CANNES 2021: Babi Yar. Context
festival de cannes 2021While the crimes and atrocities of Nazi Germany have been captured with a painful brilliance by narrative features, the often overlooked recency of these horrors has allowed the documentary genre to also express various emotions and truths regarding the event. Often with cases like the 1955 masterpiece Night and Fog, these expressions can carry even more weight than their narrative companions, with the authenticity of the horrors being undeniable for audience members. Screening as part of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, Sergey Loznitsa's Babi Yar. Context accomplishes exactly this. Using a vast wealth of footage captured during the time, the film gives life to a particularly haunting September 1941 massacre of 30,000 Jews.
As with other similar projects, there are no easy answers or joy found within Babi Yar. Context. Unlike narrative films, the figures within the film are not actors getting into the role but rather living and breathing humans. The hatred and disgusting lack of humanity is real. The fear and pain is real; it is both unavoidable and undeniable in the documentary presentation. Watching the project will make it almost unbearable for some audiences, as there is simply no emotion that can be felt strong enough to capture genuinely how terrifying and revolting the subject being focused on is.
This is complex within the film, as its admittedly longer 120-minute runtime is filled with gruesome visuals of torture and death. There are large sequences interwoven which focus on the general public of the time. Rather than the sorrow and pain in which this time is normally viewed, these scenes offer a different and often overlooked perspective. The community isn't dead, it is alive. Children run in the streets passing out small Nazi flags as the public gladly hang posters of Adolf Hitler in windows and on walls. Weirdly enough, this perspective of joy is somehow almost as horrifying and hard to accept as the other side to the feature. The public didn't hate this, they celebrated it and ultimately what this means in a larger conversation on society is all the more troubling.
This connection is the hidden saving grace for the feature. Had the movie came out even a decade ago, one could easily argue that it would fall into the dangerous category of torture porn. The film is undeniably painful and torturous to watch, meaning that anyone who got some form of pleasure or reward from the experience would probably have some ties twisted somewhere. Coming in the context of the modern political climate, the film horrifyingly finds a new life and relevance. Not only is the tragedy and pain of this event needed to be felt by modern audiences who act oblivious to the consequences their game of hate can lead to, but it also warns what the true villains can look like. To get to this point, the world won't be some dystopian as seen in projects also meditating on this future like The Forever Purge, it will be a strong community cheering the atrocities on either blind or simply unsympathetic to the horrors surrounding them.
Babi Yar. Context might be one of the most difficult and off-putting films of the year, but it also is one of the most needed. Ultimately, the world outside of whatever cinema one might be watching the film in is a world with horrifying trends and ideas polluting both individuals and the larger consciousness. Features like Babi Yar. Context are an important tool to lead to analysis and hopefully action against these ideas by presenting an argument one truly cannot debate or ignore.
