Barrett Watten & Vladislav Davidzon
Poetics, Film, and War: A Video Conversation about Sergei Loznitsa’s Film Donbass (2018)
Introduction
When thinking of how to introduce Vlad Davidzon—and the circumstances of our conversation on the Ukraine war and Sergei Loznitsa’s film Donbass—Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men comes to mind. Not only by virtue of the providential nature of our encounter, but with the sense that Vlad is a “messenger” of sorts, a “courier” of news from other parts of the world, stretches of time that are inaccessible to “normal life.” But there is nothing mysterious or mystificatory about Vlad; he has his feet planted firmly on the ground as he undertakes the risky business of witnessing and reporting on the Ukraine war from Odessa, Dnipro, and the front, building a by-line on CNN and France 24 as a specialist on the war in the East, from both political and cultural standpoint.
It is as an author and cultural critic that I first met Vlad, after following each other on Facebook; in Paris in November 2021, he suggested we meet for a drink in the Marais, where he mainly lives. We met and discussed the politics of the Big East, touching on my travels to the USSR, contacts with Russian poets, and their current interest in Language writing and our “Summer School” of 1989, which brought American and post-Soviet poets together (Dragomoshchenko, Parshchikov, Prigov, Kutik, Kondakova). Currently a translation is being prepared, and a major anthology is forthcoming (if it is not interfered with by authorities). Vlad proposed writing about that reception, and I sent him a copy of Leningrad. In turn, he invited me to his neighborhood in the Upper Marais, where he gave me a signed copy of his book From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays from Post-Soviet Ukraine as well as the Odessa Review, which he cofounded and edited. Then the war.
From Odessa with Love reveals the proverbial tip of the iceberg that is the history of Ukraine after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Americans, depending on their radar, are incompletely aware of the importance of these events, even as they turn out to be more consequent than anyone imagined. The Maidan Revolution (2014), to begin, set the stage for a geopolitical conflict between a so-called “Russian sphere of influence” and its underlying concept, russkiy mir(Russian world, the extent of Russophone worldview, power, culture, and language), Eurasianism versus Europe, NATO, and Atlanticism. Closer to the ground, the Maidan was a chaotic emergence of liberal democracy; nationalisms of all sorts, including extreme ones; and historical survivals of World War II accessing deep memories of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine caused by Stalin’s forced collectivization, and the victory over fascism in the war. Maidan was followed by the annexation of Crimea by the “little green men,” the fomenting of civil war in the Donbas, and establishment of Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” in the east. Bu what is going on there is anything but simple, dichotomous. Vlad’s reportage takes up the swirling contradictions, corruptions, repressions, eruptions of the period leading to the present war. This material also has great consequences for American politics, as we encounter the potential origins of “Fake News” in the propaganda campaigns in the Donbas; the corruptions of Americans and their counterparts in Ukraine (Paul Manafort, Hunter Biden); mafia-style politics of languages and regions; and the cultural dimensions of this turbulence. So it is that one of the stories Vlad covers is the showing of Loznitsa’s Donbassat the Cannes Film Festival, where it won in the Un certain regard (A Certain Look) category immediately after completion.
Then the war. Given its timeliness, Donbass was re-released for theaters in April 2022; I picked up on it in two articles in the New York Times. One covers Loznitsa’s prior work, adding the intriguing detail that Donbass was scripted on the basis of cell phone videos from the occupied zone; recently an archive of cell phone videos has been published in the Washington Post, adding to the database. The second article reviewed the film in distribution. Meanwhile, I was invited to a meeting of poets in Detroit, many on the Left, to read work responding to the war and discuss its larger politics. In turn, I offered my Detroit space for a screening of Donbass as a focus for continued discussion. On Facebook, Vlad noticed the event; offered to take part in it by Zoom (though due to time zones that would probably be about 4-6 AM); and finally we agreed on making the video uploaded here. This is how things happen, or should—one thing leading to the next, learning more and connecting—but with the sad urgency of an ongoing war, which we are dedicated to witnessing and ending. Our conversation, in real-time Detroit and online Zoom to Petersburg, Bloomington, Indiana, and Bolinas, was small but notable—the ideas were flowing, expanding from politics of war to the interpretive and formal aspects of Loznitsa’s film—its poetics. My claim, then, is that poetics is crucial to comprehend this war and process it, not just as an act of mourning but as a form of real-time agency.
What I see in Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass, what I discuss with Vlad in our conversation, and what our various real-time and online group opened up is the way in which the poetics of film, the making of the thirteen related but nonnarrative vignettes, combine to establish a “cultural logic” of occupied Donbas and prefigure the current war. (Note that the fictive premises of the film are underscored by the alternate spelling of “Donbass” in the title, versus the actual geographical region “Donbas.”) Each of the episodes elaborates a single dramatic premise, taken as Loznitsa says from cell phone evidence, of a facet of how the occupation could be experienced. Borrowing from the formal resources of Soviet high art and avant-garde film, adding the hysterical “ideology critique” of post-Soviet postmodernism, Loznitsa fashions a contrastive language of incommensurate extremes—to the point that these seem like a new reality. I would argue that this contrastive language of incommensurate extremes, a cultural logic of defamiliarization to a degree that Shklovsky could scarcely imagine it, is what we live in many ways, and not only in the war. But this war provides a heightened version of it, allowing us to perceive the corruption and distortion that otherwise goes unnoticed. Poetics intersects with war, as it did for Shklovsky, to an exemplary degree in Loznitsa’s film.
In my conversation with Vlad, I focus on the poetics of three scenes that I saw as particularly revealing: the tour of the underground bunker; the torture of the Ukrainian POW or provocateur; and the “wedding within the war” at the local marriage registry. In the first, we see, by a formal inversion of Sokorov’s Russian Ark, a materialist critique of russkiy mir in the distressed condition of the civilians, many women, children, and elderly, held hostage by the war. It is the attack on the infrastructure and the civilians that depend on it that makes this war so barbaric; Loznitsa shows how reality coincides with extreme reversal of the Russophone ideal of an encompassing “world.” With the torture of the Ukrainian captive, the question of the use of fascist as an expletive comes up. I ask Vlad, as part the Odessa/emigré Jewish community, if he sees any anti-Semitism in this populist moment of distorted “antifascism.” Perhaps not, but what is revealed is the use of scapegoating as a ritual act, the sublime object or “kernel” of ideology after Slavoj Žižek. The final scene we discuss is the wedding, a great moment of cinema and performance in its own right. I compare this scene to another moment of populist hysteria, the encounter in a German roadhouse between two gay men and a proto-Hitler youth singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” Both of these scenes are analytically precise: one a depiction of Russophone hypernationalism under conditions of the occupation; and the other the rise of fascism, seen as a hypernationalism. Is there a connection between these two moments? Vlad and I do not decide, but offer the film with its many connecting facets, as a basis for thinking.—Barrett Watten
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You can upload the full film, Donbass, through the Eastern European Movies site at:
https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/drama/donbass
Please note that this film access is available only through site membership sign-up ($5 for one day, $15 for one week):