Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation. A man is wrongly accused of collaboration. Desperate to save his dignity, he faces impossible moral choice.
EN
“Most people believe that what is shown on screen is a part of life. Each time I start a film, I tell myself that I don’t know what the world consists of. This is obviously a definition that I slot back into a metaphorical framework. Each time I make an image, I have to resignify it and so continue the work started right at the beginning of the shoot. From the very first image, you are condemned to stay inside the frame you have chosen. It all has to do with the composition, the position of the camera and the length of the shot. Each new image that you film contributes to the meaning that you allot to the whole. Once you have finished shooting, the film’s meaning is whole. The most important things in a film are the beginning and the end. In any case, no one remembers the middle. It’s Paradjanov who said that. The most important thing is the last shot and above all the very last image.
I like to experiment with forms and with Into the Fog I reworked meaning from a single sound; the character at the very end remains alone in the fog. I added just one sound and it changed the meaning of the whole film. It’s a gunshot. We understand that the character has committed suicide. I could have removed this gunshot – which some spectators encouraged me to do, because viewers traditionally like the film to end happily – and it would have given the film another meaning.”
Sergei Loznitsa1
“There is certainly some humor lurking in Loznitsa’s slavish (and Slavic) devotion to depicting mankind’s collective heart of darkness, a tragicomic method to his madness. His is a world of heightened absurdity, an atrocity exhibition where noble intentions invariably meet horrific ends and no good deed goes unpunished. Loznitsa is still intent on portraying mankind as a writhing, impotent mass of dubious morality and wretched cruelty – life as one long cautionary tale of human folly with a series of inevitably tragic ends. But with In the Fog, he allows his characters good intentions. The film is the director’s big reveal, a glimpse past the steely façade (one might call it the iron curtain) of My Joy—an expression of his overarching cynicism as a thinly veiled hope for humanity, not a battle cry in favor of its extinction.”
Aaron Light2
- 1Sergei Loznitsa, “A Lesson in Cinema,” Sabzian, 11 December 2024.
- 2Aaron Light, “Review: In the Fog,” Film Comment, 10 June 2013.
