Babi Yar. Kontekst / Babi Yar. Context

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 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:

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: INFORMATION FROM ATOMS & VOID:

After its win at Cannes, Babi Yar. Context [+] recently earned its prolific helmer, Sergei Loznitsa, a Special Mention for Best Creative Use of Archive at IDFA (see the news – his other 2021 release, Mr. Landsbergis [+], was crowned as Best Film at the same festival). His affection for such footage is already well established, and yet once again, he manages to prove that these images, especially without any explanatory narration that could make one immediately start considering taking a nap, can hit hard.

At times, it really does feel like the events that took place in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1941 are happening live. Loznitsa wastes no time in establishing the immediate danger, starting with explosions laying waste to people’s homes. His film, dedicated to the massacre that claimed the lives of thousands of people – 33,771, it’s reported here – does get explicit quite quickly. There are so many motionless corpses pictured, flies crawling on their faces, some barely resembling human bodies any more. It’s all there for the people to see, and they do. But the key to the film seems to lie not in its depictions of violence, but rather in one short sentence, stating that the horrific tragedy took place “without any resistance from the local population”.

Knowing how widespread antisemitism was in Europe at that time, or still is, some claim, it’s really not that surprising. But it happened so close, and there were so many people. The massacre itself doesn’t get a filmed treatment; it’s more about the before and after, the piles of clothes and abandoned belongings, just like in Auschwitz, or someone’s artificial leg suddenly deprived of its owner. It's good that Loznitsa doesn’t care much for words – when faced with such images, what good would they do, anyway? “One cannot explain it with words; it cannot be told,” repeats one of the witnesses later, during a trial “for the atrocities committed by fascist invaders”. Somehow ironically, perhaps, as these are the moments when words actually do make it into this mostly mute story and dilute its power a little.

“Murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women faithful to their husbands; murdered are women who are frivolous,” wrote Vasily Grossman in Ukraine without Jews in 1943, also quoted here, stating, “This is the murder of memories, sad songs, epic tales of good and bad times.”

There are scenes here that are genuinely upsetting, at one point scored to a sound that feels like a constant, animal-like lament. Others just show that conflicts like these come and go, and then come again, with the officials always getting their flowers from smiling children and the locals watching yet another parade, celebrating the fact they have survived and maybe will live long enough to welcome another general, and bring him more flowers. First, they put up posters of “Hitler the Liberator”. Then they rip them down, piece by piece. Co-edited by the director, his regular collaborator Danielius Kokanauskis and Polish director Tomasz Wolski, recently celebrated for 1970 [+], Babi Yar. Context shows the circle of war that just keeps on rolling and might never stop.

“We didn’t know,” was a sentence uttered often after the war. It wasn’t us; it was them: the “fascist dogs”, the Soviet troops. But it just doesn’t work this time around. People knew; they just didn’t care or decided not to react, too afraid or, understandably, putting themselves first. Or, and this is the most nauseating thought, they were actually glad that someone else took care of the problem. After reading an old excerpt from a paper, calling 29 September “a great day for the city of Kiev”, now “liberated from oriental barbarians” and finally able to breathe freely, one goes from “how could it happen” to “we are lucky it doesn’t happen more often”.

Babi Yar. Context was produced by Dutch outfit Atoms & Void and co-produced by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (Ukraine).

CANNES 2021 Special Screenings
Sergei Loznitsa • Director of Babi Yar. Context

“These people were like dust underground and for 80 years, nothing was done about it”

by Jan Lumholdt

19/07/2021 - CANNES 2021: The director turns his attention to a dark historical event that Europe has long tried to ignore and forget

Cineuropa: In your notes regarding this work, you write that you discovered the actual site of the killings already as a boy. Was that the genesis of the making of this film all these years later?

Sergei Loznitsa: Probably. I was born close to this place. When I first saw it, there was no monument, no sign, nothing. But in late September each year, people would show up to commemorate and the militia would come and disperse them. Finally one year, a stone was raised, where it was written: “here will be a monument dedicated to the Soviet people who were killed by Germans.” After yet another five or seven years, they built a monument, which was both strange and disgusting. Disgusting both from an artistic and ideological point of view. It stood there till now. When the Soviet Union collapsed, each nation built a monument dedicated to their own people who died there: one Ukrainian monument, one Jewish monument and one Romani monument. This division reminds me that a common memory does not yet exist. 150 000 people of the city of Kiev were killed during these three to four years. These people were like dust underground and for 80 years, nothing was done about it, no memorial, nothing. Until five years ago, in 2016, when the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was created. The artistic director of the centre, Ilya Khrzanovskiy, who I’ve known since film school in the 1990s, knew of my personal knowledge of the subject since childhood and asked me to make this film. I’ve also been planning, since some years back, a fiction feature, based on these events.

Q: The film consists of footage from the actual period, some by amateurs, including German soldiers, some from newsreels, some from filmed court trials. The material looks quite well-preserved, even pristine at times. How did you work, from a technical aspect?

A: Most of the sound was created, except for the footage with actual sound of course, when people give speeches. The rest we dubbed in, not by actors but by regular people, to get the right kind of voice for a German soldier, for example. I had 20 or 30 hours of footage, and for each episode I chose the best material for the topic, and for my artistic work. There was much more from the German side compared to the Russian or Soviet side. As for the good quality you so kindly mention, we made it look good, cleaned it up and added depth to the pictures. We had 8, 16 and 35 millimetre material, some even in colour.

Q: What would you like to call the film: a documentary, a document, a chronicle?

A: I like all those words. But to me, it’s firstly cinema. A piece of art.

Q: A term that turns up several times during the film is “chronocide.” Can you elaborate on its meaning?

A: We live in a time of chronocide, it’s around us. In some countries – Ukraine isn’t exclusive to this – people don’t want to say or hear truths about past events. Instead they prefer to talk about these events with a different tongue. “Well, the people who collaborated weren’t that bad,” things like this. “Chronocide,” this metaphorical word that gives a new meaning to “killing time,” was proposed by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Epstein, and I understand where it comes from. During the Soviet era, they said nothing about the Holocaust. It’s like society finds itself in a historical black hole where heritage is non-existent.