Revue

Two years prior to , in the film , Sergei Loznitsa used archive footage to reconstruct the Siege of Leningrad, a city cut off from the outside world by the German army during World War II. is also a time machine that transports the audience into the past using old footage, but in tone it’s the antithesis of . The earlier film showed a city being destroyed, but here we see a glorious utopia, brought to life in a montage of TV programs and state-approved documentaries. Workers talk cheerfully about their production records, dams are built and rockets launched into space. On the shop floor, machines are shut down so the workers can listen to a poetry reading. Although the film doesn’t play for laughs as much as (a 1982 montage of archive footage by Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty portraying U.S. enthusiasm at the dawning of the atomic age), it compellingly captures the grotesqueness of Soviet propaganda.