Perhaps one of the most chilling moments in the documentary On the Natural History of Destruction, by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, is a speech by Winston Churchill prior to the RAF bombing of German cities in the final stretch of World War II. In it, the British premier exhorts the inhabitants of the cities where there were weapons factories to abandon their homes and jobs to take refuge in the countryside and watch "how the fire destroys the houses from a distance."
In some way, Churchill's cynicism is reflected in the shamelessness of Vladimir Putin when he denies against all evidence that many of his bombings on Ukraine are aimed at the civilian population, or in that of the Israeli authorities when they order Gazans to leave the north of the strip while their missiles continue to cause death and destruction in the cities of the south.
It is just one of the parallels between that horror and its more contemporary manifestations. The documentary, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is now available on Filmin.
Loznitsa (Maidan, Austerlitz, Donbass) bases his documentary on the book of the same title by the novelist and essayist W. G. Sebald. With a questionable criterion, the filmmaker contrasts the Allied air bombings of Hamburg, Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin with those of the Luftwafe on London and other English cities, leaving Russia out of the scene and ending the action before the massacres. of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He thus achieves that the film has the tension of a duel between two, but it loses the coherence and rigor that the German author's essay had.
Arranged in chronological order, the documentary begins by showing the bustling daily life of German cities just before the disaster. It has no narrator, but there are slight appearances of an extraordinary soundtrack by Christiaan Verbeek.
The viewer cannot help but think about today's wars when civilians appear on the screen trying to rescue people buried under the rubble, or when the lens stops over the bag containing the rigorously labeled corpse of a child dejected in a city in Germany.
In fact, with his decision not to inform the viewer about the cities to which the images correspond, Loznitsa conveys the idea that all bombings are equally devastating, all the ruins look alike and under them lie the same victims as always: the defenseless civilians.
The theme of Sebald's book, published in 1999, was, above all, the silence of German intellectuals after the Allied bombings which, according to the author (there are discrepancies over the figures) killed 600,000 civilians, destroyed 3.5 million homes, left 7.5 million people exposed to the elements and, in the case of Dresden, generated up to 42.8 cubic meters of debris for each inhabitant.
Its publication sparked a lively debate about Germany's difficulties in digesting its historical guilt, an issue that now resurfaces – another parallel – in light of the uncritical support of a large part of German public opinion for Israel's attacks on Gaza.
But Loznitsa preferred to pull another common thread. The director has resorted to the magic of editing to highlight the routine banality of the civilian bombing industry. On both sides of the conflict, hard-working men and women are working on the manufacture of bombs that will then be transported in forklifts to the bellies of the planes with the same naturalness with which handling employees transport our suitcases through airports.
It is the implacable logic of the war economy. Again the echo of current conflicts. Without making it explicit, the filmmaker suggests that we never learned our lesson.
