Sergei Loznitsa: The Early Films
28 minutes
Even the title of Sergei Loznitsa’s sophisticated debut is a wry send-up of all those Socialist Realist agitprop films extolling the superhuman Soviet worker. (After all, who can build a house in a single day?) While students at the prestigious Russian film school VGIK under the tutelage of Oscar-nominated Georgian filmmaker Nana Dzhordzhadze, Loznitsa and his friend, Kazak editor Marat Magambetov, made this formally subversive study of a construction site, focusing not on heroic acts of labor but on cigarette breaks and stray dogs, nearly slapstick antics involving wood planks and ladders, and the detritus of rusted metal, broken concrete, and discarded newspaper. Contemporary critics saw in the film a critique or lamentation of post-Soviet society, a vision of emotional paralysis brought on by political and economic collapse. But Loznitsa and Magambetov were up to something far more poetic and abstract, their complex montage built from diurnal weather patterns of storm and sun, repeated camera movements, unusual sounds (a howling wolf, a wailing baby), and the shifting tempos of once-banned Estonian folk ballads and waltzes. In the end, the dilapidated building has been magically