State Funer­al – first look review

Fea­ture-length doc­u­men­taries have become such a sophis­ti­cat­ed art form, film­mak­ers increas­ing­ly have to have some­thing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary up their sleeve to win over an audi­ence. If unseen archive proves the great­est trea­sure of them all, then this unique­ly Sovi­et endeav­our sure­ly knocks it out of the park.

Draw­ing on extra­or­di­nary footage, both colour and black and white, which has been beau­ti­ful­ly restored, State Funer­al is a sober­ing doc­u­ment of a nation caught in the grip of mass mourn­ing. Stal­in remained a remote, vague out­line of a fig­ure to mil­lions of Rus­sians and is here clear­ly mar­ket­ed by the state as an icon, a tow­er of strength and self-sac­ri­fice, rather than the tyrant he actu­al­ly was.

The film begins with Joseph Stalin’s body lying in state, sur­round­ed by an enor­mous dis­play of flow­ers that threat­ens to engulf him at any moment. In a dis­play of blind obe­di­ence – with a device that is repeat­ed over and over again in this sub­tly arrest­ing film – every­day Rus­sians (and lat­er dig­ni­taries) file past to pay their respects. Queues of peo­ple line the streets at every turn. The sight of this is stag­ger­ing, giv­en what we know now about the man and his bru­tal poli­cies on his own people.

Set against a near-con­tin­u­ous score of clas­si­cal won­der (Schu­bert and Tchaikovsky fea­ture, as do oth­ers), we trav­el the length and breadth of the for­mer USSR (or at least, appear to), as rur­al and urban com­mu­ni­ties of all shapes and sizes cease their activ­i­ties to remem­ber their leader. Almost as con­tin­u­ous is the hyp­not­ic, near-monot­o­nous drone of rous­ing pas­sages of detail read over over pub­lic address sys­tems, which list all man­ner of infor­ma­tion about their late leader – includ­ing, even more strange­ly, his med­ical ail­ments and offi­cial cause of death.

For those not famil­iar with Sergei Loznitsa’s remark­able body of work (the acclaimed, mul­ti-award-win­ning film­mak­er makes dra­ma and docs in equal mea­sure), dis­cov­er­ing a film like this will prove a rev­e­la­tion. Rarely, if ever, have we seen state-spon­sored pomp and cer­e­mo­ny on such a breath-tak­ing scale. Giv­en this was a time when com­mu­ni­ca­tion was more com­mon­ly shared via words on a page or a voice on radio rather than on screen, it’s even more alarm­ing when one draws a par­al­lel to today.

It’s not beyond the realms of pos­si­bil­i­ty, for instance, to imag­ine Putin or, for that mat­ter, Trump con­coct­ing an elab­o­rate series of events to offi­cial­ly mark their pass­ing, should they still be in pow­er when their lights go out. The means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion may well be dif­fer­ent today, but the sheer naked ambi­tion to rule with an iron fist and present a con­coct­ed nar­ra­tive of absur­dist fic­tion remains alive and well.

State Funer­al is med­i­ta­tive and thought­ful, rather than bom­bas­tic and brash – and there isn’t a great pay-off at the tail, either. But as a wry piece of intel­li­gent and mea­sured film­mak­ing, it leaves an indeli­ble mark, a pow­er­ful res­o­nance that proves impos­si­ble to shake off.

For those left won­der­ing where the source of all this footage lies, some answers can be found neat­ly tucked away in the film’s final cred­its. Ever the polit­i­cal ani­mal, Loznitsa’s fol­low-up to last year’s The Tri­al (also at Venice) is every­thing you could want it to be and more.