Hard to be a God

Some 15 years in pro­duc­tion, Alek­sey German’s Hard to be a God has tak­en on almost myth­ic sta­tus for cinephiles sali­vat­ing at the prospect of its com­ple­tion. Employ­ing a perfectionist’s eye for detail that makes Kubrick and Cimi­no look like Fried­berg and Seltzer, Ger­man spent six whole years on prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy alone. That every sec­ond of effort made it onto the screen is tes­ta­ment to this sin­gu­lar filmmaker’s fer­vent com­mit­ment to his expan­sive vision. There are no bones to be made about it, Hard to be a God is a mod­ern masterpiece.

Adapt­ed from the nov­el by Boris and Arkady Stru­gatsky, the sci-fi vision­ar­ies respon­si­ble for Road­side Pic­nic (on which Tarkovsky’s Stalk­er was based), Hard to be a God tells of a plan­et iden­ti­cal to Earth, only 800 years cul­tur­al­ly behind. For all intent and pur­pose it’s the Mid­dle Ages, the planet’s Renais­sance hav­ing been active­ly sup­pressed by a rul­ing nobil­i­ty and war­ring mil­i­tary fac­tions. Intel­lec­tu­als are being round­ed up and mur­dered, hence the pro­tag­o­nist, Don Ruma­ta – an anthro­pol­o­gist sent from Earth to ush­er in and report on a forth­com­ing age of enlight­en­ment that nev­er mate­ri­alised – dis­guis­ing him­self as a local lord, a descen­dant of a pagan god and wit­ness to the filth and degra­da­tion that sur­rounds him.

Yet Hard to be a God is lit­tle con­cerned with fol­low­ing any tra­di­tion­al approach to nar­ra­tive, as this is a sen­so­ry cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence like no oth­er – a whol­ly immer­sive plunge into the mud, the blood, the snot and the shit of a vis­cer­al­ly realised world. Ger­man forges a mise-en-scene like noth­ing else, pack­ing every cor­ner of every frame with inci­dent and detail. Yes, this is a three hour, black and white Russ­ian film, but there’s noth­ing aus­tere about German’s images, the screen is burst­ing with life (or as often, death), the cam­era in per­pet­u­al motion in, around and through the guts of humanity.

Char­ac­ters break the camera’s fourth wall with aban­don, often per­form­ing for its ben­e­fit, only to be shoved out of the way. Ger­man com­pos­es across every axis of the frame, lay­er­ing his images as though for a 3D cam­era, as the tex­tures ren­dered by cin­e­matog­ra­phers Vladimir Ilin and Yuri Kli­menko sim­ply defy belief. It’s a film to be seen big, and with­out ques­tion to be seen more than once. Not only are there nar­ra­tive and the­mat­ic rich­es to be exca­vat­ed, but the sheer sen­so­ry tac­til­i­ty of the expe­ri­ence – there’s just so much to take in – is enough to over­whelm the first time round.

That so much time was spent in post-pro­duc­tion on the film’s aur­al sound­scape pays div­i­dends, and the mas­ter­ful edit­ing is often close to invis­i­ble. Sequences pulse and throb through extend­ed takes, as even the smells(!) of the world seem to be tan­gi­bly trans­mit­ted. It’s dif­fi­cult to draw com­par­i­son with the work of any oth­er film­mak­ers as a point of ref­er­ence, so unique is German’s vision. Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Tarr’s Sátán­tángó, Pasoli­ni and even Gilliam fleet­ing­ly popped up, but they remain super­fi­cial touch­stones. So dis­tinc­tive an expe­ri­ence is Hard to be a God, it’ll have to suf­fice to say this at least stands shoul­der to shoul­der with the aforementioned.

There’s an inescapable polit­i­cal alle­go­ry at play here, cast­ing its pro­tag­o­nist as a fig­ure of insight yet impo­tence, resigned to the inef­fec­tive­ness of indi­vid­ual action in the face of social apa­thy and fas­cist might. Hard to be a God fus­es its his­to­ry – past, present and future, even alien plan­ets, it’s all the same quag­mire of shit and bru­tal­i­ty. Ger­man nev­er got to see his mas­ter­work pre­mière at Rome back in Novem­ber, hav­ing passed away ear­li­er last year. His son added the final touch­es to the film his father had begun pre-pro­duc­tion on in 1998. A mas­ter­piece more than fif­teen years in the mak­ing, from a direc­tor none of whose films are avail­able on DVD in the West. On the strength of this jaw-drop­ping piece of work alone, that needs to change. That needs to change now.