31/05/2022 - CANNES 2022: For his latest archive-derived doc, Sergei Loznitsa focuses his attention on the Allied bombing campaigns on German cities during World War II

Although he initially came to acclaim through his dramatic fiction work and present-day observational documentaries, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa now appears to be on a one-man mission to put every piece of remotely interesting archive footage sitting in a lab to good use. He collates and reconstructs these fragments, often shot by civilians whose identities are now lost to time, into quite technically dazzling filmic wholes, not so much giving us a new read on history, as providing a cinematic index and representation of it that we never knew was available.

Loznitsa can also more urgently be described as a prophet of the post-communist East, whose brilliant 2018 satire Donbass [+see also:
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interview: Sergei Loznitsa
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interview: Sergei Loznitsa
film profile] did the previous year, this one takes his focus away from Eastern Europe, this time harnessing archive material showing the aerial bombing campaigns against northern German cities during World War II, and the civilian casualties and infrastructural damage they faced.

The high-dramatist side of Loznitsa never deserts him in these films. Turning against the attitudes of recent theorists of documentary, who are always keen to point out the form’s artifice, he instead embraces that very thing, editing the epic master shots and crowd panoramas that he was lucky enough to recover into what British war-film specialists like David Lean would nod approvingly towards with their cinematic sense of spectacle. Only here, the unknowing, innocent German townspeople are the victims; in his footage, we see only the smallest glimpse of Nazi insignia across the documented locales, and the chilling military dogma is courtesy of speeches from British army officials Field Marshall Montgomery and Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. After many repurposed propagandistic shots of weapons manufacturing, and cheery pilots sitting excitedly in their cockpits, there is now an assault to be carried out, fired by the enduring truism that this is just in a time of war.

This reversal of typical sympathy, when thinking of commentary on this war in the decades since its end, is the most subversive and interesting element of the film. With the horrifying bombings in Ukraine and earlier in Syria still very much in our thoughts, Loznitsa has the courage to almost surgically excise the phenomenon of aerial campaigns and the collective punishment of innocents from the context of World War II, and speak of it as a universal moral horror. Compared to his films on Soviet Russia, whose vivid colours and famous landmarks allow us to make no mistake, his use of black-and-white imagery helps the audience isolate the disgust and sorrow they should feel. The way he cuts between shots of the fiery post-blast impacts and the levelled buildings means we have no way of telling whether it’s Cologne or London we’re looking at.

The Natural History of Destruction is difficult, upsetting viewing – at times naggingly repetitive and unwilling to vary the nuance of its argument. But we should be grateful for Loznitsa’s crusade to show us what needs seeing, and reflecting upon.

The Natural History of Destruction is a co-production between Germany, the Netherlands and Lithuania, staged by LOOKSfilm, Atoms & Void and Studio Uljana Kim. Its international sales are handled by PROGRESSfilm.