The Shards | Masha Chernaya

It is unsettling how wars or mass murders have become normalized and routine aspects of our daily lives – not only for those (mostly Westerners) whose only exposure is through images, sounds, and texts, but also for those who endure them in the most inhuman and abject ways imaginable. Reflecting on the “banality of evil” has somehow itself become banal. We have grown accustomed to atrocious images of dying civilians followed by cute, fluffy animals on our social media feeds. Regimes of the representable and the unrepresentable now inhabit the same virtual space of collective apathy, yet we are still haunted by the unanswered questions of the human conscience, which continues to resist the distanced cynicism with which this awareness burdens us: what do we make of this world? Is there anything left to do?

While some of us are confined to pondering these questions from within the conformity (and conformism) of our relative distance to a given political context, those living within it often have no choice but to take action; usually hastily, out of fear or courage, or perhaps recklessly, against overwhelming odds, of which one is the speed at which the tide of our present keeps shifting. Russian filmmaker Masha Chernaya’s intimate chronicle, The Shards, is the fruit of such an action – made with a creative and political impulse that the filmmaker wears like armour, to shield herself from the titular shards erupting from the collective turmoil and personal losses she is trying to navigate.

Chernaya’s audiovisual account first takes us back to the early months of 2022, shortly after the second Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and spans the next two years. Although structured episodically, The Shards plunges the viewer into a temporal whirlwind where, apart from a few historical markers – such as Navalny’s funeral – all the images seem to emerge from an amorphous, endless present. This spatial and temporal disorientation that we experience is tied intrinsically to the strategies Chernaya employs to bring these impressions together, reflecting not only her own confusion as she grapples with the alienating chaos her once-familiar homeland has fallen into, but also serving as a counter-response to audience-friendly documentaries that tend to oversimplify and schematize a country’s social and political dynamics, as if to render them easily digestible for a general public. There is nothing informative or demonstrative about The Shards; not once does it set out to offer a neat exposé on the realities of Russia in times of war, under the rule of an oppressive regime. Although the scenes in underground raves and fight clubs might evoke a familiar imagery bordering on stereotypes of Russian youth culture – further amplified by social media – Chernaya's vision in these scenes is far too raw, sharp, and agitated to be deemed opportunistic. Her relationship with the camera relies more on action than on thought. This is a quality she later emphasized herself, referencing the practices of other Russian artists from the same period who, in an effort not to fall behind the present moment, filmed everything simply for the sake of filming, leaving reflection on the images for later. Much to the chagrin of a certain type of audience – one that values documentaries for their discursive readability – The Shards is an impenetrable film, and Chernaya leaves no room for the ideological or political instrumentalization of her country.

Using the camera as a shield and filming as a coping mechanism, the film is nonetheless very much about the instrumentalization of cinema on a personal level. A significant portion of the material consists of Chernaya’s interactions with friends and family, which take a devastating turn following her mother’s cancer diagnosis. While the film contains some truly heart-wrenching moments based around death and grief, Chernaya maintains a largely introspective gaze. In what appears to be a conscious decision, she does not show her mother battling her illness, but instead focuses on the funeral, thus making it clear that these images, at times overwhelmingly sad, are about herself and her grief. The extended funeral sequence, during which she films her mother lying in the coffin, is hard to watch, not simply because of the dead woman in front of the camera, but because it is her daughter behind it. Chernaya navigates her grief by hiding behind the camera, holding onto it like a lifeline, while concurrently making herself very vulnerable to the audience’s gaze.

The sense of protection and vulnerability is not the only paradoxical force shaping the emotional economy of the film; the erratic, rocky movements of the camera in Chernaya’s hand channel an embodied perspective to the viewer. However, at the same time, the filmmaker’s choice to observe her own grief through the camera’s lens, rather than live through it, becomes a telling sign of dissociation... but what else could one expect, when death itself is the most paradoxical experience to witness in our time? Its simultaneous intimacy and banality are made all the more palpable through the personal and collective layers between which the film continuously oscillates.

Chernaya’s self-distancing strategy becomes even more complex and compelling when the editing process is taken into account: a process through which rawness is shaped, action gives way to reflection, and images speak to one another less through impulse than through association and audiovisual syntax. Beyond the tumultuous fragments of chaos and distress, but also anger and rebellion flowing from contemporary Russia, it is the way Chernaya appropriates her family archives that most clearly reflects the discerning, controlled approach with which she ultimately engages the footage she has filmed. The archival images from the 1990s, featuring herself and her family members, function as a temporal parenthesis, inviting her (and us, the audience) to reflect on said images. If one manages to move beyond the surface-level nostalgia of grainy, worn-out textures, the narrative framing of this material reveals the retrospective meanings and impressions the images hold in potentia. Drawing from a hug or a kiss from her mother, or a shot of her younger self saying she does not like to be filmed, The Shards is a film that constructs meaning through reframing and association. If the raw immediacy of its images speaks to the present moment, they are also addressed to the future, awaiting the necessary time to pass, to be reworked, rethought, and made to bear new meanings.