The Shock of the Real: Two Films that Show History in the Raw
Is it the Netflixation of history? We’ve become increasingly accustomed to viewing historical or even recent events through the prism of fictional representation, mainly in TV dramas. The success of the drama The Crown, to give just the most obvious example, means that millions around the world see the Queen as Claire Foy-Olivia Colman-(and now) Imelda Staunton in her various ages rather than the admittedly inscrutable person who sits on the actual throne. The way events are portrayed in the series is assumed to be the reality, even if there is no real proof they actually happened. Even serious factual documentaries are not complete without dramatized re-enactments of events with actors bulked up to play Henry VIII or sporting a bushy moustache and a thick Georgian accent for Stalin. “We don’t have to get anything correct,” said Kristen Stewart after the premiere of the widely praised film about Princess Diana, Spencer. “We were just sort of allowed to allow art and multiplicity to bring her back to life for a moment”
Into this climate the documentaries of Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa fall like a scalding gush of freezing water, shocking the viewer by making you look reality square in the eye. I’ve been particularly startled by two Loznitsa documentaries, the recently released State Funeral (2019) on the ceremonies marking Stalin’s death in 1953, and The Trial (2018) about a 1930 show trial under the Soviet tyrant. Both films, compiled from hours of archive material, are edited with added sound effects to create their own rhythm and force the viewer to watch the footage with the constant thought hammering in the head of ‘ My God, this actually happened’ and not take comfort in the dividing wall provided by an actor.
While State Funeral takes its departure from the funeral ceremony for Stalin as he lies in state in his open coffin in Moscow’s House of the Unions, it’s really about the faces of everyone else. The reactions and expressions of ordinary Soviet citizens who march in to pay their respects to the dictator in a near endless procession. Some are crying in genuine grief, others seem strangely puzzled, more often than not the expression simply keeps the mind an eternal secret. A younger woman with the hint of an enigmatic smile. An old man without expression, staring blankly ahead. A tired looking woman crying with a tissue in her hand. They never knew that they would be scrutinised in this way, almost seventy years on. Are the tears just a ritual, brought on by fear? Are people perhaps crying for those lost in the purges? But could the grief also be genuine? “On our first day without Stalin. It’s the day when he is gone. Death has come, and everything is useless. Death has come — and we are all alone,” says a speech read out loud in Moscow as people queue to buy the newspaper to read about his death.
As well as ordinary Russians, those inspecting the coffin include well-known figures. The grand Soviet leaders and foreign dignitaries appear suddenly, like anyone else, but there is the jump of recognition. Future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, focused and not looking in mourning at all. Perhaps preparing the machinations that would ultimately bring him absolute power. Top apparatchik Georgy Malenkov, who appears introverted and troubled. And the feared secret service chief Lavrenti Beria, with a touch of swagger in a wide-brimmed hat and a smirk that belies the fact he would be dead months later. The great culminating set piece is the funeral ceremony in Red Square outside Lenin’s mausoleum, already inscribed with both the names of Lenin and Stalin. The leadership climb to the top of the monument and give speeches in a glacial cold. Khrushchev declares the ceremony open and closed, Malenkov, foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Beria are shown speaking. Many of the foreign dignitaries are shown frozen solid, including Chou Enlai of China and Romanian dictator Gheorghe-Dej.
These hypnotic and disorientating techniques are used to possibly even greater effect in The Trial, which portrays the 1930 show trial of eight economists and engineers accused of sabotage at the behest of foreigners known as the Industrial Party Trial (Protsess Prompartii). Proceedings take place in exactly the same place as would be used 13 years later for the lying in state of Stalin, the grand Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions. It remains in use even today, and living in Moscow I frequently attended classical music concerts there, troubled by the ghosts of the past while enjoying its admittedly very fine acoustic. The charges are a complete fabrication but the half dozen accused meekly admit their guilt robotically with little emotion, reading out their confessions like they were a scientific paper. Sometimes they implicate eachother in the plot. Again we are confronted with the constant thump of uncomfortable questions. Have they been tortured into submission? Are they agonising behind the facade? Or have they even been falsely convinced of their guilt?
As the defendants one-by-one address the court, the camera gazes at the hundreds crammed in the Hall of the Columns. Some smile, laugh, others bored and a few shield their eyes from the piercing light used to illuminate the picture. Their stenographers, clerks, guards. Loznitsa is in no hurry to let the footage go on and there is time to ask what would become of these people in later years, through yet more purges and then World War II. The verdicts are read out by judge Andrei Vyshinsky, one of the key figures of the Stalin era and a notorious player in the purges. Five are sentenced to death and three to 10 years prison. Vyshinsky would survive being purged himself and went on to succeed Molotov as Soviet foreign minister in the wake of World War II. The prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko, however was himself executed in 1938. Of the condemned, none were executed in the end after the sentences were commuted and all eventually rehabilitated. In the context of Soviet show trials, it’s not even the most remarkable. But the knowledge this was a near habitual event in the 1930s in the USSR only adds to the intensity.
The films fall into a proud tradition of montage films made in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Romm’s 1965 film Ordinary Fascism (also known in the West as Triumph over Violence) sought to tear up the myths of Nazism with savage mockery of the excesses of the Third Reich, such as the mediaeval costumed extravaganzas, adulation of Hitler and the screaming rants of Goebbels. To make the point, Romm, one of the Soviet Union’s most eclectic directors whose career began in the silent era, contributed (Werner Herzog-style) a deadpan voiceover. A pioneering documentary was the 1927 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by the editor Esfir Shub, one of the great early female Soviet filmmakers. In a similar fashion she splices together archive footage of the Romanov dynasty to make the point to Soviet audiences that the fall of Nicholas II was inevitable.
Dziga Vertov, the acclaimed Soviet filmmaker who created the iconic Man with Movie Camera, also put together a remarkable sequence about Lenin’s funeral in his 1934 Three Songs About Lenin. It is strikingly similar to State Funeral — although shorter — in how it shows people filing in to inspect Lenin’s coffin, focusing on their faces and repeating one shot after another. Top leaders are shown as well as the masses such as secret police chief Felix Dzherzhinsky who looks himself a pallid walking corpse. The most striking mourner in Vertov’s film is terrifyingly alive however — Stalin himself.
We live in an era where myth and story-telling are overriding the reality of actual historical events, as their fictional representation on television reprints the imagination. The 2017 English-language film The Death of Stalin — which was controversially banned in Russia — may have brought out some of the panic that Stalin’s henchmen felt when the leader died but brought modern viewers no closer to understanding the reality of how it was. Loznitsa cannot explain how people really felt when they filed past Stalin’s coffin. But eschewing any fictional myth-making it plunges us into the centre of events and shows how discomforting the memory of real history can be.
