Ukranian director Sergei Loznitsa’s latest archival footage project, State Funeral, shows the pomp and regalia of the death of Joseph Stalin and the massive spectacle of his interment. Scoured from mostly unused newsreel footage intended for state documentaries, Loznitsa’s assemblage is as straightforward as it is hypnotic, letting the ironically regal treatment that the head of the Soviet Union received speak for itself while focusing more on the blurred lines between genuine and performative public grief for the dead monster.
An opening montage announcing Stalin’s death over radio broadcasts traverses the vast range of the Soviet Union as villagers, city workers and soldiers alike gather around PA systems. Images of newspapers and other lettering in various languages subtly testify to the sheer number of nations under the USSR umbrella, but the radio announcement sounds like the same audio clip playing no matter where the camera cuts to, linking these disparate states together under Russia’s banner. The Soviet Realist style is evident even in this old documentary material, with copious shots arranged in medium close-up to show faces solemnly bowed in mourning: hard looks passing over remote village elders still wearing traditional garb, or dock workers pausing their labor and falling silent.
Yet it is when the film pivots to various Party officials arriving in Moscow for the funeral that these small shows of public grief start to turn into an elaborate public ceremony. A procession of planes bringing dignitaries of various SSRs gives way to the general public gathering around monuments in Moscow and laying a colossal number of wreaths and flowers as radio addresses blare hyperbolic tributes to the departed premier, casting him as an unparalleled hero of history whose deeds verged on the mythic. As more and more citizens stream into the capital, the streets choke with bodies lining up to pay their respects to Stalin lying in state. Even in the outlying cities and countries, gigantic statues are erected and decorated. Speeches become more and more fervent, elevating Stalin to the embodiment of the communist struggle, another irreconcilable irony in subordinating the collective under the will of the individual.
Running more than two hours, State Funeral contains copious amounts of these repetitive images, but Loznitsa makes that repetition the point, foregrounding the protracted act of public grieving as Stalin’s last act of mass manipulation. As faces march past the camera on their way to Stalin’s body or various statues of him, the lines between genuine and performative mourning are blurred, and at a certain point you’d swear you can see the general fatigue start to set in at having to march around every day paying tribute. Slowly, the soundtrack, dedicated to various classical requiems, starts to incorporate more and more diegetic sound, adding in the awkward coughs and sniffles of those waiting in the antechamber around Stalin, an amusingly subtle indication of growing tedium.
With footage from so many sources, Loznitsa’s film regularly leaps between, say, high-contrast, carefully composed black-and-white to hand-held 16mm color. The aforementioned beauty of the close-ups and aestheticized framing of ordinary people is compounded by how precisely Stalin’s posed corpse is lit and framed. In black-and-white, the lights that shine down over Stalin are blown-out and illuminate him like a divine being. Yet the most striking moments are those filmed with a two-strip color stock very much like the stolen German Agfa film used to shoot the color footage in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. That film, of course, was a thinly veiled attack on Stalin, making for a mordantly fascinating contrast with the loving images of the premier’s corpse and its many admirers here, with the color stressing more than anything the greens of military uniforms and wreaths and the reds of flags of banners. At times, the slow pace of the film quickens into darting montages of gathered faces, turning scattered footage into classic Soviet collectivist montage, with wonderful juxtapositions of groups united in shared mood.
Left unaddressed here, though perhaps ominously hinted at with all the footage of Khrushchev standing silent guard over his predecessor’s body, is that this overwhelming, seemingly endless pageantry in deference to Stalin would be soon followed by a massive program rolling back his most brutal policies and undermining the very personality cult that made the spectacle seen here possible. That irony hangs over the proceedings and deepens the absurdity of the mass grieving that Loznitsa otherwise communicates through the film’s length. State Funeral is an epic account of the Soviet Union at the height of its power, assembled with a keen eye for Russia’s film history as much its political art, yet in Loznitsa’s subtle visual and audio play, it puckishly pokes fun at the majesty on display.
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