Babi Yar. Context
Back in 1941, the Nazis’ Sonderkommando and Police Regiment South (with help from the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police) killed 33,771 Jews in Kiev’s northwest Babi Yar ravine. Babi Yar’s Jews were murdered “without resistance from the local population,” says Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa. Those are his words (“State Funeral,” “My Joy”), taken from the press notes for “Babi Yar. Context,” a Dutch-Ukrainian documentary that re-enacts a timeline of events centered on the 1941 mass killing at Babi Yar.
“Babi Yar. Context” includes lots of newly restored documentary footage plus a brand new audio track featuring a dense soundscape of recreated ambient sounds (courtesy of sound designer Vladimir Golovnitski) and dramatized/recreated dialogue. This new soundtrack is distracting, though it’s not clear if it does so intentionally or by accident: It reminds you too much of how alive and immediate, already disturbing component footage can be made to seem by life-like immediacy and dramatic tension, which seem to be what Loznitsa wants with this movie, given those intentions he states like setting the period at the end of the title off against “Context.”
As political commentary “Babi Yar. Context” is fairly straightforward: Loznitsa exhumes a crime using pseudo-naturalistic footage that ultimately concludes in 1952, when Babi Yar was turned into a landfill for dumping industrial waste. In multiple interviews Loznitsa insists he did not alter his documentary’s footage but you can tell some things from this concluding scene, especially those obscene churning sounds that seem to come out of a photographed drainpipe.
Before and after shots accompanying the Babi Yar massacre appear to establish that surviving locals were complicit with what happened there; damning sentiment is obviously supported by the movie’s vital new footage, though that footage is never so meaningful as to overcome the distracting nature of Loznitsa’s obvious streamlining/narrativizing of the past.
Loznitsa begins by establishing the idea of the Babi Yar massacre as a rupture in daily life for people in Lvov and Kiev. Birds chirp, feet shuffle, people murmur as they go about getting through their days; none of it is ever as loud as the rumble of motor engines or voracious churn of fire and smoke engulfing nearby burning buildings.
Do these vivid, realistic sounds humanize the past by re-arranging every day textures of pastness into a fussily re-arranged time capsule? History at this newly revived moment now appears in Loznitsa’s movie like an over-determined collection of singular details. We’re overwhelmed by this enhanced footage but never really encouraged to think about what we’re looking at beyond any given scene’s visceral effect or even alongside another one.
Loznitsa shows us two banners from earlier that year welcoming the Nazis, one of which reads “long live the leader of the German people, Adolf Hitler.” He also shows us the relief and gratitude on the faces of Red Army prisoners near Kyiv when they were released into the custody of their wives and families in 1941. This scene adds dramatic tension to later scenes that highlight selective memory, self-involvement and canned catharsis in political theater around Babi Yar the testimony of surviving eyewitnesses in 1946, for example, or the hanging a few Nazi perpetrators in 1946.
Rather than focus on representative actions by Organization Ukrainian Nationalists, Loznitsa points out presence of German Governor-General Hans Frank whose arrival is celebrated during Stanislau parade just days after killing at Babi Yar. Not only does Loznitsa make Ukrainians’ embrace of Frank look crass here but it seems like premature celebration their pact (ie: unfulfilled) with Nazis as well.
In this charged climate, murdered Jews at Babi Yar can be read as proving what we know now all too well that you can’t trust Nazis; Ukrainian nationalists were stupid to help their oppressors. However, Loznitsa does not overtly condemn OUN or their collaborators (he explains why some extent in this conversation with Anthony Kaufman). Instead making calculated act genocide, he wants viewers see through vague kind counter-mythmaking that leaves them nothing else but wallowing residual guilt induced by Babyn Yar.
“Babi Yar. Context” being both an essay movie and cut-up historical document might create uneasy tension for viewers who want to know more about what they’re looking at. Loznitsa succeeds if nothing else being upsetting. You can’t deny power intertitles featuring quotes from Vasily Grossman’s mournful 1943 essay “Ukraine Without Jews” or local Kyiv newspaper article claiming in October 1941 that Nazis were “fulfilling the desires of Ukrainians.”
Even worse are those uncomfortable silences which punctuate movie’s deceptively complex soundtrack. Thousands dead weigh heavily on their mourners, but not always seems like Loznitsa is comfortable sitting with that weight.
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