Sergei Loznitsa's historical drama Two Prosecutors, which he adapted from the novella written by the onetime Gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov (1908-87), confronts the horrors inflicted by Stalinism. A Kafkaesque parable, it asks the rhetorical question what can an idealist achieve in a system marked by arbitrariness and terror, where laws are either ignored or reinterpreted? Needless to say, the film invokes the Russia of today.
Loznitsa describes it as a "typical Russian fairy tale", one that evolved as the bureaucratic nightmarishness evoked by Gogol, as well as Kafka, kept creeping into his script as he was writing it. He expresses it on screen through images of claustrophobic corridors and the gloomy waiting rooms where the film's protagonist, the young prosecutor Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), is repeatedly left to stew. The bleak colour scheme intensifies the foreboding mood.
This story with no heroes is set mainly inside a Soviet prison in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Purge of his political enemies. Neither the camera nor the guards lose side of Kornyev, who has come into possession of a letter from Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), one of the prisoners on death row. Kornyev insists on seeing Stepniak, who apparently has vital information to share.
Sitting down for an interview on the occasion of the film's UK release, Loznitsa was as sharp and combative as ever.
PAMELA JAHN: Georgy Demidov, who wrote the Two Prosecutors novels, studied physics in Kharkov [now Kharkiv]. You studied maths in Kyiv. Did you feel a certain kinship when you read his work?
SERGEI LOZNITSA: On a meta level, yes. He employed a language that's very close to me. He wrote the novel in 1968 having spent 14 years [from 1938] in the Gulag, where someone told him the story that forms the basis of the book. The manuscript was confiscated, but in the 1990s, after a long struggle, Demidov’s daughter managed to get it back, and it was published.
Kornyev, the prosecutor at the centre of the film, could be seen as a naive idealist. Is he a variation of Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot?
Yes and no. Returning to Russia after receiving treatment in Switzerland, Myshkin has absolutely no idea about the norms and morals of the country in which he finds himself in. He tries to embody his own ideal, and his naive, honest nature leads high society to falsely label him an "idiot". Kornyev, on the other hand, grew up in the Soviet Union; he came from a family that strove to create the ideal of a Soviet person.
In a sense, he was produced by this country. But he became a prosecutor in the very moment when the country was in a process of radical change in a way that wasn't necessarily perceived as such by the rest of the population. It was a time when the reprisals had already reached a very significant level. We might see him as an idealist or as a naive person, but that's because we know today where all this was going and how it would end.
It's ironic that Kornyev and Stepniak, who both believed they could help build the Soviet Union as a constitutional state, end up meeting in prison.
Demidov tells us not only the story of two individuals, but shows the model of a
society of oppression. He analyses the mistakes people make when they have to make decisions in such a system. Many actually believed in sabotage at the lower levels but considered the system itself to be good. That is why they also believed Stalin. That was the great mistake.
In one of the film's crucial scenes, Kornyev meets the director of the prison where Stepniak is held.
Yes, it's an interesting moment, because at that time there was still a law in place that would allow a prosecutor like Kornyev access to any prisoner. And the director of the prison had no right to stop him but, of course, he tries to avoid a meeting between the two. In a way it resembles the conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles, when the latter defines himself as "part of that power that always wills the evil and always creates good". It's the moment where everything shifts, not only in the film. Today, we are observing an enormous amount of that in the world.
In what way?
Just look at Iran – it's a dictatorship. Now, is it good or bad to attack that country? You decide. There is a shift in how conflicts are dealt with when you have no idea
anymore what is right and what is wrong.
Can you still believe in justice when you look at the chaos around you?
Whether justice is possible or not is a very serious philosophical question.
I remember Hitchcock's Psycho. In the moment when Norman Bates commits the crime, that's when he leaves himself behind. But when we, the audience, condemn him, this is the moment in which he returns to himself. So, who are we judging?
In my film, the situation is actually very obvious. There is no such thing as justice in a lawless system. In Kornyev's case, he comes from a point of complete lack of knowledge, and when he starts to understand, there's nothing left that he can
possibly do. And that brings us back to the question that the two security officers ask him when he's on the train: What can we do when there is a criminal who hasn't yet committed a crime? There is no answer to that.
How can we stop history from repeating itself?
The sentence is incomplete; it doesn't represent fully what is going on. History
repeats itself when the people who are participating in it do not learn from their own experience. What should have happened the very moment the Soviet Union
collapsed was a trial of the crimes of the Soviet government. But there was no trial, no understanding. There was no knowledge and no moral lessons learned from the enormous crimes that were inflicted on the peoples of the countries under Soviet rule. That means that this form of life that was going on in the Soviet Union keeps going on. And if a criminal knows that they won't be punished, they will continue with what they're doing in order to hold on to power, to property, to make life easy for themselves, for their friends and relatives.
You trace Soviet history by switching between documentaries and feature films. Do you follow a certain path, or plan?
In 2018, I released an archive film, The Trial, based on footage of show trials against people whom Stalin had declared enemies of the state. The charges were all fabricated, but Stalin spoke of an "industrial party", of sabotage and of a French plot against the Soviet Union. The astonishing thing was that many of the accused actually pleaded guilty. After that, I wanted to make another film about how these people fared in prison.
Two Prosecutors is very dark and oppressive. At what point did you decide that the film's aesthetic should mirror the crimes of the Stalin regime?
That was the task we set ourselves from the very beginning, to create an
atmosphere that would allow viewers to immerse themselves into what we
believe corresponded with the time depicted in the film. That's why we chose the Academy format [the squarish 4.3 or 1.37:1 aspect ratio for 35mm film] and the soft lighting. We also avoided any colours that would normally be associated with life: green, yellow, orange, violet, and the blue of the sky.
Do you think cinema in general should make audiences feel uncomfortable today?
Art is a phenomenon that develops according to its own rules and laws – there is no right or wrong. It takes the direction where talent drives it. There are directors that make uncomfortable films. I'm one of them. Picasso once said, painting is not there to decorate your living space. Painting is there to attack it. In a similar vein, Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom [1975] is a provocative piece of art that got banned at the time. Sometimes good directors enter a zone of discomfort in order to make a point.
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