Do You Hear What I Hear?

IN SERGEI LOZNITSA’S STATE FUNERAL, SOVIET CITIZENS congregate throughout the country in March 1953 to honor the passing of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. Entirely archival, the footage for the film derives from a movie called The Great Farewell, which draws on dozens of filmmakers who captured the four days of public mourning that followed Stalin’s death. That early film had been shelved and was scarcely seen until the ’90s, whereas Loznitsa’s premiered in September in Venice before coming to North America for the Toronto and New York film festivals.

gathers that raw material, shot on both black-and-white and color film stock, into an effectively linear synchronicity of disparate shoots all witnessing a similar procession of reverence and solemnity: from workers emerging out of an oil rig hoisting Stalin’s portrait—presented as if it