Yes, it's 8 hours of archive footage with a few bits of text to guide you along. Yes, it does feel long.
Curtis combines his weakness for going on a bit (everything he makes is just that little bit longer than the last, until we find ourselves here) with the weakness of a genre: an almost-pure archive documentary series that attempts to show "how things really were." Or, as the series puts it, this is "what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism... AND DEMOCRACY."
The result is something doomed to be highly misleading, in that it is up to the viewer to remind themselves that these are only the clips Curtis wants to show. It is just as far away from "raw unedited FEELING" as a state news report. Regardless, it's still interesting, if mostly in a voyeuristic sense.
Who else could get access to this footage? And who are we to turn down the opportunity to watch such fascinating glimpses of a period we may never otherwise have seen? Taken as merely a curated collection of clips there's much to celebrate. But 8 hours is a long time to reflect on how much you like a film, and eyes tired of this found footage funeral dirge may begin to question why so many clips are outside of Russia, feel the absense of events unshown, doubt the text or perhaps wonder what exactly Curtis is arguing here, because it definitely feels like he's arguing something.
Curtis combines his weakness for going on a bit (everything he makes is just that little bit longer than the last, until we find ourselves here) with the weakness of a genre: an almost-pure archive documentary series that attempts to show "how things really were." Or, as the series puts it, this is "what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism... AND DEMOCRACY."
The result is something doomed to be highly misleading, in that it is up to the viewer to remind themselves that these are only the clips Curtis wants to show. It is just as far away from "raw unedited FEELING" as a state news report. Regardless, it's still interesting, if mostly in a voyeuristic sense.
Who else could get access to this footage? And who are we to turn down the opportunity to watch such fascinating glimpses of a period we may never otherwise have seen? Taken as merely a curated collection of clips there's much to celebrate. But 8 hours is a long time to reflect on how much you like a film, and eyes tired of this found footage funeral dirge may begin to question why so many clips are outside of Russia, feel the absense of events unshown, doubt the text or perhaps wonder what exactly Curtis is arguing here, because it definitely feels like he's arguing something.