Video as an Artistic Manifesto of Time. Shortparis – An Example of a Total Work of Art

The text focuses on the videos of the Shortparis collective from St. Petersburg that were made between 2018 and 2022 for songs from their last three albums, Так закалялась сталь (2019), Яблонный сад (2021) and Зов озера (2022). With the help of numerous symbols, paradoxes and motifs from Russian history, the videos reveal the traumas and sufferings on the eve and morning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This article does not attempt to decipher them precisely as that would strip away the enigmatic nature of Shortparis’ total work of art, which one needs to listen to, see and experience in order to discover the other, enlightened, Russia.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!