Squelched by the first spasms of de-Stalinization, the original film was a collaborative effort by six eminent directors, including Grigorii Aleksandrov, an early collaborator of Eisenstein’s who became famous for 1930s musical comedies, and Elizaveta Svilova, who helped create the Soviet montage documentary with her husband, Dziga Vertov. There is never any question about what they’re looking at, even when the body is out of sight.įaces and crowds are the substance of the Ukrainian-Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, a 2019 documentary created from 1953 footage for a documentary called The Great Farewell. Some are in tears, some look anxious or horrified, some wear an expression of awkward indifference, some might be suppressing a smile. The cadaver turns the heads of a torrent of mourners. At first you might miss Stalin in the sea of white flowers and crimson satin then you spot his waxy dead man’s face, the black moustache that Mandelstam famously, fatally compared to a cockroach.
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