Starting with images of Soviet citizens learning of Stalin’s sudden death and ending with the dictator’s internment in Lenin’s tomb, “State Funeral” unfolds like a silent pageant, the only narration provided by propagandistic eulogies over loudspeakers. (Think of Armando Iannucci’s “
The Death of Stalin” without the antic wit.) Using images taken by 200 camera operators stationed throughout the far-flung Soviet republic, Loznitsa creates a portrait that is simultaneously dreamlike and immediate, poetic and polemical, with the Soviet Union’s multitude of ethnic communities expressing state-approved grief in weird lockstep. It’s easy to dismiss it all — the copious tears, the never-ending queues, the ever-larger wreaths being carefully placed and preened over — as so much political theater. This is the man, as Loznitsa’s postscript reminds us, who exterminated millions of Soviet citizens. But he’s also the man who saw the USSR emerge victorious from the ravages of World War II. Without subtitles, and only the fascinating tableau of faces to go by, it’s hard to know what’s in the hearts and minds of “State Funeral’s” subjects. Like 2010’s “The Autobiography of Nicolai Ceaucescu,” Loznitsa’s film stands as a work of archival ambition and psychological ambiguity, as much about obedience and cultish denial as it is a visually stunning time capsule (the black-and-white and color images have been dazzlingly restored). It’s not every day one can witness mythmaking in real time.