Unnatural, in fact. Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film director whose brilliant 2018 satire Donbass brought home to Cannes what was happening in his country, now brings to the festival an eerie new docu-collation of archive footage meditating on the horrific aerial bombardment inflicted on cities and civilian populations by the British and Germans during the second world war. Nothing could be more brutally relevant given the current destruction of Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities by Putin’s Russia, although Russian warfare in the 1940s doesn’t feature here.
The film is inspired by WG Sebald’s essay collection Air War and Literature, which ruminated in detail on the evasiveness and amnesia that follows war and the need to bear witness. Yet there is scope for debate as to whether Loznitsa’s film treatment entirely approximates the subtlety of Sebald’s writing, and I’m inclined to say that this tests the limits of Loznitsa’s approach.
It is avowedly about aerial bombardment during the second world war, a type of warfare that political leaders convinced themselves was somehow more efficient and more detached from the grisly business of land war and hand-to-hand combat. But the film – for reasons never discussed, and there is no overt discussion of any kind – stops short of the most horrifically unnatural part of the second world war’s air-bombardment history: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contenting itself with ostensible equivalence of the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force. Maybe we are edging close to a new kind of Kino-historikerstreit.
Without voiceover narration, Loznitsa takes long uncut clips of archive footage, mostly black and white but occasionally switching to colour, showing the contented civilian populations (with no notion of what horrors are in store), footage of munitions workers, footage of combat planes taking off and sailing through what appear to be calm skies, dropping bombs and then showing us the stunning destruction, including a heart-wrenching image of a dead baby. A passionate string octet on the soundtrack in the final 10 minutes underlines the despair.
