Leningrad – Kolshchik
2017 · Directed by Ilya Naishuller
280K Likes
Best comments
1.“Moral of the story: don't blow soap bubbles at the circus.”
More comments
- 2.“To all the people who don't speak Russian: turning on the subtitles only makes it weirder.”
- 3.“The best 4 minutes and 18 seconds most Americans won't see.”
The story
Leningrad is the St. Petersburg band run by Sergey Shnurov – Shnur to the fans – and their sound is a brass-heavy pileup of ska punk, Russian chanson and pop rock, with lyrics known for being vulgar, boozy and happy to poke at Russian clichés. Kolshchik first came out in March 2016. The title means tattoo artist, and the song tells a wry little tale: a woman carries a freeloading boyfriend for years, he walks out on her and their daughter, and she marks the great romance by getting her eyebrows tattooed so she looks stern from now on.
The video ignores all of that. Director Ilya Naishuller – the man behind Hardcore Henry, the action movie shot entirely in first person – sets it in a circus and runs the whole thing backward. A little girl in the crowd blows a soap bubble, and that tiny thing kicks off a chain of violent, bloody, bizarre events that you watch rewinding from the wreckage to the cause. Yulia Topolnitskaya, the star of Leningrad's earlier video Exhibit, turns up too. Fancy Shot and Versus Pictures produced it, and CGF handled the visual effects.
It landed in February 2017 with Meduza warning readers about the cruelty on screen. Fans split between people who liked it more than the song and people who just wanted to see it played forward. It won first place for Best Concept at the 2017 Berlin Music Video Awards. One soap bubble. Total carnage. Chaos theory, Russian edition.
