In 1940, Romania allied with Nazi Germany in response to the annexation of two provinces by the Soviet Union. The following year, the 6th Regiment of the Romanian army joined the German advance against Soviet forces, and this provides the subject for Memories of the Eastern Front, a new 30-minute documentary by Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânc?. Utilising a similar aesthetic and the same level of formal rigour to their previous collaboration – the immense The Exit of the Trains which focused on the Ia?i pogrom of 1941 – the film charts and challenges the story presented in a meticulously laid out and annotated photograph album.
In any film that is concerned primarily with presenting and interrogating found materials, the narrativization of those materials often tends towards their subversion. Part of what is interesting about such work is the reframing of footage – or in this instance, photographs – that either lacked or suppressed certain contextual information. Memories of the Eastern Front shows the images in full, but then punches in on specific features and intercuts them with quotations that fill in various, often uncomfortable, missing details. Stories of rape, pillaging, and executions sit uneasily alongside smiling portraits or picturesque landscapes and even cast a shadow over the more overtly military imagery.
Visually, the film is a tour of identically sized photos mounted on grey backing paper accompanied by an absolutely silent soundtrack. While this austerity of form might feel quite contradictory to the wordy, essayistic mode, the gaps that are created by the juxtaposition of images and intertitles leave a similar sensation of space needing to be filled by the viewer. This is perhaps Jude and Cioflânc?’s entire point, that a display of history is necessarily born of a certain perspective which will, intentionally or otherwise, leave some things unsaid. The cumulative power of Memories of the Eastern Front could be said to be its prompting to probe each image with an equally discerning eye.
Director, screenplay: Radu Jude, Adrian Cioflânc?
Cinematography: Marius Panduru
Producer: Ada Solomon
Editor: C?t?lin Cristu?iu
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Shorts)
No dialogue
30 minutes
