"If a single offering sums up video's awesome ability to open whole new ways of thinking about the world, it's Sokurov's five-hour-plus Spiritual Voices, a soft and subtle portrait of lonely Russian soldiers (on the border between Tadjikstan and Afghanistan) whose inner strength serves as a metaphor for humanity's ultimately spiritual nature" (David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor, reviewed at the New York Video Festival). Beginning with a shot of a Russian soldier and ending with one of a wounded angel, Spiritual Voices is a monumental meditation on the differences and conjunctions between nature and art, aesthetics and barbarity, life and death. The opening sequence is in itself a self-contained masterpiece, a thirty-five-minute static shot of a snow-covered landscape in which changes are almost imperceptible: clouds obscuring the sun, a small bonfire being lit, muffled sounds of gunshots, dogs barking, distant voices. Stasis finally erupts into cataclysm, and the war, brutal and "unaesthetic" as Sokurov calls it, engulfs the soldiers. A call to contemplate the ravages of war on the individual body and the collective psyche, the videowork has an eerie, urgent topicality. "I can hardly conceive of Russia without war. Russian men without heavy soldiers' coats or army shirts or boots are difficult to imagine....It has always been like this" (Sokurov).