The Old Jewish Cemetery

Sergei Loznitsa recreates the disquieting strangeness of a place through its most obvious appearance: a Riga park which we sense, given the handful of passengers getting of the streetcar serving it, is far from the centre. The editing delivers the fragments of a commemorative plaque one by one, gradually revealing the historic nature of the place. The chronicle of a slow-moving life (the elderly carrying their shopping), the long shots hiding what the writing, then a few scattered gravestones, suggest lies under the earth. The frame may well empty and fill as people come and go, but this movement is on the trivial, present-day surface of a multi-layered series of massacres perpetrated by the Nazis and uncommemorated by the Soviets. The puzzle of the plaque gives memory back to Riga’s Jewish community, to whom the film is dedicated. The choice of this piecemeal revelation translates the scandal of a fragmentation repeated over centuries. How could an 18th-century Jewish cemetery become the site of a holocaust of corpses? Shadows of foliage on the ground materialise generations of absent ones. Like the residents’ madness in The Colony and the users’ unfathomable sleep in The Train Stop, the genocide is the invisible dimension that cinema alone (in 16 mm black and white film) can make palpable while safeguarding its mystery. (Charlotte Garson)