"Cold and New Wars": The Fall of Lenin

THE FALL OF LENIN: An ironic documentary film about the farewell to the phantoms of the USSR in Ukraine.The spiritual session with the ghost of Lenin guides us through our past, present and future. The film presents the dawn and the twilight of idols, and the curious afterlife of history’s ghosts. It is inspired by laws adopted in 2015 by the parliament of Ukraine which condemn the Soviet totalitarian regime and ban the use of Communist symbols.

Afterwards, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa and Ekaterina Degot, art historian and artistic director of steirischer herbst, talk with curator Olga Schubert from an artistic perspective about the deconstruction of historical narrative, the socio-political preconditions for the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the development of post-Soviet societies towards a war-torn present.

The films of Ukranian director Sergei Loznitsa which could be descriped als portrais of history are careful constructed harratives of historical memory. His work is rooted in the rich tradition of avant-garde documentary. Free of any kind of voice over or explanatory devices, Loznitsa’s documentaries are instead pure cinematic poems whose subtle arguments are made through careful montage and arresting imagery which captures both the quickening pulse of Eastern Europe in the midst of the profound political and socio-cultural transition, and the deeper echoing rhythms of history.

The Old Jewish Cemetery (2014) - which can be seen in the online program of arsenal 3 - spends 20 minutes quietly observing people wandering about a mass burial site in Riga, Latvia, lingering in the gap between its present everyday calm and its unspeakably tragic history.