IN THE WAKE OF THE VOID: ARCHIVE FILMS OF SERHIY LOZNYTSIA AS AUDIOVISUAL UNIVERSALGESCHICHTE

Abstract

Serhii Loznytsia’s film Babyn Yar. Context quite clearly displays a pattern of peripeteia, as it follows the events of Germany’s occupation of Soviet Ukraine from 1941 to 1944 and its aftermath. A peripetic structure often includes events being told (or even actually happening) two times, from a perspective of before and after. Posters of Hitler being affixed and later torn down would be the most explicit (and at the same time metonymic) example in Babyn Yar. Context. Kyiv being taken over by Germany and later by the Red Army is another one. Loznytsia’s film in fact consists of two halves of roughly one hour each, with the events of Babyn Yar in the middle or in the center. But this center is, narratologically, almost a void. The massacre, to which Loznytsia’s timeline presents a context, is both the peripety of his montage, as well as a void within it. The author looks at Loznitsia’s attempt considering aspects of archiveology and narratology.