Massed mourners hail the dictator’s flower-clad body in a film that gives long-lost footage a new and unnerving lease of life
For this very disquieting documentary, like a two-hour bad dream, Sergei Loznitsa has assembled hitherto unseen footage in colour and black-and-white that was shot in the Soviet Union in 1953; it shows the official obsequies for the death of Stalin, whose body is seen lying in state, surrounded by lush flowers, like a Marxist-Leninist Ophelia. All this was reportedly intended for an official film, but, as the Khrushchev era advanced, and Stalin’s reputation declined, there was evidently no enthusiasm for editing and presenting this footage in the right spirit, and so it was allowed to languish, forgotten.
And what is so extraordinary is that these scenes of people shuffling along in the streets, obediently reading newspaper reports, listening to speeches, presenting wreaths, were clearly intended to be edited as ambient material, doubtless accompanied with a strident voiceover. Loznitsa doesn’t do this. He just presents long stretches of eerily fascinating scenes, the long national pageant of sleepwalker-solemnity, like a live feed from some reverential television broadcast. (You can imagine some Dimbleby-esque commentator for the actual funeral scenes at the end.)