Donbass (Sergei Loznitsa, 2018) (Patreon)

When the lineup was announced for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, there were some of us who were wondering why Sergei Loznitsa's newest fiction feature Donbass was relegated to the Un Certain Regard sidebar, given that he has already played in Competition with his three previous features. Now, having seen Donbass, I have a clearer idea, although I don't particularly agree with the festival's decision. 

Even when compared with My Joy or A Gentle Creature, this is an unremittingly ugly film, a vortex that sucks in any and all possible light. But it's difficult to argue with Loznitsa's diagnosis of life in the Donbass region, which is plagued with a situation so vile one cannot even agree how to characterize it. Invasion? Annexation? Civil war? Indigenous fascist uprising? Whatever is going on, a few things are obvious. One needs to be from the region to fully comprehend the subtle allegiances and micro-geographical alliances that define the conflict. There is a substantial part of the citizenry that is struggling to just go about their daily lives, without much success. And behind the guns are a group of venal politicians and oligarchs who are profiting from the death and mayhem. Of course, pull back enough curtains and you'll eventually find Putin, but you'd be shot dead first.

Unlike Loznitsa's previous films, there is no single point of identification. Donbass is a multi-stage panorama of horror and destruction that takes a wide-angle on the situation even when showing the brutality in close-up. No one has a name, or if they do, we're not meant to remember it. This is Breughelian cinema, a mass of details that don't add up to a complete or edifying picture. We go in confused and come out confused as well. The only absolutely clear signpost Loznitsa provides for us, a constant throughout the film, is the crisis of representation. That is, the fact of not knowing what's going on is a major theme, the Donbass conflict reflecting an epistempological crisis as well as a physical emergency.

We see German news crews struggling to identify who is the commander of a platoon. Everyone jokes, "I'm not the commander, he is!" We observe a grifting oligarch delivering a speech to the hospital staff he's been stealing from, positioning himself as the great reformer. We attend a wedding which doubles as a political function for pro-Russian rebels. But above all, Loznitsa begins and ends with actors and crew who are working to make a film about the Donbass. There are direct repetitions between both segments, but the final iteration ends quite differently than the initial one. In both cases, however, Loznitsa breaks the frame and implies that what we are watching is implicated in the violence that it is supposedly "about."

By extension, we are implicated too. As statements on cinema go, I can see why that might not have been one that the folks at Cannes wanted to ratify.