State Funeral

Both as film and as history, State Funeral stands as a canonical work.

A film like State Funeral is a warning. History has lessons for us about what does, and does not, work, in politics, in leadership, in culture itself. We would do well to listen. We would do well to watch.

Loznitsa’s essay raises questions about the nature and ideological mechanisms of totalitarian myth-making, and the nature of public grief as propagandist display.

A fascinating and invaluable document for all of its considerable run time, State Funeral is an occasion worthy of the title.

The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.

This cannily edited selection of rare archive footage reveals the peak of the people’s mind-born terror, and it is the beginning of the end.

With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.