Imperium review – Sergei Loznitsa’s archive collage collates everyday life in cold-war Soviet Union

Venice film festival: The Two Prosecutors director cuts together documentary footage shot by a TV crew in the 1970s to try and get across what daily life in the USSR was likeHere is an archive-compilation documentary from Sergei Loznitsa, a hypnotic panorama of early 1970s life across the vast reaches of the Soviet Union, or maybe we should call it the Soviet empire. Loznitsa gives it the Latin title Imperium, perhaps to recall the Romans before their decline and fall. His material is taken from fascinating footage shot between 1970 and 1973 by a visiting Italian camera crew who presumably had the necessary permissions and were well enough liked by the authorities to keep coming back.The effect is part Potemkin village, part seance, part ethnographic study; there are no interviews or voiceover, just ambient footage. (The Italians may have intended this material as B-roll to be fitted into a more conventional film.) Imperium has sometimes the eerie quality of a ghost story with phantoms drifting placidly across the screen, gazing blankly into the camera, occasionally grimacing or grinning, but destined never to see the film of which they are a part. We don’t see the gulags, of cour…

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