NZIFF Film Review: "State Funeral" ("Прощание со Сталиным") (2019).

From the director of Donbass (Донбас) comes State Funeral (Прощание со Сталиным). This Russian documentary film directed by Sergei Loznitsa. This Unique, mostly unseen before, archive footage from March 1953, presents the funeral of Joseph Stalin as the culmination of the dictator's personality cult. The news of Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, shocked the entire Soviet Union. The burial ceremony was attended by tens of thousands of mourners. We observe every stage of the funeral spectacle, described by Pravda newspaper, as the Great Farewell, and receive an unprecedented access to the dramatic and absurd experience of life and death under Stalin's reign. The film addresses the issue of Stalin's personality cult as a form of terror-induced delusion. It gives an insight into the nature of the regime and its legacy, still haunting the contemporary world.

In early March 1953, after three decades of tyranny and terror, Stalin's staff found him semi-conscious on the bedroom floor of his Volynskoe dacha. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He was moved onto a couch and remained there for three days. On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. An autopsy revealed that he had died of a cerebral hemorrhage and that he also suffered from severe damage to his cerebral arteries due to atherosclerosis. It was rumoured that Stalin was murdered. On March 6, Stalin's death was announced. The body was embalmed, and then placed on display in Moscow's House of Unions for three days. Crowds were such that a crush killed around a hundred people. On March 9, the funeral culminated in the body being laid to rest in Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square; hundreds of thousands attended. That month featured a surge in arrests for "anti-Soviet agitation" as those celebrating Stalin's death came to police attention. The Chinese government instituted a period of official mourning for Stalin's death.

The film is relatively silent - there is no added commentary, no titles, no extra sound - capturing an emotional detachment that is hard to shake, all the more so because of its prevalence. It is precisely the director's economy and calm before this loaded historical subject that makes Austerlitz all the more powerful. The film's visual and spatial incongruities impose tacit condemnation-a kind of guilt-by-participation determination-but, more plaintively, the contrasts allow for a sustained contemplation of the elegiac, of memorialization. Exhibiting a simplicity and intellectual acuity that is far too rare in the field of documentary, Loznitsa has created a film whose cumulative impact will stay with you long after you watch it. Prepare to draw plenty of conclusions about and insights into human nature from their ordinary exploits, including many that you won't expect. What one collects by the end is a rounded portrait of humanity, and, somehow, one of hope, despite the ghastliness of the controversial ideology and the need to revisit them. The present-day worth of preserved Soviet relics is tacitly addressed in Sergei Loznitsa's brilliant observational doc. While the film explores an important thesis, its presentation is all but enticing.

Simon says State Funeral (Прощание со Сталиным) receives:

Also, see my reviews for Donbass (Донбас) and Ema.