Perhaps one of the most chilling moments in Ukrainian filmmaker Serguei Loznitsa's documentary On the Natural History of Destruction is a speech by Winston Churchill before the RAF bombed German cities in the final stages of World War II. The British prime minister urged the inhabitants of the cities where there were weapons factories to leave their homes and workplaces to take refuge in the countryside and contemplate "how the fire destroys the houses from a distance".
In some ways, Churchill's cynicism is reflected in the shamelessness of Vladimir Putin when he denies against all evidence that many of the bombings in Ukraine target the civilian population, or in that of the Israeli authorities when they order the inhabitants of Gaza to leave the northern part of the strip while missiles continue to cause death and destruction in southern cities. 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 the documentary on the book of the same title by the novelist and essayist W.G. Sebald. With questionable judgment, the filmmaker contrasts the Allied aerial bombings of Hamburg, Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden or Berlin with those of the Luftwaffe on London and other English cities, leaving Russia out of the picture and ending the action before the massacres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this way, he gets the film to have the tension of a duel between two, but loses the coherence and rigor that the German author's essay did have.
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 of today's wars when civilians appear on the screen trying to rescue people buried under the rubble, or the moment the lens stops on the bag containing the corpse, rigorously tagged, of a child shot down in a city in Germany. In fact, with the decision not to inform the viewer about the cities to which the images correspond, Loznitsa conveys the idea that all the bombings are equally devastating, all the ruins are alike and underneath lie the same victims as always: defenseless civilians.
The subject 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 about the figures) killed 600,000 civilians, destroyed 3.5 million homes, flattened 7.5 million people and, in the case of Dresden, generated up to 42.8 cubic meters of debris per inhabitant. The publication sparked a lively debate around Germany's difficulties in shouldering historical guilt, an issue that is now resurfacing - another parallel - due to the uncritical support of a large part of German public opinion for the attacks Israel in Gaza.
But Loznitsa has preferred to pull another common thread. The director has resorted to the magic of montage to highlight the routine banality of the civilian bombing industry. On one side and on the other side of the dispute, diligent workers are applied to the manufacture of bombs that will then be transported in carts to the bellies of the planes with the same naturalness with which the employees of the handling (assistance to planes and passengers on the ground) carry bags through airports. It is the relentless logic of the war economy. Once again the echo of current conflicts. Without making it explicit, the filmmaker suggests that we never learned the lesson.
