Gosudarstvennye pokhorony / State Funeral

Sergei Loznitsa: Государственные похороны / Gosudarstvennye pokhorony / State Funeral (NL/LT 2019). A compilation of news footage from Stalin's funeral.

Государственные похороны / Gosudarstvennyje pohorony.
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Production: ATOMS & VOID (Sergei Loznitsa, Maria Choustova), Studio Uljana Kim (Uljana Kim)
135’
Language: Russian
Country: Netherlands, Lithuania
Screenplay: Sergei Loznitsa
Editor: Danielius Kokanauskis
Sound: Vladimir Golovnitski
    Festival premiere: 6 Sep 2019 Venice Film Festival.
    Midnight Sun Film Festival (MSFF) online 20 June 2021, with English subtitles.
    MSFF online, viewed on a 4K tv set in Lappeenranta, Midsummer Eve, 26 June 2021.

Venice Film Festival 2019: “ Unique, mostly unseen before, archive footage from March 1953, presents the funeral of Joseph Stalin as the culmination of the dictator’s personality cult. The news of Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, shocked the entire Soviet Union. The burial ceremony was attended by tens of thousands of mourners. We observe every stage of the funeral spectacle, described by Pravda newspaper as “the Great Farewell”, and receive an unprecedented access to the dramatic and absurd experience of life and death under Stalin’s reign. ”

“ The film addresses the issue of Stalin’s personality cult as a form of terror-induced delusion. It gives an insight into the nature of the regime and its legacy, still haunting the contemporary world. ” Venice Film Festival 2019

Director’s Statement:

“ The death of Stalin meant the death of an epoch. Without even realising this, millions of people, mourning the Leader in March 1953, were also living through a life-changing experience in their own private histories. ”

“ It is crucial for me to bring the spectator inside this experience not as an impartial observer of a historical event or an admirer of rare archival footage, but as a participant and a witness of a grandiose, terrifying and grotesque spectacle, revealing the essence of a tyrannical regime. ”

“ I see this film as a visual study of the nature of Stalin’s personality cult and an attempt to deconstruct the ritual, which formed the foundation of the bloody regime. It is unthinkable that today, in Moscow circa 2019, 66 years after Stalin’s death, thousands of people gather at his tomb on March 5th, in order to lay flowers and mourn his death. I believe it’s my duty as a filmmaker to employ the power of documentary image to appeal to the minds of my contemporaries, and to seek truth. ” Director’s Statement

AA: Sergei Loznitsa's feature-length documentary has been created with the Emile de Antonio method. The documents speak for themselves. There is no commentary.

Only the end titles give us a resume of Stalin's legacy: 27 million murdered, executed, tortured, deported, and 15 million starved to death. The De-Stalinization started in 1956, and Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum in 1961.

The technical quality of the footage is brilliant. The film looks like shot today. It is immersive, as if we were there.

The cult of personality is crystallized at the moment of death in slogans such as: "Fulfill Stalin's immortal cause", "Stalin is dead: long live Stalin"

The scope and depth of the national mourning epic is extraordinary. We visit the entire Soviet Union, from the Black Sea oil rigs to the reindeer-herding Nenets, from the Altai region to Khabarovsk, from Tallinn to Riga, from Moscow to Minsk and Vladivostok. The news spreads from the village radios to Estonia's Rahva Hääl. All newspapers feature the photo of Stalin, often an identical one. Flags are pulled down to half-mast. Engine drivers sound their alarm whistles in chorus. Gun salutes are made. Moments of silence are staged. The Soviet empire falls silent. The mobilization is immense. The mourning crowds are endless, as are funeral wreaths. The feeling of profound grief and helplessness is genuine and ubiquitous.

We are left to contemplate the multiple layers and meanings of this mysterious sorrow.

A film within the film, reassembled, is the vintage official Stalin funeral documentary, Velikoye proshchaniye / Великое прощание / Great Mourning / Le Grand Adieu (SU 1953, 65 min), directed (n.c.) by Grigori Aleksandrov, Mikhail Chiaureli, Sergei Gerasimov, Ilya Kopalin, Irina Setkina and Elizabeta Svilova (the wife of Dziga Vertov). We are reminded of Vertov's Three Songs About Lenin (1934), itself a problematic film, made under the control of Stalin. 195 cinematographers are credited.

Besides the dead Stalin, the film features Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Nikolai Bulganin, Nikita Khrushchev, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, as well as Svetlana Alliluyeva and Vasili Stalin. The main speakers are Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria and Molotov.

Visitors from China include Zhou Enlai, Guo Moruo and Li Fuchun, from Poland, Bolesław Bierut and Konstantin Rokossovsky, from Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, from Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi and István Dobi, from Rumania, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, from Albania, Spiro Koleka, from Bulgaria, Valko Chervenkov, from Mongolia, Yumgaagiin Tsedenbal and Nudenhuugiin Yadamzhav, from the GDR, Max Reimann, Walter Ulbricht, Otto Grotewohl and Wilhelm Ziesser.

From France, there is Jacques Duclos, from Italy, Palmiro Togliatti and Pietro Nenni, from Great Britain, Harry Pollitt and Peter Kerrigan, from Austria, Johann Koplenig, from the Spanish exile, Dolores Ibárruri, and from the Philippines, Jesus Lava.

Few are those who are not Communist insiders. From India, there is Saifuddin Kitchlew. And from Finland, State Minister Urho Kekkonen, the lone panther in this crowd.

On the soundtrack, we never hear the revolutionary funeral march, "Замучен тяжелой неволей" (обр. Л. Шульгина – Г. Мачтет, 1876) / "Sait kärsiä puolesta aatteen" / "Slavery and Suffering".

Instead, the soundtrack is based on classical music:
– Schumann: Kinderszenen 6: Träumerei, Op. 15
– Tchaikovsky: 6. Symphony, Op. 74
– Tchaikovsky: 5. Symphony, Op. 64
– Schubert: Klaviertrio No. 2, D 929, Op. 100
– Mendelssohn: Lieder ohne Worte: Op. 62 Nr. 3 Andante maestoso e-Moll MWV U 177 "Trauermarsch"
– Mozart: Requiem, K. 626
– Chopin: Marche funèbre, Op. 35

If memory serves, there was a distant echo of Beethoven: 3. Sinfonie "Eroica" Op. 55, 2. Satz: "Marcia funebre"

With a harrowing Stalin cult of personality anthem:
– Matvei Blanter: "Колыбельная" / "Lullaby", lyr. Isaak Dunayevsky, perf. Sergei Lemeshev (1949) .

After all these years, André Bazin's classic essay "Le Cinéma Soviétique et le mythe de Staline" (1950), with an appendix added to Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? I (1958), quoting Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (1956), remains the superior analysis of the theme. Although written by Bazin while Stalin was still alive, it is also illuminating about his funeral hagiography.