Time Out


Sight & Sound, reviewed by Kate Stables

Film: An extraordinary and utterly original piece, barely seen outside the festival circuit, Aristakisyan’s award-winning documentary-poem threads together his intimate monochrome portraits of the beggars and swamp-dwellers of Russia’s Kishinev city with an incantatory narration addressed to a doomed unborn son that transmutes their stories into bleak, revelatory fairytales. Grainy yet incongruously gorgeous, his human tableaux rivet the eye, as an underground-dwelling mute drinks in the sight of his neighbours every Sunday, and the ragman whispers secrets to a wall of dead men’s clothes. As Graeme Hobbs’ excellent accompanying essay points out, one feels compelled to look for cinematic clues (there are hints of Pasolini or Tarkovsky, even Eisenstein) but the film’s bizarre yet beautiful combination of anarcho-Christian philosophising, and endlessly arresting visual and verbal imagery, remains completely unique.

Disc: A marvellous transfer, shining with pearly puddles and inky blacks. Second Run’s interview with the farouche Aristakisyan digs gamely for information, but turns up poetry again: "The film was shot like a string of prayer beads for the eyes”.