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Academic Article, In St. Petersburg - to drink!, 2017 (New)

Description

  1. Overview
    1. Article analyzing the music video “Drinking in St. Petersburg!” by the Leningrad group leader Sergei Shnurov.
    2. Describes the work as a carnival-laughable and provocative-obscene experiment that serves as a diagnosis of society, an anthropological description of Russia here-and-now, and a social manifesto.
    3. Published in UFO Magazine, Number 6, 2017.
    4. Keywords: Leningrad group, Sergey Shnurov, music videos, St. Petersburg, vodka, revolt, freedom, pastiche, images and allusions, social anthropology, laughter, absurdity.
    5. UDC: 82-1 + 77 + 78.
  2. Video Analysis
    1. The clip lasts 7 minutes 13 seconds, while the song takes only 3.5 minutes; half of the clip is free from voice-over music and vocals.
    2. The main character is a puny fair-haired “nerd” with glasses and a neat haircut, modeled after Russified Edward Snowden.
    3. Characters represent different social strata: a bank clerk, a saleswoman of a convenience store, a museum lady art critic, a Caucasian taxi driver, and a traffic cop.
    4. All characters “break into the pattern” of everyday life and act in accordance with the slogan “Fuck your system!”.
    5. A programmatic gesture featuring five different social groups symbolizes the unity of the nation, including representatives of the authorities such as traffic cops.
    6. The rejection of hierarchical relations and visualization of the slogan “freedom, equality, fraternity” is presented as fantastic fiction.
    7. The state of freedom is fueled by vodka (champagne and martini appear briefly as a marker of hussar chic).
    8. The intoxication of the heroes goes through stages from joyful euphoria to sleepy dullness and vomiting.
    9. The alcoholic transgression reaches its climax late at night on the roof of a St. Petersburg mansion.
    10. The main character is depicted with torches in his upraised hands, shot from a low point against the backdrop of a huge sky.
  3. Interpretations and Allusions
    1. The torch scene is a direct parody of the pathos of Nicolas Cage from the Hollywood blockbuster “The Rock” (1996).
    2. The shot inevitably references Eugene Delacroix’s painting “Freedom Leading the People” (1830).
    3. Compositional resemblance to Delacroix’s painting is reinforced by the associates of the “clerk-Snowden” located at his feet.
    4. Delacroix showed representatives of five different social strata around Liberty: a worker, a bourgeois, a teenager, a military man, and a student at the Polytechnic School, symbolizing the unity of the French people during the July Revolution.
    5. The clip’s metaphor for the unity of the nation is ambivalent and promising.
    6. The appeal “Free, brother?” from the traffic policeman to a Caucasian taxi driver is noted as an unimaginable appeal in Russian everyday life.