Loznitsa, Sergei

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    ‘Donbass’ Review: War in Ukraine, the Prequel

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    Sergei Loznitsa’s film, completed in 2018, presents an absurd, horrific tableau of cruelty and corruption.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Donbass,” which opens in American theaters today, is not exactly a new film. It was an Oscar entry in 2019 after making its debut at the Cannes Film Festival the year before, and the events depicted onscreen — fictionalized recreations of things rumored to have really happened — take place a few years before that, in the wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine.Watching it now, as reports of Russian atrocities in other parts of Ukraine dominate the headlines, is unnerving in a way that’s hard to put into words. The movie’s timeliness is obvious enough, and its prescience carries, at least for this viewer, a jolt of shame. The images of what was happening then provide a prologue to the horrors we are witnessing now — and amount to an unheeded warning.Could a wider audience for “Donbass” have made a difference before this year? Can it make a difference now? Probably not. Art isn’t a lever that moves history, but a lens that shapes perceptions of it. Certain narrative works, novels as well as films, provide illumination different from what might be found in journalism or history. Loznitsa’s nonfiction features, including the recent found-footage documentary “Babi Yar: Context” and the eyewitness chronicle “Maidan,” are to some extent explanatory, examining the causes and consequences of war and political upheaval.“Donbass,” at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.In an early scene, a government meeting is interrupted by an angry woman, flanked by cameras, who dumps a small tub of excrement on an official’s head. The raucous, profane free-for-all that ensues turns out to be a model of civil discourse compared to what comes later, but it also sounds what will be the film’s dominant notes.This is a place — identified as “Occupied Territory” in the flashes of text that introduce each scene and called “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, by some of the characters — where violence and absurdity commingle, where chaos is wrapped in bureaucratic punctilio and ceremonial pomp. (Loznitsa and his crew, including the brilliant Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, shot the film in and around the central Ukrainian city of Krivoi Rog). There is a sly anarchy in Loznitsa’s methods: He wanders, with deceptive casualness, from episode to episode, leaving one story in the middle to follow a stray character into the next.Starting and ending in a television hair-and-makeup trailer, he takes us to a maternity hospital, a Ukrainian border checkpoint, various militia outposts, a crowded bomb shelter, a bus stop and a wedding. We meet a lot of people, often without catching their names, and observe interactions that range from ridiculous to infuriating to unspeakable. The mood is unstable. Amusement gives way to unease; disgust melts into dread, anxiety into despair. This is a tour of hell, and a reminder that hell is other people. The discomfort comes from the sense that we know these monsters. We are these monsters.“Donbass” isn’t easy to watch: A scene in which soldiers lead a prisoner into the street to be humiliated, harassed and then beaten by passers-by is particularly excruciating. But the movie bristles with caustic humor and moral rigor. The separatist fighters and pro-Russian citizens who dominate the action are held up for censure and ridicule, yet are also given a fair hearing when they paint their adversaries as fascists.Do they really believe it? When reality is distorted by authoritarian propaganda, cynicism can be impossible to distinguish from sincerity, and opportunism can masquerade as righteousness. That sounds abstract, but the movie’s bitter achievement is in its granular, ground-level concreteness. It’s horrific, impossible, extreme — and also understated.DonbassNot rated. In Russian, Ukrainian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Babi Yar: Context’ Review: Unearthing Footage of a Nazi Massacre

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, about the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in 1941, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own.Over two days in September, 1941, German soldiers, assisted by Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was one of the earliest and deadliest episodes in what is sometimes called the “holocaust by bullets,” a phase of the Nazi genocide that took place outside the mechanized slaughter of the death camps. These mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, are estimated to have taken at least 1.5 million lives.The Ukrainian-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, consisting of archival footage interspersed with a few tersely informative title cards, is called “Babi Yar: Context.” What’s meant by “context” isn’t so much a broad, explanation of the event — such as one finds in the historian Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” — as a detailed visual narrative with a hole in the middle.When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they brought movie cameras as well as rifles. So did the Soviet Army when it took back Kyiv in 1943. Some of those cameras were instruments of propaganda; others were wielded by amateurs. The two sides left behind an extensive cinematic record, a pool of images that have mostly languished unseen since the end of the war. Weaving them together and dubbing in sound (the rumble of tanks and the murmur of crowds, with an occasional snippet of intelligible speech), Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.The killing itself took place off camera. What is astonishing is how thoroughly nearly everything that happened before and after the massacre was documented, in black-and-white and sometimes in color. The detail is unsparing and relentless: farms and villages set on fire by German soldiers; Jews being rounded up, humiliated and beaten; snowy fields strewn with frozen corpses; bombs exploding in downtown Kyiv; the public hanging of 12 Germans convicted of atrocities after the war.Though there is a military and political narrative to be gleaned from all of this, Loznitsa’s method (displayed in earlier found-footage films like “State Funeral,” about the aftermath of Stalin’s death) is to allow the human reality to speak for itself. A few prominent officials are identified — you may recognize Nikita S. Khrushchev, who became the leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic soon after the Germans were driven out — but what the film displays most vividly is the intense individuality of anonymous, ordinary people. History is a catalog of faces: city-dwellers and peasants; victims, perpetrators and bystanders; Germans, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians.Mostly, these people don’t speak. Toward the end, there are scenes of courtroom testimony, during which a German soldier and several witnesses and survivors talk about what happened at Babi Yar. Their words, in the absence of images, have a harrowing intensity beyond what any pictures might convey. So does the Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s 1943 essay “Ukraine Without Jews,” quoted onscreen to emphasize the enormity of what can’t be shown.Much of the rest of “Babi Yar: Context” works the other way around, finding an eloquence in actions and gestures that words might not supply. And also an element of indeterminacy, as you try to read the thoughts and feelings on those faces.There is a political, moral dimension to the work of interpretation that Loznitsa compels. After Kyiv, other cities like Lviv fall to the Germans; the streets fill with Ukrainians celebrating their victory as liberation from Soviet oppression. Girls in traditional costumes present bouquets of flowers to Nazi officers, and banners are hoisted proclaiming the glory of Adolf Hitler and the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. When Jews are rounded up, harassed and brutalized, local civilians are on hand to participate.Later, there are parades and flowers to welcome the Red Army. Hitler’s likeness is taken down and replaced with Stalin’s. You might wonder about the composition of the crowds. Did some of the same people who welcomed the German army as liberators also turn out to support the Soviet army’s return? Did residents of Kyiv who cheered the arrival of Nazi fighters also cheer their execution?Forcing you to think about these questions is one of the ways Loznitsa’s film draws you closer to the horror at its center, stripping away the easy judgment of hindsight as well as the layers of forgetting and distortion that accumulated around the massacre in subsequent decades.And of course “Babi Yar: Context,” completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own. The Babi Yar Memorial near Kyiv was damaged in early March by a Russian missile. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has claimed that one of his goals is the “denazification” of Ukraine, whose current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. The past that Loznitsa excavates casts its shadow on the present. Knowing about it won’t make anything easier, but not knowing can make everything worse.Babi Yar: ContextNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘State Funeral’ Review: Saying Goodbye to Stalin

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s new found-footage documentary illuminates Soviet life in the immediate aftermath of the dictator’s death.Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. “State Funeral,” the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s fascinating and elusive new documentary, shows what happened in the next few days, as Stalin’s body lay in state at the Hall of Unions in Moscow before being transferred to the Lenin mausoleum. (It was removed eight years later, but that’s another story).Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.At the beginning, crowds gather to hear news of the dictator’s death, read out in stately, somber tones over loudspeakers. Those broadcasts, which continue as the masses shuffle past Stalin’s wreath-laden coffin, supply an abstract, rose-colored interpretation of his life amid frequent invocations of his immortality. His subjects — his comrades, in the idiom of the time — are reminded of his undying love for them, as well as of his “selflessness,” his courage and his monumental intelligence. He was, among other accomplishments, “the greatest genius in human history.”This kind of rhetoric is evidence of the cult of personality that would be disavowed a few years later when Nikita Khrushchev came to power and undertook a program of de-Stalinization. “State Funeral” captures the official manifestations of that cult, including the gigantic portraits of Stalin hanging from public buildings and the arrival of delegations from other communist countries. Fulsome elegies are delivered by the distinctly uncharismatic men who — briefly, as it turned out — took Stalin’s place: Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrenti Beria. (Khrushchev, who would shortly kick them out, serves as master of ceremonies).But Stalin’s famous visage, with its bushy mustache and sweptback hair, is upstaged by the throngs of ordinary citizens who gather to bear witness and pay tribute. The anonymous camera operators, shooting in color and in black and white in far-flung shipyards, factories, oil fields and collective farms, are Loznitsa’s vital collaborators. Intentionally or not, they gathered images that complicate and to some extent subvert the somber, emptied-out language of the regime, disclosing a complicated human reality beneath the ideological boilerplate.It’s the parade of ordinary Soviets that makes “State Funeral” both moving and unnerving. It is hard not to be touched by the tears shed by grandmothers, soldiers, old men in fur hats and bareheaded young women, even though they are mourning a monster. Other responses are harder to read. Does that steady, unsmiling gaze signify stoicism or defiance? Is that faint smile an expression of relief? Of gratitude? Of terror? When someone looks directly into the camera, do the eyes register suspicion or solidarity?A brief note at the end of the film reminds the viewer of Stalin’s crimes against his own people — the tens of millions purged, imprisoned, starved and slaughtered. That knowledge sits uncomfortably with what has come before, not because the leaden language of the scripted obsequies is persuasive, but because the grieving citizens are so real. In their variety and particularity, these people don’t seem to belong to a distant place and time. They seem entirely modern and familiar.Which can be taken as a warning: Any population can be swayed and subjugated by tyranny. They could be us. But the tone of “State Funeral” is more meditative than admonitory. It contemplates the Soviet state at almost the exact midpoint of its existence, illuminating the faces of those who lived there and at the same time reckoning with the dead weight of history.State FuneralNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. At Film Forum. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More