State Funeral (2019)

Directed by: Sergei Loznitsa | 135 minutes | documentary

What if a powerful despot from the greatest country in the world dies? The Soviet Union held its breath on March 5, 1953. Lengthy processions of people stumbled past Joseph Stalin’s coffin in Moscow’s Red Square, and countless Communist committees organized mass rallies at effigies of the old ruler across the country. From Stalingrad to Vladivostok, cameramen stood ready to immortalize the last honor for the Red Tsar on celluloid. The whole Soviet Union moved for him when he was alive. At his death, the whole empire stood still. At least, if you believe the Latvian-Dutch documentary production ‘State Funeral’. You’re also looking at a well-considered selection of old movie propaganda that kept pace with the cult of personality surrounding Stalin.

Some 65 years later, Ukrainian director Sergey Loznitsa, also responsible for special film productions such as ‘Donbass’ (2018), ‘Gentle Creature’ (2017) and ‘In the Fog’ (2012), has captured footage of Stalin’s vigil and the days of mourning afterward surfaced from state archives. He then edited the images together with editor Danielius Kokanauskis into a smoothly running montage of two hours and fifteen minutes. The restoration of the statues alone must have been a monster job. Especially if you count in the credits the number of people who worked to capture this biggest national event.

Loznitsa’s project has been more than worth the hard work in the archives. ‘State Funeral’ is overwhelming, absurd, pompous, stately and at times hypnotic. It is a curious mix of grandeur and sadness interspersed with universal images of mourning the death of a statesman who was a father figure to many. In this case of the cruelest kind. In addition, the documentary film is not only of great cultural-historical importance, but it also wryly displays the aesthetic beauty of state propaganda. There are breathtaking images in ‘State Funeral’, from moving close-ups of the multi-ethnic population to panoramic images of the immense Soviet empire. In addition, the images occasionally change without mercy between color and black and white.

Although there is a lot of repetition in ‘State Funeral’, you can discover countless curious details. At the beginning you see a group of burly Soviet men carrying the coffin with Stalin in it in a somewhat clumsy way. It could just be that the coffin slips out of their hands and the great Stalin (he wore, among other things, extra thick shoe soles to look bigger) slides to the ground like a salt bag. In the crowd there are not only sad people, but also children playing or people with a barely suppressed cheerful expression on their faces. In addition, the soundtrack shows striking details. Great speeches thunder past that almost lull you to sleep with ideological-political language. Here the communist promises already sound like a horrible joke. Also bizarre is the listing of Stalin’s causes of death. In detail, this information reverberates through public sound poles, over the radio and in movie theaters throughout the Soviet Empire.

That rumbling with the coffin in ‘State Funeral’ could also have been a scene in the satirical ‘The Death of Stalin’ (Armando Iannucci, 2017). This film offers a look behind the political scenes during this turbulent time for the Soviet regime. Iannuci’s film is full of fictional interventions. However, how high is the fictional content in ‘State Funeral’? Lotznitsa’s production is basically a montage of not so innocent archive images. These images also served as state propaganda to promote nationalism. How much more footage is there? And what choices did Loznitsa and Kokanauskis make? The fact that Jozef Vissarionovich Stalin has died is actually rock solid, but the whole fuss around it? After all, the veneration of Stalin was already ubiquitous in the Soviet Union during his reign and a part of the incumbent should not be underestimated.

Except for a text at the end about Stalin’s legacy when the cameras were not rolling, it is remarkable that ‘State Funeral’ offers little historical context. The number of people who have died directly and indirectly as a result of his regime runs into the millions. While the exact numbers will always be up for debate, it cannot be denied that Stalin was at the helm of a murderous and greedy cabal. Even his successor Nikita Khrushchev, no sweetheart at all (see also Andrei Konchalovsky’s ‘Dear Comrades’, 2020, and Dominic Cooke’s ‘The Courier’, 2020), already accounted for this horrific reign. In addition, Khrushchev banned the worship of his predecessor and had Stalin’s body removed from the Mausoleum, where Lenin also lay, in 1961.