For him to make such an observation about the impossible reveals something very bleak. The eighty-six-year-old Godard arguably did more than any other living filmmaker to integrate the methods of avant-garde film with a Marxist outlook. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010), the dreams and manifestations of socialism are fractured and fragmented, unable to communicate with each other or themselves. In Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) a dissembled statue of Lenin floats down the Danube River.

Many other filmic observations of the past twenty-five years have been far more pointed. But he is far from the only filmmaker to use the torn down and disassembled socialist dream as a cornerstone for his stories. Geyrhalter is asking far broader questions about humanity’s futurelessness. Might the “end of history” we were all supposed to have witnessed with the fall of Communism, be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Is the human race possible without utopias?

These opening and closing shots beg questions. The last time is during a winter storm, when its caverns and hallways are being flooded with snow as the screen fades to an empty white. The first time we see the it is in the springtime rain falls in through the disintegrating roof. 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.

Left-Wing Melancholia by Enzo Traverso