Sergei Loznitsa - Documentarist of Time

Sergei Loznitsa is a consummate chronicler of the history of Eastern Europe, covering both fairly recent events such as the Ukrainian revolt in Maidan (2014) and earlier ones such as Stalin’s funeral in State Funeral (2019). Always vigilant in his representation of the past, he skillfully uses archive footage to make you feel like you are an eyewitness. Mr. Landsbergis deals with the crucial events from 1987 till 1993 in Lithuania, when it broke away from the Soviet Union.

In this episode of HOBO, Sergei Loznitsa discusses with us his new film Mr. Landsbergis, which premiered at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Three years of modern Lithuanian history make for a dense four hours of viewing in the latest archive documentary and an exhaustive account of the struggle for Lithuania’s independence from the USSR. The film is assembled from video footage of events culled from various sources, including broadcast news and the Landsbergis family’s archive, interspersed with sequences in which Loznitsa, off-screen, interviews professor Vytautas Landsbergis, now aged 89.

Winner of the top prize at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, this epic chronicle of the early collapse of the USSR is authoritative and detailed even by the exacting standards to which the distinguished director has accustomed us. It also presents a very different Gorbachev than the man who has generally been celebrated as the benevolent engineer of “perestroika" in recent documentaries. It instead outlines the profile of a man completely organic to the Soviet bureaucracy, albeit distant from the Stalinist legacy. Another leader of an empire that insisted on describing itself as a democratic utopia.

Sergei Loznitsa has produced a wide range of archival documentaries at an incredibly fast clip over the past 15 years. Dredging up visual materials from decades’ worth of Soviet media and private archives, he probes what people at the time both were and were not shown, drawing out the contrast between official and alternative narratives. Speaking about his archival docs at the Central European University a few years ago, he stated their overarching goal is “to portray the past as if it were the present,” to make history so vivid people “can touch it with their skin”. In his archive-based films, the past is interrogated and reassembled in provocative, often disturbing ways. But for all the tactility Loznitsa can imbue in his rescued images, it’s the sounds they emanate that turn them into living, breathing things.

This interview was recorded in December 2021 during the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF).

The fifth episode of HOBO is out now.