_{The Natural History of Destruction by Sergei Loznitsa}

The idea to make an archive-based film about the saturation bombing of German cities during the latter part of the Second World War came to Sergei Loznitsa after he read WG Sebald’s similarly named book on the subject, On The Natural History of Destruction. This collection of essays, entitled Luftkrieg und Literatur in German, not only looked at the devastation wrought by Allied bomber planes on cities from Dresden to Cologne but also asked why so little attention was paid to the suffering that the Germans endured.

The Natural History of Destruction* (Sales handled by Progress Film) is receiving a Special Screening in Cannes. It is produced by Maria Choustova of Atoms & Void. Like most of its Ukrainian director’s previous films, it has received Dutch backing.

“History is written by the victors. For many years, the destruction of the German cities and the deaths of 600,000 German civilians was considered to be a deserved punishment for the crimes their leaders and their army committed in Europe and worldwide,” Loznitsa makes a familiar observation about why so little attention has been paid to this apocalyptic episode.

Even today, the subject remains “highly problematic and sensitive.” The issue, Loznitsa suggests, is the idea of “collective guilt” formulated by Carl Jung at the end of the Second World War and which remained deeply rooted in German society.

Of course, for obvious reasons, the film has an added contemporary resonance. It will be showing in Cannes even as the war in Ukraine, which started with the Russian invasion in February, continues to rage.

“When the war began, the film had already been edited. So, even though some of the images one sees in the film bear a striking resemblance to the images from Mariupol or Kharkiv, which we are now seeing every day on our computer and TV screens, I can say that the idea to make this film came to me back in 2017, and we have been working on this project and financing it for several years. I knew that this war was going to break out. I spoke about it in many of my films,” Loznitsa notes of how his documentary touches on subject matter which has become horribly familiar in recent months.

The director, though, points out that it is not his job to “make parallels” between what is in his film and what is happening currently in Ukrainian cities. “It is up to the spectator to do his part of the job and to reflect upon the events depicted in my film and to see whether they are related to what is going on in these territories now. My duty as a filmmaker is to raise an issue, to put forward a question,” he says.

Loznitsa started working on the film in the autumn of 2021, and the edit was finished at the end of February, just as the war began. He continued with the music recording and sound design in March and April. The work was done in Lithuania and in the Netherlands.

The war has now derailed another of the director’s long gestating projects. He had been planning to make a dramatic film based on the Babi Yar massacre (also the subject of his recent documentary Babi Yar. Context*). "We were supposed start preparations for the shoot in April this year and to shoot the film this summer – in Kharkiv and in Lviv. Unfortunately, this project had to be postponed… I intend to continue working on the film as soon as the circumstances will enable me to do so."

In the meantime, Loznitsa has his Cannes screenings to attend. “Unfortunately, the issue of mass destruction of the civilian population remains as relevant today as it was 80 years ago, and I believe that humanity has to find a way of putting an end to this barbarity once and for all… [but] at this point in time, this goal seems to be incredibly hard to achieve.”

In Cannes, Loznitsa expects to be asked yet again about his position regarding the proposal to boycott Russian culture and Russian filmmakers. As he has made clear, he is categorically against such “carpet boycotts” (just as he is against “carpet bombings”).

“I am convinced that a person and an artist should be judged not by the passport he/she holds, but by her/his actions, words and oeuvres,” the director states.

For more information on Cannes Film Festival, click here. To see the full screening schedule of all Dutch (co-)productions at Cannes, click here.
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund