A Satirical Promotion: Sergei Loznitsa Goes to the Opera
In January/February 2025, the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive welcomed renowned Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa for a ten-day residency. Loznitsa’s Mosse Lecture on February 5, 2025, was the opening event of this spring’s Documentary Voices series, co-curated by Kate MacKay and Professor Deniz Göktürk. Raiden Shields, a student in Professor Göktürk’s UC Berkeley course on Documentary Forms, discusses below Loznitsa’s emphasis on the power of editing and the fine satire transpiring through his montage of archival footage.
by Raiden Shields
It is a special experience to watch a film while the creator walks the audience through their thoughts and processes and what they were thinking during the film’s making. On February 5, 2025, Sergei Loznitsa did just that with his promotional film for the Paris Opera, A Night at the Opera (2020), as he gave a Mosse Lecture as the opening of this year’s Documentary Voices series at the Berkeley Museum of Art’s Pacific Film Archive. From the podium he controlled the playback to start and pause the film as he saw fit to talk about what he liked about certain shots, tell the audience who is on screen, and break down his editing pattern for this project. He explained that he used archival footage provided by the Opera to weave together a night that incorporates scenes from decades of events with a focus on the pomp and circumstance surrounding this historic institution and the performances it showcased. For the first five minutes, people file into the building in outfits exclusive to the elite while those in more common clothes are kept beyond the gates. Once inside the building there is an excitement among the buzzing audience of the opera that translates through the screen, but the film cuts back out to the facade and an even higher echelon of society begins to arrive. Queen Elizabeth, Grace Kelly, and three different Prime Ministers of France are shown entering with their respective entourage, draped in gowns and medals. The cuts repeat the arrival of various rounds of dignitaries in seamless succession and parade a poetic use of editing unique to the medium of film.
In their book, Introduction to Documentary, Bill Nichols and Jaimie Baron define the “poetic mode” of documentary in terms of editing: “The poetic mode sacrifices the conventions of continuity editing and the sense of a specific location in time and place…. This mode explores associations and patterns that involve temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions…People more typically function on par with other objects as raw material that filmmakers select and arrange into associations and patterns of their choosing.” During the showing, Loznitsa spoke about how the footage was taken from many different nights across decades of events, and edited together to give the impression of multiple arrivals on a single evening. By condensing years of footage into an illusory single night the film creates a rhythm and coherent pattern that the audience can recognize, which reveals the ritualistic habits that compose the opera. Loznitsa commented that these rituals resemble religious services, with the formation of uniformed guards and the architecture of the building being two of the main things the director pointed to himself. In their article on Loznitsa, Sibel Sebuktekin and Yasemin Kılınçarslan write: “Sergei Loznitsa is known for his documentaries where he points his camera at people, recording how they behave ‘like fools’ without making any commentary… through the creative use of editing in his documentaries, consciously generates underlying meanings and subtexts within his works.” Many of his films are composed entirely from archival footage, as is the case with A Night at the Opera. This style of poetic editing lends itself to ironic juxtapositions that can create satire, which is the very heart of making fun of something.
Satire is a nebulous term that means something different to each person. Humor is, at its root, subjective, but the intent of the author, if known, is important in determining how content should be interpreted. In an article discussing satire Dakota Park-Ozee says, “…a satirist may make opposing views, arguments, or proposals appear absurd—or reveal they truly are—by increasing the absurdity of her own argument…If a satirist makes reality look impossibly absurd in comparison to an improbably fantastic oppositional reality, it is hard to misinterpret the critique of the current state of affairs.” During Loznitsa’s talk it became obvious to the audience in attendance that he was making a joke, and he noted that this material, meant to be promotional by the opera who commissioned him, is at the same time poking fun at that very institution. Tasked to present the prestige of the Paris Opera, Loznitsa hyper-focuses on doing that and only that until the final sequence. For the audience to recognize the humor a demonstrable difference must be made clear and Loznitsa does this with escalation from the first sequence to the second. He moves from showing famous people some would recognize to showing ultra-famous people most would recognize, which is fundamental to legibility of the central joke. It takes a full five minutes for the first volley of important people to find their seats, which the audience recognizes as high society by key universal signifiers such as tuxedos and gowns, and the opera appears ready to begin, but the camera cuts in an instant back to the exterior where processions of luxury cars and people in the most extravagant outfits begin their entrance. Similar to the first five minutes, Loznitsa focuses the next seven minutes on these recognizable figures walking into the building, through the halls and to their seats. Sitting through the first five minutes of people entering is tolerable to the audience, they trust that the filmmaker is setting the stage for the performance, but running through it twice to such an indulgent extent makes it a rolling laugh for those next seven minutes.
There are two reasons this film, which plays a joke on the commissioning institution, still works well as a promotional piece – the subtlety of Loznitsa’s editing style, and the power of the final performance. Lora Maslenitsyna describes this style, saying that, “Loznitsa’s film does not plainly observe a historical event…The film produces an immersive portrait of a city confronting its historical legacy in which civilians reimagine their relationships to forces of power…By confronting Loznitsa’s unique contribution to non-fiction representation, viewers can engage with the transformative political voice deployed through his films’ novel narratives…” On its face this is footage from a real life event, nothing more, but if a viewer was to stop and evaluate what was happening in front of them, the intent of the director and editor becomes apparent. A Night at the Opera was made as satire, done so to entertain Loznitsa himself while doing contracted work. Observational documentaries are an alternate way to have an experience, a way to shortcut life without having to be in the moment caught on camera, but, as Maslenitsyna and Werner Herzog would agree, the choices made when selecting the material and the presentation of that material through editing are what make truly effective documentaries impactful. Anyone can assemble a series of images cataloguing an event like a calendar, but it takes real creativity to assemble images of the past and tell a story with the montage. That is what purely observational documentaries struggle with, storytelling. It is the backbone of this visual medium, and it is what people need to latch onto to find meaning within a work. If something is a nebulous collection of images with an either uninspiring or nonsensical connection from one frame to the next it becomes too challenging for most audiences to derive meaning, especially if the nature of the documentary is not explicit upfront.
Loznitsa is a cinematic storyteller who uses no voiceover narration or commentary but only a montage of moving images from the past to convey timeless messages to the audience, as demonstrated by his choice of ending for A Night at the Opera. The final five minutes show a powerful performance by Maria Callas of Una Voce Poco Fa. Loznitsa uses footage from an active camera view with copious close-ups, letting the audience observe her precise facial movements as she produces incredible sounds of coloratura soprano. Ending the piece on this positive note is what sticks with the audience and, even if they picked up on the satire of the first twelve minutes, immersing them in five minutes of the final performance drastically alters what they come away with. That last display is a commodity worth a fortune, it is the heart of what one can expect from a night at the Paris Opera and it may inspire some to seek out the experience, as the commissioner intended it to do. It is no surprise the Paris Opera liked this promotional piece, and it does not matter whether their marketing team picked up on the satire, as all that matters is the audience and how they feel after the powerful ending.
The beauty of Loznitsa’s approach is the ambiguity which he presents. He is an advisor, not a dictator, when it comes to the messages his works communicate. If I had watched A Night at the Opera without Loznitsa’s commentary during the screening, I am not sure if the humor would have resonated. One ongoing joke embedded in twelve minutes of footage, punctuated only by a singular level change, is about as subtle as a joke can be. Editing is Loznitsa’s super-power, honed over decades of creating thought-provoking documentaries, and it was a treat to hear him break down what, on its surface, appeared to be a light promotional video. It is truly amazing how hundreds to thousands of small editing decisions can create distinct meaning.
Works Cited
Baron, Jaimie. Nichols, Bill. (2024). “Chapter 10: What Are the Poetic and Reflexive Modes of
Documentary?” In Introduction to Documentary (4th ed.). Indiana University Press: 174-190.
Herzog, W. (1999, April 30). Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact
in Documentary Cinema. Walkerart.org. https://walkerart.org/magazine/minnesota-declaration-truth-documentary-cinema-1999
Kılınçarslan, Yasemin . Sebuktekin, Sibel. (2025). “Traces of Post-Soviet revolution poetic
cinema in the films of Sergei Loznitsa”. Small Wars & Insurgencies, 36(1). 213-235.
Loznitsa, Sergei. (2020). A Night at the Opera. Paris Opera.
Maslenitsyna, Lora. (2024). Against observation: the panoramic legacy of Sergei Loznitsa.
STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET CINEMA, 18(3), 345–358.
Park-Ozee, Dakota. (2019). “Satire: An explication”. HUMOR, 32(4), 585–604.