Blockade (review)

A number of iconic images evoke the siege of Leningrad: the grainy photograph of an elderly woman drawing a sled with a corpse along a deserted and snowbound street; the studio portrait of a little girl and her death-list-diary, and perhaps the image of composer Dimitri Shostakovich on watch, looking slightly owlish and rather out of place.

The greatest benefit of Sergei Loznitsa's documentary Blockade is that it broadens our visual repertoire of the siege through his compilation of footage from former Soviet archives. Even more so, Loznitsa added a careful and masterful soundtrack to the footage, thereby creating an aura that is as deeply affecting as it is subtle. Yet, these production values also raise important questions. Has the crisp and stunning imagery been remastered? And if so, what was lost—and gained? Unfortunately, the viewer has no reasonable way of answering this question. Similar questions arise regarding the soundtrack, which largely consists of illustrative sounds—tram noises, footsteps, cracking wood, fire, artillery shelling, wind, the sound of water being ladled into buckets. Voices are muffled and indiscernible, short of one stunning moment in which, in front of a bombed out residence, a child wails "Mama, Mama." It is an extremely effective, chilling moment, most likely a "true invention" in the parlance of film scholars, and it raises important but ultimately unanswerable questions about direction.

Mr. Loznitsa very effectively creates filmic chapters of various lengths, which follow, as much as the images allow, the public course of the siege from the erection of defensive measures through the breaking of the blockade in 1944 and the execution of German war criminals in January 1946. The viewer thus appears to witness German POWs being led through the city before the beginning of the blockade, street scenes, artillery attacks and their devastating impact on the city, bunkers, civilians moving their few belonging across town, the dismantling of the sculptures on the Anichkov Bridge, a city frozen solid with trams stranded in the streets, people foraging for food, water, and firewood, people waiting, and the dead and dying.

The sheer magnitude of the largely unknown images alone makes this a worthwhile documentary for anyone interested in the Siege of Leningrad or World War II, but it is the poignancy of certain images that gives this documentary its particular value. There is a sequence of people dismantling stadium bleachers for firewood—after which the camera pans across showing many more snowed in bleachers and a poster of a watchful Stalin.

And among the many images of the dead being transported to mass graves, there are two which almost too vividly illustrate the tremendous suffering of the Leningradski. In one, a desperate young woman carefully hands over her dead infant to be buried; in another, a couple pulls a sled on which rests a dead body. Their hands are joined over the rope. The viewer is never allowed a glimpse of their faces, but their anonymous, yet deeply private suffering becomes emblematic for civilian suffering and resilience.