State Funeral

March 1953: Stalin is dead and the Soviet Union spends four days on his funeral. The film shows those four days with no commentary, no talking heads and no present-day framing, using nothing but footage shot at the time. It is not interested in Stalin. It is interested in the crowd: hundreds of thousands of faces queuing, weeping, performing weeping, waiting without knowing what else to do. The camera is not on the coffin but on the people looking at it. The story of the material is as strange as the film. In 1953 an enormous official documentary was planned: two hundred cameramen were assigned, and forty hours of colour and black-and-white footage were shot. Once Khrushchev came to power and de-Stalinisation began, the film, The Great Farewell, was shelved and stayed unseen until 1991. Sergei Loznitsa found those reels in the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk and cut them into a two-hour film. The sound design was rebuilt and the edit is new. None of the images are. Who it is for: anyone drawn to archival cinema, to propaganda taken apart with its own material, and to Soviet history. Who it is not for: viewers who want a narrator and context. The film will not tell you who anyone is; if you do not already know, you spend two hours looking at faces.