Traktora (1987)
By Igor and Gleb Aleinikov
The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 22. Traktora (1987) Colin Marshall Here's another Aleinikov piece with a throughline of speech but no English subtitling. The sort of propaganda they appropriate for source material, though, is less about content than tone. It probably was even to audiences for whom it was intended. In the visual department, almost every shot contains a tractor, that stolid standby of Socialist Realism, real or artistically rendered. And though I technically have no idea what all the talk is about, words that sound a lot like cognates for "tractor" surface over and over and over again. I'm not sure how different this is from the Aleinikov brothers' other experiments with found agitprop, though confinement to the domain of the tractor its gives it a more focused feel. It's trippier, too, and not just because of that odd choice of subject matter. 4:21 in, a hard-to-figure-out strobe light effect overtakes the previously normal-looking, even bland, footage, creating the rare, much sought-after grainy, pixelated, black-and-white communist disco aesthetic. Combine that with a significant slowdown in and distortion of the flat, declarative, once-authoritative Voi…
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