The mass production of Joseph Stalin’s image was a central feature of his cult of personality. Rooted in an ever revisionist visual regime, the Soviet Union leader’s pictorial proxies proliferated across the socialist state, making a totalitarian grip on such a vast and diverse expanse of land ideologically possible. The nation’s pater familias was to be seen and venerated all over, in both life and death. With millions out parading pictures of a face that had now crystallised into a death mask, Stalin’s authoritarian endeavour would reach its apex. Yet, though mighty, the dictator’s funeral was marked by sombre sterility: a witness to the misery and terror for which Stalinism stood. State Funeral, Sergey Loznitsa’s new archival documentary film, informs viewers of this moment of Soviet history.

Two hundred cameramen were employed for the colossal funeral of March 1953. They recorded the extensive four-day obsequies in Moscow and the parallel ceremonies happening across the Soviet Union, as mourners from Siberia to Estonia were stopped to listen to broadcasts and to observe staged tributes to the deceased dictator. The resulting 40 hours of colour and black-and-white footage were intended for an official film, whose development was halted as Nikita Khrushchev came into power and the Soviet Union entered its de-Stalinisation process. Sixty years later, Loznitsa rediscovered these mostly unseen reels of footage in the Russian State archive and edited them into a two-hour-long documentary. A compilation of the restored tapes, State Funeral juxtaposes the cold grandeur of the ceremonies with stunning and psychologically intriguing images of the millions of mourners that flocked to attend Stalin’s open-casket service and interment alongside Vladimir Lenin. With no guiding talking heads or voiceovers, the images are set to the tune of monotonous radio announcements, official eulogies and sublime funeral marches. Though highly formalist, State Funeral’s purpose is clearly articulated in the closing intertitle: dozens of millions were killed in the purges, gulags and famines, which made oppression the key tool of Stalinism.

State Funeral is a film about faces. First, Stalin’s own. Loznitsa shows glimpses of the corpse lying in state, untouchably surrounded by a theatrical field of wreaths. More expressively, his presence is replicated all over by icons of his figure, which activated a visual connection with those outside of Moscow. In State Funeral’s most remarkable shot, often noted as worthy of a neorealist film, a full-body portrait of Stalin is seen dangling from a creaking crane over an industrial building, projecting Stalin’s bleak omnipresence over the masses — and then, the faces of the mourners themselves. State Funeral’s long takes allow the viewer to scrutinise the expressions and bodily behaviour of the hordes streaming in and out of the House of the Unions and congregating in squares and around makeshift shrines. Attesting to the huge geographical and ethnical scope of the Soviet Union, these sometimes weeping but most often uninterested individuals elicit the question: what are they really feeling? Needless to say, the deliberate voicelessness of the faces worn down by decades of starvation, war and purges speaks volumes. Equally unsettling are the dispassionate speeches on the Red Square led by Khrushchev and other high-ranking officials, survivors of Stalin’s relentless purges on his own party. These men would become the heads of the collective leadership that replaced Stalin’s autocracy and which swiftly put into motion the de-Stalinisation reforms that eradicated his cult of personality.

It’s worth contemplating what the planned official film would have looked like. Without doubt, it would have been a noxious idealisation of Stalin’s legacy which would struggle to strike a convincing balance between the cinematic opulence of the festivities and the speeches extolling the humility of the dictator. His claim to be a loving extended member of every Soviet family was the core rhetoric of his cult of personality and of Socialist Realism, the propagandistic movement that formed the absolutist visual façade of Stalinism. It’s as the antithesis of this forcibly optimist and utopian state-sanctioned art form that State Funeral presents itself. Taking advantage of the immaculate archival footage, Loznitsa allows the fear, formality and heaviness of those scenes to sink in, pushing forward a complex yet decided outlook on the spectacle. The exacerbated formulaic and ceremonious images are there to prove a point. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s moving “Lacrimosa” and Frédéric Chopin’s sublime “Funeral March” are played on loop, providing further contrast to the grimness of the images. In going back and forth between black and white and muted colour, often switching in the middle of a sequence, the documentary keeps viewers alert throughout what is, nevertheless, an excessively lengthy picture. Loznista drives the point home repeatedly: here is Stalin’s moribund cult of personality, raw and unedited.

Loznitsa’s State Funeral is an important reflection on the moving image. The waxy, theatricalised corpse; the portraits of Stalin; the people observing and being observed — these different layers of representation and vision are exposed in their rawness by cinema’s own aesthetic capacity to provoke new connections and meanings through the tool of editing. Profiting from historical hindsight yet deeply embedded in current debates on digital manipulation, State Funeral is a formalist archival glimpse at the ominous turn of events of one of the largest cults of personality of the 20th century. This will be the film’s own enduring legacy.

Luís Correia (@correialuis_) is a London-based writer, film programmer, art historian and thinker. His previous work has focused on queer history, the representation of the body in film, European visual culture and the emancipatory politics of art.