State Funeral
A detailed account of Stalin's funeral in 1953 is not for the fainthearted.
The Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa started his career making documentaries and they have continued to be a strong element in his work. Nevertheless, it has been his fictional films such as In the Fog (2012), A Gentle Creature (2017) and Donbass (2018) for which he is best known here. Until now Maidan (2014) was his only documentary feature to have gained distribution in Britain, but it is now joined by State Funeral. Compared to this piece, Maidan was a standard documentary in that it was filmed by Loznitsa in Kiev and was a report on contemporary anti-government protests held there in late 2013 and early 2914. In contrast to that, Loznitsa has also made a number of documentaries dealing with past events for which he has turned to archive material and State Funeral is a work of that kind for the funeral in question is that of Joseph Stalin in March 1953.
Loznitsa has never been an artist to let off his audiences lightly and, just as his dramatised films tend to be grim and harrowing, his documentaries if one judges by the two that I have seen are no less demanding in their own way. Maidan lasted 133 minutes and State Funeral runs for 135 minutes, neither film offering a commentary. Indeed, with State Funeral it is also the case that what we see is entirely made up of actuality footage shot at the time of Stalin's death. The film begins with radio announcements of his passing, records the days immediately afterwards when his body was lying in state in Moscow, goes on to cover the memorial gathering in Red Square which followed (this includes addresses by Malenkov, Beria and Molotov) and then closes with a coda of final salutes and tributes. The quality of this old footage, some of it in colour and some in black and white, is quite remarkable and the crowd scenes are impressive in their own right. This is, of course, a time capsule since watching the film carries one back to the 1950s, to the Soviet Union as it then was and to an era when Stalin was seen as an immortal hero who would forever be venerated and of whom it could be said that he was the greatest genius in the history of mankind.
The length of the film brings out the scale of what for the most part seems to have been genuine respect and admiration (just look at the number of women crying as they pay homage). The absence of any spoken commentary is balanced by brief written statements which, ending the film, refer forcefully to the horrors perpetrated by Stalin. As for the film itself, it is in part an object lesson in filmmaking for, although Loznitsa shot none of its footage, his use of sound effects is masterly in the way that it makes everything feel so vivid and alive. Similarly, in association with his editor Danielus Kokanauskis, he provides a masterclass in finding flow in the images while simultaneously offering variety through the blend of colour and black and white material but with the transition made smooth by the classical music which continuing unabated accompanies these mixed images. But, even if the extra application of natural sounds brings immediacy to the proceedings, the repetition of similar material over and over for 135 minutes cannot but become daunting long before the film concludes. There is brilliance to be found in this assemblage and there is history to be seen in the images, but even so State Funeral is a work of very specialised appeal. I feel certain that Loznitsa is well aware of that but doesn't given a damn because he has given us what he wanted to create: a film record that speaks.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Dir Sergei Loznitsa, Pro Sergei Loznitsa and Maria Choustova, Screenplay Sergei Loznitsa, Ed Danielius Kokanauskis, Sound Vladimir Golovnitski.
Atoms & Void/Studio Uljana Kim-Mubi.
135 mins. The Netherlands/Lithuania/Czechoslovakia/Slovakia/Poland/Belgium. 2019. Rel: 21 May 2021. Available on Mubi. Cert. PG.