In the early 1970s, Italian film crews spread out across the USSR, capturing a vast, multicultural empire few had ever seen in such diversity. From urban commuters to village fêtes, Baku trawlers to Siberian reindeer herders, the cameramen aimed to capture the Soviet polity at a time when Westerners had a gray, monolithic image of what lay behind the Iron Curtain. Granted official permission, they managed to resist any push towards propaganda, even finding ways to slyly critique a system that proclaimed regional autonomy but controlled everything from the Kremlin. While planned as a monumental, multi-chapter TV series, only a few episodes wound up being broadcast on Italian TV, just once, following which the endeavor lay forgotten in the archives. If ever there was a project for Sergei Loznitsa, this was it.
In “Imperium,” working with 60 hours of 16mm, the master documentarian organizes this journey along geographic lines, starting in Moscow and heading east, then doubling back through “the Stans” and the Baltic republics until ending in what was then Leningrad. As with Loznitsa’s past films of this type, some snippets of conversation and music have been added, but otherwise the footage has simply been restored and edited together. What’s revealed is an immense state whose distinct regions still managed to hold onto unique traditions, notwithstanding an incessant centralized proclamation of unity.
