feel of the August 1991 demoes in Leningrad after the failed takeover by the Communist party which was supposed to signal the start of a democratic Russia. At 127 times, The Trial( 2018) is Loznitsa’s longest archival-based movie to date. His raw material was a 1930 display test( one of the first and a precursor to the Moscow Trials) in which a group of scientists and engineers from the old-fashioned technology intelligentsia were tried for storying to overthrow the Soviet government with the assistance provided by French Prime Minister Raymond Poincare. They all pleaded guilty — but it was all a lie. There was no conspiracy; “the mens” were merely scapegoats for the Soviet Union’s first recently implemented and failing five-year plan.
Still image from Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial( 2018)( screenshot by the author)
Seamlessly cutting the footage together, Loznitsa develops a single Frankensteinian document of what’s known as the “Industrial Party Trial.” Naturally, organically, he organizes it in linear order: opening statements, witness witnes, closing statements, and verdict. The cinema play-acts like a classic Hollywood courtroom drama, nonetheless with the uncomfortable humor, the interstitial tedium, and the long-winded responses included. All the players involved in this concert put on a stoic demeanor, and hairline rifts, exposing an underlayer of emotion, only become visible when the defendants deliver their final words to the judge.
Still image from Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial( 2018)( screenshot by the author)
The visuals used in The Trial are historical records documenting a fiction, which is further contorted, or perhaps highlighted, by Loznitsa’s streamlined reconstruction. In the US, it calls to mind the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the’ 40 s and’ 50 s, as well as the constant congressional hearings taking place during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Still image from Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial( 2018)( courtesy of International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam)
Distortion was essential theme in Donbass( 2018 ), a roundelay of fury set in that titular region of east Ukraine scarred by the five-years-and-counting contradictions between Ukrainians and pro-Russian seperatists. The movie opens with groupings of gaunt actors preparing in a trailer and then scampered out to the incident of a wrecked tram by military personnel and wranglers, where they act as bystanders and eyewitness, even committing TV interviews to reporters on the incident. “It all seems unreal, ” a dame “eyewitness” tells the camera crew. Elsewhere, people get out their phones to take selfies and register videos of a Ukrainian soldier being publicly beaten. And in a later panorama, a male with a deer-in-the-headlights looking presents an obliging camera around a dank, dark subterranean bomb shelter full of people. The cinema is full of these episodes — seguing into each other, such as a person in a scene initially appears in the following one before plummeting out of the movie entirely in this protagonist-less job. At first it intimates at, then explodes with violence, wave after ripple, who the hell is registered, spread, and manipulated for ideological gain for the separatists.
Still image from Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass( 2018)( image politenes of Pyramide Films)
Not all of the moments in the movie have the ripped-from-the-headlines feel.( Loznitsa has said that he based the events in the film on incidents he heard or considered on YouTube .) In one of Donbass’s more blunt symbolic gestures, a garish bridal between Mr. and Mrs. Fried-Egg roars on in occupied eastern Ukraine in the name of Novorossiya.
What Donbass does convincingly is synthesize the carnivalesque repugnance reveal of My Joy( 2010) and A Gentle Creature( 2017) with the immediacy and actuality of his more non-fiction oriented projects, like Maidan( 2014 ). It is an indignant cinema casting a light on “Europe’s forgotten war” — a struggle with more than 10,000 casualties so far. The Trial, on the other hand, unearths a piece of Soviet record that resonates with the memes, fake report, and trials of today. Moreover, Loznitsa is deepening his use of archival footage. With both studies, you’re visualizing a filmmaker growing in deftness with using appropriate tools that he has.
The eighth publication of the First Look festival will take place at Museum of the Moving Image( 36 -0 1 35 Ave, Astoria, NY) opening January 11 and leading through January 21.
The post A Chronicler of Soviet and Post-Soviet Life Blurs Fact and Fiction showed firstly on Hyperallergic.
Read more: hyperallergic.com
