Absurd justice: documenting the show trial in Sergei Loznitsa’s<i>The Trial</i>(2018)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article interrogates the material history and conceptual origins of Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial (2018), an archival documentary that re-edits restored footage and deleted scenes from Iakov Posel’skii’s 1931 propaganda documentary 13 Days, one of the Soviet Union’s earliest sound films. Shelved in state archives soon after its release, Posel’skii’s documentary chronicles the infamous Industrial Party Trial, in which a cabal of scientists and engineers were accused of undermining Soviet industry. To tell this story, The Trial relies on a lack of commentary supplemented by novel sound editing techniques including the addition of seemingly indexical sounds. This article investigates such devices as an attempt to immerse the viewer in a moment in time, thus creating a realistic experience of a historical event. In doing so, it provides insight into the cinematic techniques Loznitsa uses to repurpose archival materials, and touches on the role of the audience in Loznitsa’s film.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".