The Natural History of Destruction

PROGRESS Film

VERDICT: Sergei Loznitsa’s latest archival cinema essay, inspired by W.G. Sebald’s book and organized within a quasi-symphonic structure, lays out the brutality of fire bombings in World War II and the ways the war machine refused to acknowledge the human costs.

Sergei Loznitsa explores a deeply troubled past with his customary sensitivity to archival footage in The Natural History of Destruction, a tragico-poetic cinema essay on the shocking carpet bombing of cities during World War II. Inspired by W.G. Sebald’s collection of lectures published under the same name, the film is arranged in clear chapters that move from “normal” pre-War life to the build-up of the war machine and on to the evisceration of entire cities, seen both from the air and on the ground. Whereas Sebald’s focus was on the German population’s inability to process the horrors, and how that vacuum became part of the national psyche, Loznitsa balances the mechanisms of destruction designed to disguise human agency with the unimaginable toll on the populations involved. Clearly paralleling the devastation Ukraine is facing under Russian assault as well as the all-too-quickly forgotten annihilation of Syrian cities by its own government, this powerful documentary will be eagerly scooped up by festivals and showcases.

More than ever before Loznitsa constructs his film like a symphony (it’s also his first time working with a composer), employing a more pronounced sense of overture, crescendo, diminuendo and coda than usual. On a purely aesthetic level the opening montage of images showing daily life in Germany is an effective way to start, yet there’s a significant problem, unaddressed, with conveying the idea of pre-War Nazi Germany as a country of idyllic tranquility. As Sebald wrote, “The majority of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived,” and not just that great writer but a host of other philosophers from Siegfried Kracauer to Theodor Adorno would strongly object to the unintentional implication that this was a nation of quaint cottage industries and conventional urban life. Including shots of city streets decorated with swastikas isn’t quite enough to counter this notion, notwithstanding that symbol’s visceral power.

From shots of a pleasure-going dirigible the tone makes a disruptive shift with an extraordinary sequence of nighttime bombings, abstract in their terrible beauty as phosphorus white blobs are seen from the troposphere glowing and flashing, their terrifying destructive force aurally complemented by low, distant rumbles that gradually get louder as the screen turns increasingly white from agglomerated explosions and the soundtrack practically shrieks. Intellectually we know that each one of those dots represent a bomb laying waste to thousands of lives and homes, which makes the barely audible recording of a British pilot calling it “a good show” especially obscene.

B&W and color footage on the ground reveals the degree of urban devastation whose incomprehensible impact on those living in and near the rubble is surreally reflected in shots of passersby walking along the cleared streets as if all was normal. From there Loznitsa focuses on the manufacture of fighter planes and bombs assembled by workers in Britain and Germany disconnected from the missions and psychologically removed from the impact of so much annihilation. Winston Churchill’s radio broadcast of May 10, 1942 is heard with his sickening suggestion that civilians could “escape from these severities. All they have to do is to leave the cities where munitions work is being carried on – abandon their work, and go into the fields, and watch their home fires burning from a distance.”

Sebald more than Loznitsa is careful not to make equivalencies between Nazi Germany and the United Kingdom, and the culpability of the civilian population in enabling the Axis war machine (not to mention the Shoah) is not within the scope of either the lectures or the documentary. What the director does convey however is the unfathomable level of destruction, especially in Germany but also the aftermath of Nazi air raids on British soil. A thin white horizontal line on an otherwise black screen suddenly gapes open and we watch as shells are released from the chute: being so far up, the bombers are disconnected from the consequences of their actions, but Loznitsa then drops us on the ground to witness blazes so intense they melted stone and incinerated flesh.

Churchill is cheered by crowds and Hitler is heard preaching terror as we see walls scrawled with messages by survivors asking about loved ones and alerting neighbors that one resident is dead but another is alive. Women with eyes bandaged and bodies of children lined up in rows communicate the horrors, though the footage can’t convey how the population processed this hell, which is the crux of Sebald’s book. “The destruction of someone’s native land is as one with that person’s destruction,” he declared, a statement all too often forgotten when commentators underplay the impact of decimated environments on the psyches of those who lived there.

The unanswerable question through it all is how is it possible to claim such devastation is perpetrated in the cause of humanity? World War I saw the first use of such massive fire bombings, amplified in World War II and continuing to the present time in Raqqa, Homs, Kharkiv and Mariupol. The ammunitions industry and their enablers make it so easy to separate materiel from what happens when their bombs actually explode, and too often news images further the abstraction and remove the individuality of survivors. Yet we still nurture this foolish notion that civilization advances when in truth we delude ourselves that rebuilding is the path to healing, stuffing camphor up our noses to prevent acknowledging the stench of all the rotting bodies underneath.

Loznitsa’s sourcing of archival material is as always impeccable, and the footage has been expertly scanned, restored and color graded. Christiaan Verbeek’s music heightens an understanding of the film’s symphonic structure, though the use of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg overture is a little obvious. The excellent sound design makes it all a disturbingly sensory experience.

 

Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Screenplay: Sergei Loznitsa
Producers: Regina Bouchehri, Gunnar Dedio, Uljana Kim, Sergei Loznitsa Maria Choustova
Editing: Danielius Kokanauskis
Music: Christiaan Verbeek
Sound: Vladimir Golovnitski
Production companies: LOOKSfilm (Germany), Studio Uljana Kim (Lithuania), ATOMS & VOID (The Netherlands), Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (Germany), Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (Germany)
World sales: PROGRESS Film
Venue: Cannes (Special Screenings)
In German, English
109 minutes