A politician dumps a bucket of faeces over the head of an editor she believes is corrupt. A German journalist brings something to light, but only a bit of it ends up being true. A man leads through a labyrinthian bunker with people waiting at every corner. Men are harassed and recruited at a checkpoint. A wedding on the front. In a birth station of a clinic, a functionary presents a seeming abundance of food and medication and wants to demonstrate that he has the situation under control with the absurd acting. Soldiers are punished by corps with a gauntlet. An attack is staged with extras on a film set, but it isn‘t clear what‘s acting, what‘s reality, and who is being told what.

We are in eastern Ukraine, which separatists have declared an autonomous region, and people are on the field against the Ukrainian army supported by members of the Russian army, though inofficially. 13 scenes of war. 13 images that make up a panorama of a society that was created in war. In the newest entry of his impressive filmography, an archaeology of political violence, Sergei Loznitsa has searched for the buried truth of war in amateur recordings and reimagined 13 grotesque tableaus that have a satirical tone throughout while also being precise. They show interpersonal relations that have been soaked in violence and it is evoked in all of the images, from the creation of the images and the antitypes, the cell phones recordings and TV stagings. War for Loznitsa is an (in)human condition, its manufacturing is also a work on the image.

Sebastian Markt

Translation: Elinor Lewy