BELGESEL VE TARİH: SERGEI LOZNITSA’NIN STATE FUNERAL, REVUE VE THE EVENT BELGESELLERİ ÜZERİNDEN SAVAŞ SONRASI SSCB TARİHİ ÜZERİNE BİR İNCELEME

The aim of this study is to analyze three important periods of social change in the USSR after the Second World War through three different documentaries within the framework of the relationship between cinema and history. In this context, it examines the documentaries State Funeral (2019), which deals with the Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality and the climate of mourning in the USSR in 1953; Revue (2008), which shows the de-Stalinization process and the new industrial-development understanding that started with the N. Khrushchev period; and finally The Event (2015), which observes the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Glasnost and Perestroika period. The reason for choosing these documentaries is that all of them were created using archive footage. The conception of history as primarily arising from and shaped by written documents has undergone a significant change thanks to the spread of videorecording technology and tools during the 20th century. From historians to archaeologists, sociologists to anthropologists, and even scientists working in fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology, the image has become the witness and evidence of history and discoveries. In fact, today, the image has become more important than writing when it comes to “history” and reality. For example, anthropologists have photographed and videotaped the cultures of the tribes they have studied in detail. In this context, the singularity of the image as historical evidence and the holistic narrative formed by images when they come together fall within the scope of this study. In his book Cinema and History (Cinema et Histoire, 1993), Marc Ferro puts forward the thesis that all films, whether documentary or fictional, are historical documents, and that images can serve, like written documents, as direct references in historiography. Michel de Certau, in his book The Writing of History (L’ecriture de l’histoire, 1975), argues that history is first and foremost a fiction and that historiography cannot be considered independently of the worldview of the historian. The archival footage used in the above-mentioned documentaries is a type of historical evidence and a documentary record of the past. These documentaries offer very important anecdotes about the daily and social life of the society as well as the national and international politics of the Soviet Union in certain periods. Although the images that make up the documentaries, recorded at various times, were recorded in a controlled and supervised manner by camera operators guided by a certain authority and procedure, their historical objectivity 380 sinecine | 2023 Güz Autumn |   14 (2)  and evidential quality are not lost. For even the most controlled images carry implicit meanings about the historical contexts in which they were shot. For example, in the documentary State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa, 2019) about Stalin’s funeral, the “cultization” of Stalin’s dead body is seen, as well as the clothes and emotions reflected on the faces of Soviet citizens arriving in Moscow. Although the intention of the film operator was mainly to gather information about the sublimity of Stalin’s funeral, much other information seeps in. Stalin’s funeral is choreographed and planned down to the last detail. But what is unchoreographed and unplanned is the reality of the people who came to see Stalin’s dead body and their curious, fearful, sad, or emotionless eyes. Or, for example, the images of the peasants of the USSR in Central Asia, who obviously live far away from the image of socialism in Moscow, pretending to understand the funeral ceremony in Russian, which they heard on the radio, and to be sad about Stalin’s death, because they knew they were being filmed. This, too, tell the viewers a lot. When we look at these images, we obtain a wealth of data about people’s faces, the clothing style of the period, people’s poverty, the way they speak, their socialization style, political discourses, political developments, people’s expectations, economic problems, dreams, daily-life routines, and many other issues. There is a very important feature in this kind of archival footage. No matter why they were shot or with what mise-en-scene, after a certain point the image declares its neutrality toward both the viewer and the filmmaker. The person who recorded the image can only control the image up to a certain point. At this point, the time interval between the date the image was shot and the date it is watched again has a very important effect. Images that pass through time will undoubtedly begin to express different meanings and say new things for the new eyes that will watch them in the future. Therefore, in this sense, it can be said that documentary images are a particularly dynamic and vivid type of historical evidence. At this point, of course, another issue that we should mention is the point of view that Sergei Loznitsa tries to conceal as much as possible in his documentaries. Loznitsa tries to show that he approaches history objectively by making his negative ideological attitude toward the USSR as invisible as possible. In various statements to the media, he has stated that he has no intention of becoming a historian. However, the essence of the matter shows us that the montage of scattered and fragmented historical images to create a certain meaning is no different from the work of the historian who brings together various scattered written documents. In line with this assumption, this study, based on Marc Ferro’s thesis, will analyze what the images in the documentaries produced by Sergei Loznitsa show historically. It also presents some analyses of the history presented within the framework of Michel de Certau’s worldview of the historian.