Named after the English title of W.G. Sebald’s collection of essays, which addresses the “representational amnesia” that seems to have struck cultural production in regards to the relentless bombings of German civilians during the Second World War, Sergei Loznitsa’s film is composed of carefully selected archival footage, restored and remastered with the aim to produce an experience of the sensations and the sights occasioned by such attacks that is as immersive as possible, as well as to describe the moments that preceded and followed them. Taking its distance from the rigorousness of the documentation process which characterized other historical found-footage films by the Ukrainian director, here the stake seems to be less to gather testimonies with the thoroughness of an inveterate collector doubled by an intransigent investigator, than to induce a trance that forms on the border between moral horror and aesthetic fascination. And indeed, the bombing scenes are fragments of a hypnotic visual symphony which resonates in a sinister way with the wars being currently fought from Mariupol to Aleppo. (Liri Chapelan)