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Sergei Loznitsa: Бабин Яр. Контекст / Babi Yar. Context (NL/UA 2022). |
Бабин Яр. Контекст / Babi Yar. Context
NL/UA 2022. PC: Atoms & Void / Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
Sergei LOZNITSA
– Director
Sergei LOZNITSA
– Script / Dialogue
Tomasz WOLSKI
– Film Editor
Danielius KOKANAUSKIS
– Film Editor
Sergei LOZNITSA
– Film Editor
Vladimir GOLOVNITSKI
– Sound
A compilation film about the Holocaust in Ukraine.
In black and white with some colour in Academy (1,37:1).
121 min
Languages: Ukrainian, Russian, German, Polish.
Festival premiere: 11 July 2021 Cannes Film Festival
Russian festival premiere: 12 Oct 2021 Moscow Jewish Film Festival
Finnish festival premiere: DocPoint online 31 Jan
– 6 Feb 2022.
Version with English credit sequences, intertitles and subtitles viewed at Lapinsuu, Midnight Sun Film Festival, Sodankylä, 16 June 2022.
Synopsis (Cannes Film Festival):
"
On September 29-30, 1941, Sonderkommando 4a of the Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by two battalions of the Police Regiment South and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, and without any resistance from the local population, shot dead in the Babi Yar ravine in the north-west of Kiev 33 771 Jews. The film reconstructs and visualises the historical context of this tragedy through archive footage documenting the German occupation of Ukraine and the subsequent decade. When memory turns into oblivion, when the past overshadows the future, it is the voice of cinema that articulates the truth."
AA: The more I read and watch about the Holocaust, the harder it gets.
Sergei Loznitsa's Babi Yar: Context is the strongest work I have read or seen about the massacre near Kiev in September 1941. The film is based on original documents. There are distant views, panoramic shots and tracking shots that document the epic scope of WWII in Ukraine. When Nazis occupy Kiev, Soviet partisans detonate much of the city centre. In revenge, Nazis organize a massacre of the Jews in Babi Yar.
Nazis attempt to erase all signs. Loznitsa conveys the massacre via several ways: the void itself, a montage of colour photographs of remaining objects, and documentation of a parallel massacres in Lviv and in Lubny (in Poltava) on 16 Oct 1941; those photographs are extraordinary. We get to read from
Vasily Grossman's "In Ukraine There Are No Jews". We see the report given to American journalists after the liberation of Kiev. Most movingly we see witness statements from the actress Dina Pronicheva, one of the rare Babi Yar survivors, and one of the executioners, SS private Hans Isenmann. Like in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, the voice testimony of those who were there makes us feel the presence of the unimaginable. There is a stunning sequence of the public hanging in Kiev of war criminals including Isenmann.
Besides Shoah, Loznitsa's film is equally about the context: the pervasive and persistent antisemitism in Ukraine and Russia. The persecuted Jews were not convincingly protected, and after the war, the Soviet Union tried to erase signs of the massacre. But: "The past is never dead. It's not even past" as William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun.
I have seen the first Babi Yar movie, Mark Donskoy's
Nepokoryonnye / The Unvanquished (SU 1945). The Soviet Union was the first country to make films about Nazi death camps: Maidanek (about Lublin, 1944) and Auschwitz / Oswiecim (1945), both in Poland. Donskoy was the first to make a film about Holocaust in the USSR. These movies belong to the anti-fascist continuum in Soviet cinema, including films such as Professor Mamlock and The Oppenheim Family (both 1938) covering anti-Jewish persecutions in Germany. The trend had been launched during the earliest years of Soviet cinema. For instance Dziga Vertov in his early newsreels had documented anti-fascist slogans in the First of May demonstrations of 1923. But there were macabre reversals, particularly during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and from the end of WWII till the death of Stalin.
Babi Yar was covered by bold poets like
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1961) and
Ilya Ehrenburg (1944 / 1959) but not by film-makers. Mikhail Romm's Everyday Fascism (1965) was a key film of the Thaw in this respect, one of the Trojan horses of Soviet cinema: while officially about Hitler, it was equally about Stalin.
Sergei Loznitsa's movie contributes powerfully to the uneasy coming to terms with the past in Ukraine and Russia.
In a sidenote about Finland, Finnish volunteers in the Waffen-SS entered the front in 1941 and early 1942, in units of the SS Division Wiking. In July 1941 they participated in Operation Barbarossa in conquering Ukraine in Ternopil, along the Dnieper River, north of Rostov-on-Don, and along the Mius River. Having fought on the Caucasus front and Stalingrad they retreated across the Don back to Ukraine.
The official view in Finland during the Cold War was that Finnish SS men knew nothing, saw nothing and did nothing related to the Holocaust. There is even a Finnish SS movie,
Aseveljeyden sankarit ([Heroes of the Brotherhood in Arms], FI 1943, free online on Elonet) which portrays Operation Barbarossa as warfare as usual, including in Ukraine in Husiatyn / הוסיאַטין (Ternopil Oblast), Kremenchuk, Dnipropetrovsk, along the Dnepr and in Zaporizhzhia.
But for instance Heikki A. Reenpää (1922
–2020), a giant in Finnish culture, reports in his memoirs Pojanpoika (1998) that he heard already in 1942 in a report on Ukraine from a Finnish SS veteran about mass executions, destructions of villages and houses in which inhabitants were burned alive. Images that we see in SS home movies in Loznitsa's film.
...
PS 24 June 2022
More about the context: from correspondence with a friend:
"
The historical context of this massacre includes the horrific pogroms in Ukraine after World War I that killed at least 100,000 and inured the local population to genocidal violence against Jews. "
An article in The New York Review of Books this month covers three recent books on the topic:
Magda Teter, Rehearsal for Genocide 6/9/2022
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/06/09/rehearsal-for-genocide-pogroms-magda-teter/
Magda Teter: "
Approaching the history of World War I and its aftermath from three different vantage points, Bemporad, Granick, and Veidlinger each conclude that the shocking anti-Jewish assaults of 1918–1921 help to explain what would take place a generation later. The “unprecedented” scale of destruction and “the performativity of violence against Jews” can now be seen, Granick argues, as a “bridge” to the Holocaust. According to Veidlinger [Jeffrey Veidlinger, In The Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust], the pogroms and what they stood for became “an acceptable response to the excesses of Bolshevism,” leaving a heritage of social tolerance for killing Jews. In 1941, therefore, when the Nazis invaded the territories of what is today Ukraine, they were able to mobilize the local population to do their dirty work, since it “had become inured,” he says, “to bloodshed and primed to target Jews in ethnic violence.” Furthermore, the connection between Bolshevism and Jews, as well as the nexus of anti-Semitism and opposition to Soviet rule discussed by Bemporad, made the atrocities of World War II less shocking. "
"
In the end, of course, the Nazis did most of the killing, but it was in Ukraine and Poland that they first grasped (Veidlinger again) “that the physical extermination of the Jewish population need not remain a utopian fantasy but could actually be realized.” On September 29, 1941, Germans shot to death nearly 34,000 Jews in about thirty-six hours in a ravine in Kyiv called Babyn Yar (more commonly known by its Russian name, Babi Yar). The site, which as a lieu de mémoire has been claimed and contested by many groups, was damaged by a Russian missile on March 3, 2022. "
/…/
"
The stories Bemporad, Granick, and Veidlinger tell in their very different books remind us how much our world is an heir to the violent legacy of World War I. Yet they also show, as the war in Ukraine underscores, that perhaps we do not have to be trapped in this past. Slava Ukraini is no longer a slogan of the perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence; it is a slogan of a country defending liberal democratic values, whose president is a descendant of Holocaust survivors. "
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: INFORMATION FROM ATOMS & VOID: