Under Electric Clouds - A Study in Stills

Even now that I've written a thousand words or more on the subject, I still find myself haunted by Aleksei German, Jr's dystopian daydream Under Electric Clouds. I'm still moved by it and scared of it in ways I can't parse, a film with life between silences, feeling hiding in drawing rooms and slushy landscapes. Jr's whole history seems to be sleeping like a giant under the earth as his drifters slowly traverse the expanse he's invented for them. The question of legacies and fathers hints that his own father, a titan, was on his mind while composing this freehand sketch of loss and the search for meaning. Naturally those concerned with our forebears, of the cause of these limitless depressive stretches of land, dotted with phantom skyscrapers and defined by the screams of the unseen, are the chapters that hit hardest.