A Concept of Reality

While one might assume that it would be emotionally and morally gratifying to watch the funeral of a tyrant, Sergei Loznitsa’s astounding archival documentary State Funeral challenges that belief. Using magnificently restored footage (both black-and-white and colour) of the grandiose four-day affair that was the 1953 funeral of Joseph Stalin, Loznitsa immerses us in the spectacular pomp of a dictator’s cult of personality. Any sense of catharsis provided by the spectacle that marked the end of this reign, however, is overwhelmed by the impact of Stalin’s figure on display. The sight inspires fear as much as awe, for one can see in the commemoration of the dead dictator the projected, and subsequently embalmed, grandiosity of his life—a grandiosity enshrined on film by the monumental imagery shot by hundreds of cameramen, and helmed by four of the Soviet Union’s biggest directors. The footage that Loznitsa has exhumed presents a mourning, pan-Soviet populace engaged in extreme pageantry and exhibiting both real and performed sorrow, connected through radio, loudspeakers, and (if the film had ever been publicly released) cinema. We see the masses shuffle past Stalin’s body, tilted away from them amid countless wreaths, and soon realize that these sombre leaders and proles have giant spotlights and 35mm cameras in their faces, all to capture their reactions, put them on display, and turn their grief into spectacle. We hear the maudlin sentimentality of paeans, odes, and other speeches, which, in tandem with the colossal imagery, are meant to swamp the viewer with the inconceivably immense importance of the deceased and the presumption of his enduring legacy.

The nature of Loznitsa’s intervention in this material is tricky to pinpoint. As in (2018), his previous archival documentary about a 1930 Soviet show trial, the filmmaker adheres to the general chronology of his source material, with little obvious tinkering for effect. Certainly, the movie’s frequent shifts from black and white to colour, the addition of foley sound effects, a mention of the Donbass and Ukraine, the lingering on faces, and, most startlingly, the continuity cuts between different cameras recording the same documentary material, suggest an editorial hand intent on revealing the constructedness of the totemic proceedings. But this manipulation is so subtle that one could be forgiven for thinking that is merely a restoration of , the pre-existing, unreleased propaganda record that Loznitsa’s film is