Propaganda as evidence – Weekend
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Films made with specific political goals can be completely rethought when they find themselves in different hands years later. Footage filmed for propaganda turns out to be evidence of state crimes, official footage of state celebrations turns out to be an exposure of the political regimes that ordered them. Andrey Kartashov talks about films that remind you that everything you shoot can be used against you.
“The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty”
Esther Shub, 1927
Among the pioneers of Soviet editing cinema, the name of Esther Shub remains not very well known – in comparison with her classic colleagues Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Meanwhile, it was Shub (who began her career re-editing a Chaplin film for Soviet distribution) who is considered the inventor of the found footage method, in which archival footage, previously filmed by someone else, is reassembled in a new way and in a different context. “The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty” is a prototype of this approach: for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the communist Shub made a chronicle of the last years of the Russian monarchy and, naturally, used for this the filming of the court filmmakers of Nicholas II. Filming palace ceremonies was fashionable among European royal houses – a film about the coronation of Nicholas was created just a year after the invention of the movie camera! – but Shub, in the Marxist spirit, creates in his montage contrasts between the luxurious life of the monarchs and the poverty of their subjects, turning the vanity of the kings against themselves.
“Unfinished Film”
Yael Hersonsky, 2010
One of the important plot points in Winfried Sebald’s book “Austerlitz” is the story of the propaganda film “The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City”, filmed in the Terezin ghetto in 1944. On the eve of the arrival of representatives of the International Red Cross, the concentration camp was turned into a Potemkin village, the overcrowded barracks were cleared, for which hundreds of prisoners were deported to other camps, and those who remained had to act out scenes from the good Jewish life on camera: work in workshops, a vegetable garden, a library, football, orchestra and coffee and cakes. The film, completed in October 1944, has never been shown in its entirety and has barely survived. Everyone involved in its filming, including director Kurt Gerron, was sent to Auschwitz and killed. Another pseudo-chronicle was filmed in 1942 about the Warsaw ghetto – the creators of the chronicle made a lot of effort to portray life there as completely normal, but two months after filming, mass purges began in the ghetto and the film was not completed. Using this chronicle as an example, using the testimonies of survivors and the testimony of one of the German cameramen, Israeli Yael Hersonsky exposes the mechanisms of propaganda: over 80 years the world has changed in many ways, but the principles of manipulation in the media have changed little.
“Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu”
Andrey Uzhitsa, 2010
Researcher of the Ceausescu regime in socialist Romania, Andrei Uzhitsa, presented a monumental portrait of the dictator at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, and the mainstream press was then disappointed that the documentarian chose not to provide historical context or explain anything at all in his three-hour film. However, such a move is fundamental to the director’s concept. An authoritative voice-over is an essential element of propaganda, and Uzica prefers not to adopt the techniques of those he criticizes or provide interpretations to let the images speak for themselves. The film is compiled from thousands of hours of archival material filmed during Ceausescu’s 25-year reign by state chroniclers. And with the title Uzhitsa emphasizes: he did not create this chronicle. These shootings were commissioned by Ceausescu himself; this is how he wanted to see and show himself—that is, an “autobiography.” All the more frightening and ridiculous are the shots in which the official celebrations resemble either the processions of “ourists” or the role-playing games of reenactors. The spoiler for this absurd story about the love of power is stated in the very first frames of the Autobiography: Ceausescu was the only leader of the Warsaw bloc who, with the fall of socialism, lost not only power, but also his life.
“State Funeral”
Sergey Loznitsa, 2019
Like Uzhitsa in “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu,” Sergei Loznitsa does not resort to voice-over text when working with chronicles (this has been a constant feature of his method since the first archival film “Blockade”). Like Yael Hersonsky, Loznitsa’s material is an unfinished propaganda film that was supposed to be called The Great Farewell, but was never released on the Soviet screen. In the March days of 1953, leading directors of the USSR, from Grigory Alexandrov to Elizaveta Svilova, and several dozen cameramen worked on a particularly important state order – filming mourning events after the death of Joseph Stalin throughout the country. Loznitsa suspects that the comrades who survived Stalin were already preparing to abandon his legacy, and therefore there were no plans to release The Great Farewell. One way or another, the pictures of mass grief – sometimes feigned, sometimes sincere – look like a unique document of the era and, of course, say much more not about the deceased, but about the state of Soviet society, which recently experienced repression and war.
“Anna”
Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lemuskallio, 1997
The Finnish-Nenets creative and family duo Markku Lemuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui have been studying the life, history and culture of the indigenous peoples of the North through cinema for several decades. In an attempt to capture a disappearing way of life, they visited Yamal (where Anastasia was born), Chukotka, Taimyr, Canada, Lapland. “Anna” is a documentary portrait of a woman from the Nganasans, a small people of Northwestern Siberia. As a child, when Anna studied at a boarding school for Nganasan children from nomadic families, she became the heroine of a beautiful Soviet documentary about the benefits of assimilation – but she had never seen the film until Lapsui and Lemuskallio showed it to her. The optimistic voice of the announcer in the Soviet film and the slogans about the party – “the mind, honor and conscience of our era” run as a counterpoint through the film about the adult Anna, who first lost her native Nganasan culture, and after the collapse of the USSR, her acquired identity as a Soviet person.
“Our homeland is France”
Rithi Pan, 2015
Cambodian Rithi Panh fled the country as a child from the Khmer Rouge, one of the most brutal political regimes of the 20th century. The life’s work for the director, who settled in France, was to bear witness to those monstrous events – despite the fact that the Khmer Rouge, who despised cinema, left almost no documentary material for this, even propaganda. His film “The Missing Image” is dedicated to the need to talk about the crimes of the past in the absence of archives. “Our Motherland is France” is a departure from the director’s main theme. Here Rithi Pan works with footage commissioned by the French colonial administration in the region that was then called Indochina. Instead of voice-over text, there are credits on the screen, stylizing the film as a silent movie: the captions seem to present the point of view of white Europeans who believe that they brought enlightenment and prosperity to the ancient Khmer culture. At the same time, when it comes to the “universal” economic benefits that supposedly came with French rule, for some reason only Cambodians are engaged in heavy physical labor on screen. And by the end of the film, peaceful pictures from the life of French Indochina are replaced by a chronicle of battles between locals and colonialists.
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