Against observation: the panoramic legacy of Sergei Loznitsa

Critical reception of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary films typically concludes that the director privileges observational techniques to depict historical events and political movements, resulting in conflicting judgements on his films’ significance and reducing Loznitsa’s own involvement in the depicted events. This article addresses the techniques and visual grammar of Loznitsa’s 2014 film Maidan and challenges the film’s status as an example of the observational documentary mode. This article proposes approaching Maidan through a recognition of the influence of the panorama on realist representation from its inception in the late eighteenth century to its transformation of cinema in the twentieth century, showing how Loznitsa has developed a panoramic filmmaking language since his early short films. Maidan contrasts the ideas of objectivity and passivity typically assigned to observational films by constructing a historical narrative about the events that occurred in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti during the Euromaidan movement of 2013–2014. This renegotiation of Loznitsa’s filmmaking mode reveals Maidan’s unique contribution to non-fiction representational forms as well as to narratives of national identity within the post-Soviet context.