‘Imperium’ Venice Review: Sergei Loznitsa Mines Soviet Propaganda Reels To Expose The Empire’s Colonial Fault Lines

In his efforts to reclaim and critically deconstruct the history of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has typically worked with official (or semi-official) archival footage, material that lets us see —through what was once considered «promotional content»— how the country saw itself. Or, more precisely, how the authorities tried to bind together a patchwork of different nations under a single idea and concept: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. As one blunt title card in the film puts it, that country ceased to exist in 1991. And that’s precisely why this found material now functions, retrospectively, in a way opposite to how it was originally conceived.

The footage used in Imperium was shot between 1970 and 1973 by two Italian filmmakers who traveled across much of the Soviet Union, documenting its various cultures, cities, nations, customs, and traditions while working for an Italian Communist Party film archive. The images amount to a piece of ethnographic material attempting to capture that strange and varied cultural tapestry stretching from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean, and from the great cities —Moscow and what was then Leningrad, today St. Petersburg— down to the most remote villages. Selected, edited, and arranged by Loznitsa, these images reveal the attempt to impose a single, common meaning —something like a patriotic idea of nationhood— onto something that was, quite evidently, deeply diverse to begin with.

The film opens and closes in the great cities, with their avenues and monumental buildings, their parades, institutions, and urban cultural habits, but it soon leaves those vast conglomerations of people behind to venture into towns and villages that differ not just in size but in ethnicity, custom, and culture. It travels through countries that are independent today —moving from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, among others— devoting itself equally to moments of everyday life among workers and peasants and to specific events: weddings, funerals, national holidays, dances, and festivals.

What emerges, beyond the sheer diversity, is the Soviet attempt to fold all these disparate cultures into a single political tradition beginning with the 1917 Revolution and centered on Lenin as its defining figure. But what also comes through is how arbitrary, forced, and even colonialist that attempt was: there are more differences than similarities, more cultural friction than genuine compliance with certain political —and, in a sense, aesthetic— patterns. The pomp and circumstance of official ceremony repeatedly collides with the messier, more colorful realities on the ground.

With Imperium, Loznitsa continues a project he’s been pursuing for years now: his ongoing effort to demystify the very concept of the Soviet Union, an entity that lasted nearly 75 years. Films like State Funeral or Babi Yar. Context, among other works critical of that country, make his position on the matter unmistakably clear. Without adding commentary, without underlining anything, these are films that anticipate the contradictions that would eventually bring down an empire — one that, today, in a not entirely different way, still refuses to let go of that idea of domination and conquest, a country that keeps existing in the mind and in the nostalgia of a few.