Sergei Loznitza's State Funeral (2019) is an astonishing, mind-numbing spectacle. The documentary chronicles the obsequies of Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, the Soviet tyrant who died in the dead of Winter in 1953. The film is grandiose on the largest scale imaginable. It's also virtually unwatchable. Loznitza is a very scrupulous and calculating film-maker. One of his calculations, valid if highly challenging to the viewer, is to construct his film on an enormous scale both pictorially and in terms of the time that he uses to document the funeral -- the movie is almost three hours long and the film's duration is an important strategy, showing us how totalitarianism operates and how it is experienced by its victims. The funeral becomes a relentless universe, a vast sepulchral space in which armies of zombie mourners wearing red arm bands shuffle back and forth. Hollywood used to advertise films made "with a cast of thousands" -- on the evidence of this movie, State Funeral has a cast of hundreds of thousands; we behold icy-looking vistas packed with somber people, all of them heavily muffled and with an astonishing array of fur hats, extending from the close foreground literally to the horizon. Stalin's funeral is like a enormous, lethal black hole that sucks everything into it. The viewer is left exhausted, but also benumbed and bored almost to tears. One vast procession follows another and just when the repetition becomes almost unbearable, the Soviet apparatchiks begin their speeches, each filmed in its entirety while the entire nation, it seems, stands close-packed in a vast grim assembly with people crowded literally to death between enormous walls and towering colossal figures of the deceased dictator. (Although there's no footage of this in the film, a stampede near the Kremlin killed at least 140 people -- most accounts put the death toll well over a thousand. If course, the cameramen recording the proceedings weren't invited to take pictures of this carnage.) Loznitza establishes certain rules from the outset -- there is no commentary, no pundits describe what we are seeing, and there is no context provided for the footage. In a few early shots, a subtitle describes where individual sequences in the film were shot -- one of the movie's contentions is that the entire Soviet Union mourns Stalin and, so, staggering multitudes are shown in various cities including places with bright sun and high mountains in the background. At the end of the movie, we are shown mourners standing by their reindeer sleds and people grieving in Siberian wigwams and Mongolian yurts. But except for these footnotes and a lacerating final group of titles, no attempt is made to explain the macabre spectacle that the film presents.
The film begins with shots of a hearse depositing Stalin's bright red casket at an official building somewhere. We see what can be construed as family members, although no one is identified. Some bureaucrats look on as the casket is opened and we see Stalin's waxy cadaver, dressed in a resplendent uniform, a bit like an old Kodak polaroid that is partly faded: a close-up shows us the dictator's clawlike hands -- the lower half of his body is covered with a sort of red apron. Footage alternates between brilliantly restored technicolor -- either Kodak technicolor or German Agfa film-stock and deep focus and velvety black and white. The greatest cameramen in the USSR were marshaled to make movies of the funeral and their work is gorgeous, epic, and beautifully composed. (The documentary film project was edited by March of 1953 and complete for release about a month after Stalin's death. But already doubts were raised about the political viability of the project. The film was shelved and never released. Loznitza's picture is constructed from the actual negative for the documentary movie made in 1953 intercut with other striking footage found in State Archives. Essentially, the film proceeds by showing us a few far-flung assemblies of mourners, loud-speakers providing an eerily detailed and gory account of Stalin's death. The footage alternates between grandiose landscapes crowded with enormous featureless multitudes and close-ups showing handsome representative mourners. Next, we see foreign dignitaries arriving. Then, there are long sequences showing people hauling eight-foot tall wreathes resplendent with hundreds of roses -- even though this is in February in Russia. The wreathes are so big that two people have to lug them up against Kremlin walls. The open casket sits atop a bier that is three stories high, precariously tilted downward, the corpse half-drowned in a sea of flowers and green laurel, hundreds of red banners hanging from the ceiling while an endless procession hurries by, a million people moving at what seems to be a brisk trot. Next, there are vast parades. A lot of the middle hour of the movie is vague to me because I fell asleep and only awoke, now and then, to see that nothing had changed -- soldiers stood in huge phalanxes barring vast avenues, women wept or dabbed tears from their eyes, Chopin and Mendelsohnn's Death March are played in an endless loop -- a half hour later, it's the same spectacle utterly without change. Sometimes, the red casket is moved here and there by armies of men. Finally, the casket, with a little bubble so that the dictator can peer out at his people, ends up under the grim ziggurat of Lenin's mausoleum. First, Malenkov, who seems to be a complete idiot speaks -- he says that Stalin was the greatest genius of all time. Then, Beria, who looks a little like Bob Hoskins, growls out his speech -- Stalin was the greatest leader of all time. Malenkov who has little swinish eyes looks baffled by Beria's speech. Then, Molotov tells the assembled millions that Stalin was the greatest leader in all of history. Krushchev plays MC and says that the funeral is now over. The casket is hauled into the darkness of Lenin's tomb and the screen goes black. But Loznitza has saved some of the most jaw-dropping scenes for the last ten minutes. The camera shows a montage of mourners from the Black Sea to Vladivostok. At an enormous hydroelectric plant under construction, workers like tiny ants stand on immense pylons with a five-story image of Stalin draped over a pier. A big picture of the tyrant hangs over the enormous construction site and, then, seems to fly over the bulldozers and colossal trucks -- a towering crane, which we don't see, is moving the picture of the dictator. Again the screen goes black and then fades in to snowfall. A giant wave of man-high wreaths and flowers seems to have broken surf on the sea against the Kremlin wall and that camera slowly pans across the hundreds and hundreds of yards of memorial wreaths. On the soundtrack, we hear a kitschy lullabye sung by a woman about a little baby boy being lulled to sleep. A final title tells us that Stalin murdered 27 million of his compatriots outright and killed another 15 million by famine. His corpse was pulled out of the Lenin mausoleum in 1961 and is now buried in a modest niche in the Kremlin wall.
The film that State Funeral most resembles is Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will -- there is the same lethal, stupefying monumentalism, the same colossal stage architecture and scenery, the same interpolated shots of perfectly selected ethnic types, here grieving for the great man -- handsome peasants and doughty soldiers are featured in the crowd. And like Triumph of the Will, rarely shown in its huge and deadening entirety, the film climaxes with a series of majestically dull speeches that are mindless, sinister, and ridiculous all at the same time. Loznitza is playing a dangerous game: either the film is a monstrous nightmare or an ugly invitation to nostalgia for the greatness of the deceased mass-murderer. In fact, in an interview accompanying the film, Loznitza acknowledges that people either abhor what they are seeing or interpret the film as a grandiose tribute to a great fallen leader. He suggests that in Russia, audiences are about equally divided on this subject. What I found appalling about the film is that it is uniformly somber and totalizing in its effect -- we don't see anyone who seems bored by the idiotic ranting politicians, no one gets out of step in the interminable military parades, there's no sign of human frailty: no one has to go to the bathroom, even the smallest children seem perfectly attuned with the movie's tone of macabre majesty. Is it really possible that a million people crowded into Red Square and no one had to pee or suffered from diarrhea? Were the Russians really this grief-stricken by the demise of a man who was truly monstrous in all ways? Why aren't we shown something to break the mood of interminable, horrible splendor? Couldn't Loznitza find out-takes that might have humanized these ghastly proceedings? In this country, we talk about dog whistles -- State Funeral seems dog whistle of vast proportions aimed at the nationalist right-wing in Russia.
(There's an amusing colloquy by ZOOM between Sergei Loznitza and the Italian director Pietro Marcello who made the Marxist-inflected Martin Eden. Loznitza is bland, pale, and barely moves, sitting stolidly in the center of the frame; by contrast, Pietro Marcello guzzles coffee, flaps his hands wildly, a couple times almost knocking over his laptop, and, then, lights up a cigarette and nervously smokes.)
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