Cruel Illness of Men (1989)

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)

Igor AleynikovDirector