morning menu
The programming of cinemas opens up the prospects for a rich, incendiary and intense week, with a masterpiece by Ukrainian director Sergey Loznitsa (Baby yar. Context), a subtle contrast by Emmanuel Moret on the pains of love and the many hesitations of love (Temporary contact facts), Sexual political ballet inside a fire stationphosphorescent light that hovers or floats at night on the swampy ground), Deaf dialogue.
And finally, the chance to see for the last time Jean-Luc Godard, who died on Tuesday 13th September at the age of 91, in a documentary, See you Friday Robinson, The Swiss filmmaker, from afar, interviews Iranian director Ibrahim Golestan.
“Babi Yar. Context”: In the dark memory of Ukraine
Babi Yar, evil memory. Since the Nazi occupation, this place has become a symbol of the extermination of Jews in Ukraine, during what historians called the “Holocaust with bullets”. This is the face taken by the genocide of the Jews in the East. The Nazis systematically shoot, corpses pile up in heaps in pits, and then covered with earth or lime. One and a half million Jews succumbed to the mass murder, which was carried out on nearly five hundred listed sites. On September 29 and 30, 1941, they were executed in small groups, 33,771 of them were men and women, the elderly and children, who left their lives in the Babi Yar Valley, northwest of Kyiv.
This chapter is the burning heart of Ukrainian director Sergey Loznitsa’s film. As its title suggests, Baby yar. Context It is simultaneously taken in a more general framework, evoking the situation in Ukraine during the Second World War. It is a film montage free of commentary and interviews, illustrating the temporal geography of events with brief caricatures, discreetly working on the soundtrack to mitigate the effect of the specific spacing of the archives and to make the film more present in our consciousness.
This style of intervention, its dramatic structure, the selection and sequence of images that compose it, make it an exceptional work. Because the film brings back to us, in its depth and complexity, the contemporary history of Ukraine, a valuable reminder given the current tragic situation in this country. Because he offers us a wonderful reflection on the images, despite the use of archives of Nazi and Soviet propaganda, the director manages, precisely through his art of editing, to deactivate his ideology in favor of a story that allows us to understand it. Jack Mandelbaum
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