The legendary thesis film of Rustam Hamdamov was taken off the shelf in 1987-and "the news that Hamdamov, whose career was interrupted more than ten years ago, has started work at Mosfilm has caused a sensation" (Sight and Sound '89). Made in 1967, this is a brilliant homage to the carefree spirit of the silent cinema, recalling both René Clair and the Soviet Eccentrics in its lyricism and its visual satire. Shooting within a few blocks of narrow, cobblestone streets and brick apartment houses, Hamdamov recreates the twenties in its textures-sheets of lacy laundry fly from the balconies, sometimes in the face of the camera; a flat filled with the collected bric-a-brac of a lifetime becomes the whole world while we are in it. The characters in this free-floating romp are a brash young boy, Scarecrow; his father, "the greatest unknown poet in the world," and mother, "one of the greatest women of our era" who can no longer fit into her corset; and a "famous actor" who comes by for a glass of water and stays for lunch and then some. It is he who plays the music that "makes hearts tremble"-and initiates the camera's sojurn, midway into the film, into a lyrical meditation that is both show-stopping and heart-stopping. We haven't begun to indicate the film's visual inventiveness-the dizzying pan from the middle of the lunch table, for instance-and its splendid satirical effect on our view of these humorous characters. As with My Grandmother, which it oddly recalls, you really have to be there. Hamdamov, not incidentally, began the shooting on Slave of Love, a project which was then handed over to Nikita Mikhalkov, and his influence on that film is evident in this short work. Our print is without English subtitles but the "dialogue" (actually a storyteller's voice-over) is both intermittent and sparse and we will supply a written English translation.