Since part of the filming was carried out on the 9th floor, from the window of the Biryulevskaya high-rise building, as if from the point of view of an angel, only not flying, but sitting in a high tower.
One of the most impressive symbols of a happy Soviet life, peaceful labour and rich harvest. Being mystified to the highest degree, the film acquires traits of a mystical animal, a human being and just a machine.
Under a score of abbreviated drones and freeform woodwinds, the Aleinikov brothers cut together a series of images, found and made, that look unfailingly bleak, industrial or both bleak and industrial: disused factories, clunky utilitarian machinery, strings of unsettlingly young violinists,...
Aquarium Fish of This World is the story of the relationship between the captain and the boatswain, temporarily written off ashore, with a young guy who dreams of becoming a cabin boy.
Found footage and found sound. Badly solarized training films, documentary fragments, speeches of USSR party leaders and rock 'n' roll form a horrifying picture of media pressure.
Vasily Ivanovich once met with his killer… Collectivism, freedom, stupidity, fun - the main principles of the St. Petersburg underground are filmed with the help of a new myth about the heroic Chapai.
I know these were glasnost days, but still, I'm a little surprised filmmakers were out there doing stuff like this. There's nothing overtly anti-communist in this piece, but it ain't what you'd call respectful, 'neither. The brothers Aleinikov lay turgid governmental speeches about "the rearing of...
The piece presents a series of bizarre tableaux, many involving cinematic voyeurism, blurring of the living-dead borderline and a healthy amount of stabbing, of oneself and of others. A catatonic fellow gets costumed as a ghoul; a literal tree-hugger, ecstatic in his arboreal embrace, gets stabbed;...
The waste of the toy factory "Ogonyok", clumps of multicolored thermally deformed plastic, turn into a new biological species, then into a new direction of modern art, then into an isolated language of a native tribe discovered by linguists in the jungle, where words must be carried silently with...
