Opiniões dos críticos

In common with the Soviet Union it depicts, State Funeral is simultaneously a Rorschach test and an enormous 11-timezone undertaking; it is a found-footage documentary that captures life in thrilling, painstaking detail in the hours and days after Stalin’s death.

Like 2010’s “The Autobiography of Nicolai Ceaucescu,” Loznitsa’s film stands as a work of archival ambition and psychological ambiguity, as much about obedience and cultish denial as it is a visually stunning time capsule (the black-and-white and color images have been dazzlingly restored). It’s not every day one can witness mythmaking in real time.

To call the film monotonous is not necessarily a knock, as the monomaniacal mantras of authoritarianism are nothing if not monotonous, and the monotony of Stalin’s apotheosis is very much the point. It’s a film about the weight of history, and the wait of it – after a while, you wonder if they’ll ever be done flaunting the old boy’s cadaver.

The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety. Some people – a very few – are shown crying. The rest are serious, watchful, deadpan and neutral, an accentuation of the faces people learned to show while Stalin was alive, in case any emotional demonstration at all could be interpreted as wrong or disloyal. Yet perhaps their sadness is too complex to be interpreted: a realisation that an era is coming to end, and a spell is lifting.

State Funeral is an epic account of the Soviet Union at the height of its power, assembled with a keen eye for Russia’s film history as much its political art, yet in Loznitsa’s subtle visual and audio play, it puckishly pokes fun at the majesty on display.

The footage in "State Funeral" is not "objective," and much of it seems to have been created with eloquent framing in mind... Put all together, "State Funeral" gives the impression that the entire country is lined up in procession, slowly shuffling past Stalin's coffin, draped in scarlet cloth, flowers erupting above him, reaching nearly to the ceiling.

Like the thousands who queue for hours, yearning to see their dearly departed leader lying in state after his demise in early March 1953, the Ukrainian director’s epic 2019 documentary is slow, solemn and icy cold. What the cumulative effect of masterfully restored newsreel may lack in action, it more than makes up for with the numbing, slow-burn sensation of being drawn under the spell of state-orchestrated mass mourning, of submitting to the propaganda of a different continent, nearly 70 years on.

But the tone of “State Funeral” is more meditative than admonitory. It contemplates the Soviet state at almost the exact midpoint of its existence, illuminating the faces of those who lived there and at the same time reckoning with the dead weight of history.

As if this national spectacle were not sufficiently saturated with connotations of a state religion, banners and paintings of Stalin carried by crying mourners hammer the point home. These iconic images seem endowed with a sort of “livingness,” as if they have acquired special powers.

With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.

If this were a film made primarily for post-Soviet audiences, we could assume that Loznitsa is trusting, as post-Soviet intellectuals still do, in the universal recognition of certain faces, verses, songs. But Loznitsa is now based in Germany, makes his films with Dutch partners and shows them at film festivals around the world... Silence, absence, redaction: more than Beria or Molotov, these are the stars of this film.

A time capsule of a strange moment in history, State Funeral is a glimpse into the world of a cult of personality that seems incredibly alien and scarily familiar at the same time.