Revue

The film is assembled from Soviet newsreels and television recordings of the fifties and sixties. Women milking on a collective farm, miners setting records, the space programme, folk dancing, reports read out in conference halls. No narrator, no commentary, no caption on any image. The film is not interested in a history lesson. It is interested in how a state displays itself: all of this footage was shot to boast, and lined up one after another the boasting turns into something else. Sergei Loznitsa achieves that by arranging only the order and the sound. The form is entirely archival: black and white, nothing newly shot, the sound redesigned. He used the same method in The Event, The Trial and Blockade. The title points at a variety programme: the scenes arrive as numbers, each complete in itself, with no story between them. Who it is for: viewers curious about Soviet everyday life and archival cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to be guided. The film explains nothing, gives no context and moves at the same rhythm for close to two hours.