The longest siege during World War II was that of Leningrad, which lasted for 900 days. Comprised solely of rarely seen footage found in Soviet film archives, Blockade re-creates those momentous events through the sounds and the images of a slowly dying city.
EN
“[Blockade] challenges the overpowering desire for a teleological master-narrative that would ascribe meaning to the hellish world of the Siege. The final version of the Battle for Leningrad was permeated by the consoling commentary of its voice-over narration, uplifting soundtrack, and the montage principle of organization took the Smolny Party headquarters’ point of view on the Siege. Loznitsa’s film, on the other hand, works rather as a Siege diary, reflecting on the notions of limited space and the difficult progression of time. As would a citizen caught unawares in the besieged city, this film dashes from one impression, experience, and tragedy to the next. In a sense, Comrade Zhdanov was right: such an approach may well evoke an atmosphere of chaos: but it is the chaos of vision sharpened by disaster.
Viktor Shklovskii had characterized such perception already in his Sentimental Journey, a work containing some of the most acute observations on Petrograd struck by siege (it was 1919, and the oppressing force then was General ludenich’s army). Shklovskii develops the idea of defamiliarization as a result of historical shift. He writes: ‘The main defining quality of the life during revolution is that now one feels everything. Life has become art’ (Shklovskii, 1923: 383). During the Nazi Siege, life also be came art, in Shklovskian terms - spectacular and merciless. Loznitsa shows us fire and shelling, protective dirigibles (known in the language of the Siege as “elephants”), scaffolding - all the novel and thus spectacular elements of the Siege ‘stage set’.”
Polina Barskova1
Notebook: Serge Daney had this phrase about how cinema was like the rear-view mirror in a car. You see the car going foreward, and at the same time you see the landscape disappearing behind it.
Sergei Loznitsa: Well that is such a beautiful phrase. But I think it's dangerous to get lost in the debris of these beautiful images.
Do you think about that when you're making a film – about the relationship to the image, and how that relationship can change?
The image itself doesn't matter. On its own, it carries no significance. What matters is a pair: the image and the viewer. What matters is what happens in the moment of viewing. But I don't think about that at all when I'm making a film. It's a different position, another point in space... Do you think about breathing when you breathe?
Of course not.
Well, here the choice is that you either think or you breathe.
Sergei Loznitsa in conversation with Ignatiy Vishnevetsky2
- 1Polina Barskova, “Sergei Loznitsa, The Siege (Blokada, 2006),” KinoKultura 24 (2009).
- 2Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “Time Indefinite: A Talk with Sergei Loznitsa,” MUBI Notebook, 29 September 2010.