The Buzludzha is the only location to which we return. A gothic future both haunting us and haunted by us. A world without us that continues to experience itself. Just the sounds of wind, rain, birds chirping or flapping their wings. Shopping centers in Fukushima, abandoned theatres in Detroit, nondescript hospitals, office buildings, shoreline amusements parks flooded by the tides. Geyrhalter’s 90 minute film is composed entirely of stationary shots of human-made buildings that have been abandoned to the elements. Today its vast chambers, statues and mosaics are crumbling. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, it was abandoned. In Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens (2016) the first and last shots of the film are of the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria – constructed by the Communist state to commemorate the secret formation of its forerunner, Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, in 1891. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory.
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