Country: Ukraine
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Time: 2 hours and 1 minute
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Misinformation warfare, the blackest of humor, malfeasance in myriad forms
Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman, who knew of what he spoke, once wrote of his experience in the American Civil War, “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for destruction. War is hell.” By contrast, film’s role as one of the twentieth century’s most effective propaganda tools has tortured its relationship to depictions of war, which have comprised everything from lamentation to morale booster to agitprop to (most commonly) a sort of soporific comfort underscoring that order has been restored by the righteous. War films tend to feature an “us” and a “them”—or, put differently, a moral cause (say, the French resistance in Melville’s Army of Shadows or the FLN in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers or the Americans in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan) confronting an immoral enemy (the Nazis and some French, the French, and the Nazis in the three aforementioned cases). Sherman, who understood his own cause to be deeply righteous, nonetheless espied something more monstrous in the means required for its prosecution than even the most sensitive war films tend to muster. For someone like Sherman, Kantian imperatives got ground to drivel on the battlefield. Heroism and the prosecution of war remained antithetical: “I think I know what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers.” The organization of human killing, necessary or not, made little room for ethics. “War is cruelty,” he wrote on another occasion. “There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” Regardless of whether one agrees with that last statement in a world featuring exponentially more powerful weapons, grotesqueness as war’s dominant aspect framed Sherman’s understanding of his lifelong profession. It is a view shared by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa.
Shot in central Ukraine in the wake of the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian War, Donbass details Russia’s “covert” invasion of Luhansk and Donetsk, the eastern Ukrainian provinces comprising the Donbass region, during which Russian forces (almost always without ensign) assisted separatist movements through the provision of arms, intelligence, and manpower in order to facilitate the creation of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. (These Republics were formally recognized by Russia three days before its February 24, 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.) The 2014 conflict’s “little green men”—a term most frequently used to refer to non-uniformed Russian troops who entered Crimea—have since come to represent a particularly modern form of warfare in which state disinformation and denials proliferate under the already hazy informational conditions provoked by conflict, seeding divergent accounts that aim to sow doubt in coherent narrative’s very possibility. In distant countries where publics often remain under-informed amidst an onslaught of data, photographs, and news stories, epistemological disengagement remains the primary aim. Donbass functions as a corrective.
Structured by a series of vignettes that explore the use and abuse of crisis actors, war profiteers, corrupt municipal authorities, fumbling foreign journalists eager for stories, and internally displaced persons, the film glorifies nothing and nobody: a bleak and occasionally caustic reminder of the ways in which conflicts exaggerate the least savory aspects of human nature. Whether immorality borne of desperation and greed constitute most individuals’ primary experience of war, I leave to those with experience. With regard to film, Donbass’ harrowing and bleak and clear-eyed examination of war and life under occupation eschews the stylized contrivances of more heroic renditions, themselves almost universally produced for viewers lacking direct experience with the subject matter.
An emotionally taut work of protest, Donbass reproduces and mimics aspects of documentary filmmaking in order to instill a sense of verisimilitude. (Loznitsa has primarily made documentary films and leverages recognizable aspects of the genre for his “fictional” account.) Donbass’s cinematographer, Oleg Mutu, who worked with the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu on The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007)—both hard films tackling difficult subjects—achieves these “documentary” effects by employing continuous shots, unobtrusive lighting, and handheld cameras. This verisimilitude remains at once tactical—a sleight of hand that reinforces the sense that this depiction constitutes something closer to “objectivity” than other versions on offer—and strategic, staking an epistemological claim for the possibility of clarity in the face of manufactured confusion.
In turn, this clarity argues for the unredeemable nature of conflict, while effectively maintaining a discerning (and discernable) moral vision: even if within these conditions everything is bad, everyone is not. The aggressors (both Russian troops and local residents of Luhansk and Donetsk willing to leverage geopolitical shifts for their own ends) occupy central stage. The ethical emptiness of their enterprise is extensively catalogued on its own terms. It’s not a pretty picture. Like all films intent upon shaking audiences out of their complacency—in this case around a perceived under-reaction to Russian-sponsored aggression in eastern Ukraine after 2014—Donbass elicits both despondence and (much more productively) awareness. If we have not yet managed to end war, perhaps we can better learn to abhor it.
Go Down the Rabbit Hole With:
Sergei Loznitsa — Maidan (2014)
Sergei Loznitsa — State Funeral (2019)