Kritiken

Loznitsa's film is also able to inhabit several diverse functions simultaneously. It is a dispassionate, close-range journalistic account of a succession of events, but also a delicate, even whimsical portrait of small-scale human interactions; it's a document of specific incidents, but also a timeless evocation of human reactions, both large and small, to crisis conditions.

Even though Sergei Loznitsa's extraordinary documentary, Maidan, is very specifically concerned with the collectivised political upheaval which occurred in Ukraine's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) during early 2014, it also offers a bitterly universal commentary on what director King Vidor referred to as 'The Crowd'.

Loznitsa's formal approach allows us to appreciate the deep complexities of coordinating and executing such mass political activism. Examining the Maidan Nezalezhnosti for such protracted periods allows us to map out the square's complex spatial configuration and more fully appreciate the precariousness of maintaining control over such constantly shifting battle-lines.

When violence does erupt halfway, the camera remains calmly static, treating all matters of carnage in the same way it patiently studied the moments of inactivity. Loznitsa's ethical and considered approach to filming violence sharply contrasts with the inane attractions to brutality in modern media.

Each new image arrives with layers of contradiction and hyper-real clarity and the viewer is given time to process the heart-stopping tension and building tragedy. This is monumental filmmaking – part document, part cinematic Guernica that takes a historical moment and shows the great ambiguities of political upheaval and the fundamental tensions between idealism and reality at the heart of all movements.

Here, aesthetics and organizational logic are not simply effective media for a message, but political decisions: when to film; where you point that camera, and at whom; when to cut and, crucially, when not to. All of this is in the service of creating a collective image, an image of the people as a unit, a social body. What does democracy look like? It looks like an image as capacious as any that Bazin found in Wyler, Renoir, and Welles.

It's hard to tell if all sounds at any given moment are synchronized to picture, but what Loznitsa sacrifices in aesthetic verisimilitude, he gains with a more complex integration of the seen and heard. Witness, for instance... [a] contrapuntal pairing of the garbage-strewn square with a booming intercom voice-over offering the God-like reminder, "What does a man exist for? He exists for love.

Throughout Maidan, the camera only moves twice and each time it's a revelation... [They] remind that Loznitsa's three-person camera crew (himself included) was there, close to the action, many times _in it_, setting up tripods and taking the time to compose beautiful frames able to hold the screen for minutes at a time.

While the framings are not overtly painterly as such, the act of framing does something extraordinary: each shot becomes a sort of epic canvas, rather like the Russian historical paintings of the 19th century. But each detail of each shot shows you how a multitude of small everyday moments, often mundane in themselves, together make epic history:

We know that necessary choices make film subjective on some level, butMaidan comes pretty much as close as possible to true documentary, high-level objectivity... Takes are of mixed length at the beginning of the film, and the shots mostly medium, but once the fighting commences, the takes become longer, the shots extremely long. Events being unpredictable, the cameras take in an vast amount of information. Loznitsa refuses to fragment time and space.

Maidan," filmed in and around Independence Square in Kiev during the protests of late 2013 and early 2014, is interested in the physical movement of a movement. This documentary from Sergei Loznitsa, perhaps best known in the United States for the fiction feature "My Joy,"forgoes explanations. It unfolds almost exclusively in static tableau shots, as concerned with form and beauty as it is with advocacy.

While Maidan isn't as heavy-handed as many political documentaries, its reliance on static long takes and off-camera action, heard but not seen, is overabundant to the point of frustration, especially during the largely undramatic opening act... Yet when the protesters finally clash with the government, one understands that these are the very things that sustain their resolve and enable them to carry on.