Plot synopsis

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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tS2XyurjRE

commentaries

Confronting Avant-Garde Utopia With Death
Igor and Gleb Aleynikov’s The Cruel Illness of Men (Zhestokaia bolezn’ muzhchin, 1987), Emily NILL, eefb.org, 2020

От некрореализма до ТНТ: история русского параллельного кино, , 2019

The brothers Igor and Gleb Aleynikov represent the first generation of independent filmmakers in the Soviet Union, who no longer filmed and produced films within the studio system. In the 1980s they belonged to the school of Moscow conceptualism and took active part in underground art activities. They worked in such genres as mail art, book art, Sots art and home art. The Aleynikov brothers made it into history in 1987 when they became the founders of Parallel Cinema, an independent filmmaking movement that served as an alternative to the official film industry in the USSR. Their aesthetics and ideology were absolutely incompatible with the rules commonly accepted in Sovet Cinema.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHurc8o8vEQ

Selected in the following festivals or events :

- Festival of Central and Eastern Film , Wiesbaden (Germany), 2020

Images