The Event

While the coup attempt unfolds in Moscow in August 1991, people gather on the streets of Leningrad, wait, listen to the radio and try to work out what is happening. The film shows those three days entirely through archive footage of the period. It is not interested in a historical turning point. It is interested in the confusion of a crowd: nobody knows what is happening, nobody knows what to do, and what was later told as victory consisted mostly of waiting. We watch faces that do not know the outcome we know. The form is entirely found material: no new footage, no interviews, no narrator. Sergei Loznitsa edits the images and lays street sound, radio broadcasts and passages of Swan Lake over them; television broadcast hours of ballet in those days. Loznitsa used the same method in films like Blockade and The Trial. This one was shown in 2015. Who it is for: viewers who like archive documentary and are curious about the last days of the Soviet Union. Who it is not for: anyone expecting context. The film explains nothing, and a viewer without the history may not work out what they are looking at.