Igor Aleynikov

The remake of the original 1939 "Tractor Drivers"... Same heroes, but totally different times.

A man looks for his friend, but finds himself instead...

A rare Aleynikov brothers film from 1990.

A rare Aleynikov brothers film from 1990.

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, old-timey group portraits with everyone's eyes scratched out. Interspersed are less overtly sinister but somehow eerier snatches of action, like a circling brood of crude stop-motion mice or a bunch of little wooden people chopping wood and sawing logs, all differently affected by the vagaries time and the physical world foist onto film stock. (Text by Colin Marshall)

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; a bespectacled fellow with a Bolex-y camera goes around documenting it all. (Written by Colin Marshall)

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 a new man" under footage of dudes goofing around in space-alien costumes, they roll footage of apple-cheeked future Stakhanovites upside down and backwards, they crudely animate -- in a certain South Parkian way -- CCCP icons in a goofy manner. Good, clean fun. (written by Colin Marshall)

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.

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 you and shown if necessary, then into heroes of crazy phantasmagoric news.

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.