State Funeral finds absurdities and metaphors in archival footage of Stalin’s wake
Film Reviews Sergei Loznitsa
On a frigid day in March 1953, in a Moscow alley, middle-aged men in long dark coats carry a carnation-red coffin out the back of a small bus and into the back entrance of an austere building. A ballroom has been prepared with hot movie lights and prodigious wreaths, garlands, bouquets—an indoor jungle of floral arrangements, red, white, and green. The men huff and teeter as they exert themselves to lift the coffin on the bier. Young soldiers stand guard, staring off into nothing, trained to not acknowledge the physical comedy now going on behind them. At last, the coffin is in place, the lid is removed (it takes some effort), and we can see, via close-ups in color and black-and-white, its embalmed occupant: It’s Joseph Stalin. We are watching his memorial, with its weeping throngs and stilted lamentations.
Will the former USSR ever stop having to bury Stalin? This is the question ultimately asked by Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, which was edited from almost 40 hours of footage filmed for the official record. It is all too easy to read Loznitsa’s selections as a series of visual metaphors, beginning with the opening sequence. What we are witnessing is not a lid being placed on an era but the opposite: the lid’s wobbly removal by historical figures who are, to most viewers, anonymous. The minimal onscreen text identifies only the locations and foreign delegates, an eternal course of handshakes and small-town ceremonies, radiating from the central event in Moscow, where Stalin’s chief hatchet man Lavrentiy Beria and heir apparent Georgy Malenkov stand awkwardly in poorly tailored clothes. Soon, Beria would be dead from a bullet to the head and Malenkov would be on the losing end of a power struggle.
Loznitsa—a Russian-speaking filmmaker who was born in Belarus, spent his early life in Ukraine, and has been based in Germany for two decades—has, in both his documentaries and in fiction films like My Joy and In The Fog, established himself as a chronicler of unresolved Soviet trauma and post-Soviet entropy. These are different facets of the same cultural phenomenon. In State Funeral, as in Loznitsa’s other archival documentaries about Stalin-era Soviet history (among them the classic Blockade and the recent The Trial), the paradox of a ubiquitous past is reflected in audiovisual design. The original footage, most of it silent and shot in the distinct palette of German Agfacolor, has been combined with new sound effects: coughs, wheezes, squeaking shoes.
Compared to Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, which attempted to make World War I footage “come alive” with sound and digital magic, Loznitsa’s method is intentionally demystifying. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t offer a window into history: Generations removed, any documented banality can offer an insight into life in the past. When it comes to unused B-roll, a sense of the absurd is inevitable. Even in the opening shot, the coffin being unloaded, we can spy a man fumbling to find the right key for the bus door. Mourners struggle to fit humongous wreaths through doorways or stand in position waiting for the cameraman to call action. A group of artists is positioned near Stalin’s coffin, working with paints and clay to rapidly execute official artworks of the memorial like a bizarre socialist-realist art class.
With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be. We hear radio broadcasts with excessively detailed descriptions of Stalin’s pre-mortem medical conditions and long, risible poems about his superhuman kindness and genius. Stalin’s memory, it’s said again and again, will live on. But is it really Stalin, or a “Stalin” who could only exist in scare quotes?
The long reign of the man born Ioseb Jughashvili is often described as a cult of personality, which is a misleading concept. There was no charismatic persona behind the posters of a paternal Comrade Stalin, often pictured with soldiers or children. Out of all the world leaders of the 1930s and ’40s, he was easily the least gifted with the public. What Stalinist images legitimated more than anything was not the man in charge but the competing subsystems and political operatives that always seem to make up a single-party state’s fractious upper-management—the pallbearers who in more democratic circumstances would comprise an unelected deep state.
What Loznitsa is addressing is the rehabilitation of the Stalin era, specifically in Russia. Having shown the emptiness of the ceremony, he ends State Funeral on a sobering note with death tolls and statistics. Yet it is the mythic Stalin’s flimsy relationship to reality that makes rehabilitation possible: It allows one to believe that they are not rehabilitating Lavrentiy Beria, though the truth is that the exercise of power, even when nominally centralized in one figure in uniform, falls entirely on the schemers and flunkies.
27 Comments
Loved that movie. Stalin, on the other hand, was a huge cunt. Fuck him.
That’s such a great movie. Although I thought it was amusing that Buscemi and Beale, cast as Khrushchev and Beria respectively, actually look more like Beria and Khrushchev respectively.Favorite scene is when Zhukov trolls Khrushchev into thinking he’s going to report him. “…look at your fucking face!”
I honestly don’t think I could possibly name my favorite scene, there are so many great ones.
Stalin’s son throwing a temper tantrum and shouting “I hate being sober, it’s a terrible mood to be in!” was my vibe for 2020.
As a big fan of Veep and In the Loop I was looking forward to Death of Stalin’s satire, but was kind of surprised with how heavy it got (which is probably dumb on my part considering what the movie is about).
I was really intrigued by how the movie toggles between farce (most of the scenes) and occasional scenes of people being, like, rounded up in the night and shot with not even an iota of humor. Like, sure, we’re making fun of these dopes, but they also did a bunch of really horrible shit, and don’t you forget it.Also, my only other significant experience with Rupert Friend was as the perpetually stone-faced Quinn in Homeland, so he was kind of a revelation as a hilariously drunken idiot.
He plays a different sort of doofus in A Simple Favor, along with playing an even more stone-faced character in that Hitman adaptation (not the one with Olyphant).
I do want to see Friend’s Hitman at some point (because I love the Hitman franchise), even though by all accounts it’s terrible.I watched the Olyphant one for the first time a few months ago. It’s… interesting. Not great, kinda stupid, but it does some interesting things, like totally leaning into the “Agent 47 is not interested in sex” thing. Like she tries to seduce him and he just kind of rolls his eyes and sedates her and then gets back to what he was doing.
That’s kinda in-line with the games, although it’d make more sense if they actually stuck with “Genetically-engineered super-assassin who was genetically-engineered to be a super-assassin and nothing else” and not..what was it? Orphans raised by the Vatican? In Codename 47, a Hong Kong prostitute kisses him as thanks for rescuing her, and he’s visibly repulsed.
It’s what makes the farcical elements work – the whole system was a farce, but within it were horrifyingly evil human beings doing horrifyingly evil things.
I had no idea who Rupert Friend was prior to the movie and thought he looked like a discount Orlando Bloom, so I was pleasantly surprised by just how funny he was. He more than held his own with some iconic comedians and had some of the best scenes in the film.
Zhou En-Lai’s translator doing the hand gesture for “cocks and balls” whil maintaining is dead-serious, flawless translation, is just perfect.
I love that the idea was no one would do an accent and Jason Isaacs turns up and decides he needs to use a Yorkshire accent.
The decision to have everyone use their native accents (or at least accents from their home countries) was a great one, I think. It demonstrated how unnecessary is the typical trope of “everyone speaks English with a Russian accent” or even worse “everyone using an English accent to indicate that they’re foreigners.”
he’s my favorite part of that movie.
“Ah fooked Germany; Ah think Ah can ‘andle a fleshlump in a fookin’ waistcoat.”
I’d take issue with the claim that Stalin was the least gifted of all the world leaders with the public; he definitely wasn’t a great orator like Trotsky or, to take his fascist nemesis, Hitler, and anyways the general Marxist taste for numbingly long speeches was an impediment to anyone being seen in that way, but Stalin was apparently incandescently charming and made anyone who met him – soldiers, drivers, intellectuals, children, etc. – feel like they were the recipient of the affections of an intensely wonderful father figure who listened to an understood them, and Stalin as one of the few genuinely working-class Bolsheviks had a deft touch with relating to the common man – where Hitler was an asexual vegetarian artist, Stalin was a hard-drinking, hard-partying lad of a man with a fabulous singing voice who had children by at least three women, made the men laugh by knowing an extraordinary number of dirty poems, and made the kids laugh by throwing orange peels into people’s tea and stuff (though interestingly both Stalin and Hitler were incredible hypochrondriacs).I’m about to make a pretty terrible comparison, in that I’m about to compare a genocidal dictator to modern progressives, so I want to make clear that I think modern progressives are good but the Soviets were overall pretty bad, but it’s kind of the difference between the charisma of someone like Obama and someone like Biden. Biden’s charisma is not as immediately apparent as Obama’s, but he both won over the Party and then the country because he has an intuitive ability to make people feel like he hears them and relates to their struggles, and people just kind of like him and his folksy aura. Stalin is the man today remembered as a dictator who instilled a permanent aura of paranoia and obsequiousness in Moscow, because he was, but before that he was the guy who ran circles around Trotsky and the other Old Bolsheviks in securing the leadership of the nation because among the people he had the rough charm of a peasant warrior and within the Party he just made a lot more friends.
I can work with that analysis.
Trump’s sweep of the 2016 GOP Primaries comes to mind as well. While the GOP establishment was gaping in awe as they were swept aside, in 2021 they still seem to not grasp what Trump was representing that was so preferable to what the rest of the GOP was offering to Republican voters.
People might not expect it, but Stalin had a decent sense of humor.
also the soviet union did pretty well in terms of living conditions during his time. the nostalgia you see the old folk show toward his timeframe isn’t purely rose colored- life in the immediate post war era soviet union was relatively good
also the soviet union did pretty well in terms of living conditions during his time.He literally oversaw state-engineered famines that killed millions.
Let’s not do this.
Apparently both Churchill and Roosevelt thought Stalin was charming in the various meetings they had with him to decide the fate of post-war Europe.
Churchill was occasionally charmed by Stalin but that was tempered by his profound skepticism of Bolshevism and distrust of Stalin’s maneuvering, so they had some moments of camaraderie and some moments of pretty bitter sniping and tension at the conferences. But Roosevelt was basically totally enamored with Uncle Joe, and Stalin himself had a lot of nice things to say about America, since he liked American movies and in that time America was still sort of considered a kind of anti-imperialist power that had emancipated itself from the old feudal orders in favour of uplifting the common man, even in its bourgeois way. Stalin, of course, as a total chessmaster at backroom deals, was very happy to exploit that relationship and basically manipulated Roosevelt, this starry-eyed and soft-handed New York aristocrat, and played him expertly against Churchill in order to secure everything he wanted in the conferences.
Classic Psychopathic behaviour.
And, from what I’ve heard, one of the people responsible for the most deaths documented.
Is it weird that I really want to see this film, moreso than even most of the carefully-crafted and impeccably-targeted blockbusters I’m planning to see?It looks like Loznitsa’s Blockade is on Amazon Prime, so I’m guessing that’s a good place to start.
Beria, the one man who could actually make Stalin look humane, compassionate and sympathetic. Truly one of the worst human beings to have ever drawn breath, David Suchet played him as a scheming, sycophantic jester to Colin Blakely’s Stalin in Jack Gold’s underrated Red Monarch – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086178/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0- while Simon Russell Beale was terrific in the wonderful The Death Of Stalin but the real Beria was an unspeakably evil creature.
I remember watching an interview with Simon Sebag Montefiore (no fan of communism in general and Stalin in particular, so I wasn’t expecting “Good people, but mistakes were made”) a few years ago. From what I recall of the tone and content, the interview could be boiled down to something like, “Here’s Stalin and the terrible things he did. Here’s Molotov and the terrible things he did. Here’s Yezhov and the terrible things he did. Here’s Beria and…on a professional and personal level, Beria is the worst person you’ll ever hear about.”