Regaining a vision

Victor Kossakovsky and Sergei Loznitsa, a conversation.

Every day newspapers, social networks, the mass media and news reports bubble with images and news that end up forgotten in the bin by the next day. And after all this, what remains in our memory, what have we learnt? Faced with the noise of images that only confuse, and in the face of other film genres in which all images are believable because in them everything is a dream, there is a different kind of film in which everything revolves around one fundamental question, that of vision. And this viewer’s vision of images of reality raises only questions: why, how, who is showing us this, and where are we seeing it from? Russian film-maker Victor Kossakovsky and his Ukrainian colleague Sergei Loznitsa have always posed these essential questions in their work behind the camera: the political or propagandist use of images of war – from Nazism to the Soviet régime – the ethics and aesthetics of images, camera position and the film-maker’s vision, the hybrid possibilities of the poetic and the real and images for memory. Both of them have always worked in the awareness that both viewer and film-maker share a single fundamental right: “the right to a vision”.