State Funeral

Both as film and as history, "State Funeral" stands as a canonical work.

In the loony seriousness of it all, "State Funeral" isn't spectator sport - it makes us active observers of a scary machinery, something to file away.

A found-footage documentary that captures life in thrilling, painstaking detail in the hours and days after Stalin's death.

The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.

A film like State Funeral is a warning. History has lessons for us about what does, and does not, work, in politics, in leadership, in culture itself. We would do well to listen. We would do well to watch.

A haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.

State Funeral broaches the fear and the massive mistakes Russians allowed in the Stalinist regime, but it reflects upon a world where tyranny is forgiven for the same reasons: a structure of convenience and money. [Full review in Spanish]

Loznitsa redoubles reality because not only does he reincorporate real images (with impeccable colorization and sound editing work), but he orders and edits them as the person in charge of filming that state funeral would have edited them.

Packed with the faces of consternation and tears of despair, State Funeral is both remarkable and tedious.

This weird, dirge-like artifact, whose real drama is nearly all off-screen, provides a disturbing illustration of mass indoctrination...