Hard to See, Hard to Watch: Hard to be a God
Hard to Be a God, Aleksei German (2013)
For all of its maddening, challenging qualities, it should be made clear at the outset that the title of this article is not meant as a critical dismissal of Aleksei German's final feature, Hard to be a God (2013). Indeed, as a passion project some 50 years in the making, from a director whose earlier films were frequently suppressed or shelved, and seldom distributed outside Russia beyond the festival circuit, and who even died before the film could be completed, it is a genuine cause for celebration that Hard to be a God is not a difficult film to see.
As for the charge of being hard to watch, it must be admitted that German's swansong doesn't come up smelling entirely of roses. In the words of Sight and Sound's Nick Pinkerton, it is a "profoundly, willfully destabilizing experience." Even on a second or third viewing, it is the kind of film you might emerge from asking yourself: "what have I just watched?"
Yet as a deep-dive into a world mired in medieval squalor, whose every muddy puddle, every drop of dark, viscous blood is rendered in rich, tactile, almost velvety monochrome by its cinematographers, Vladimir Ilyin and Yury Klimenko, the film exerts a strange influence on the viewer. Nominally, at least, it tells the story of an Earth-born scientist (Leonid Yarmolnik) ordered to observe conditions go from bad to worse in the kingdom of Arkanar—a region on a distant, unnamed planet—that has never progressed beyond its equivalent of the medieval era into a Renaissance. Instead, a vicious and rising tide of anti-intellectualism sees all 'smartarses' tortured or killed. Adopting the persona of Don Rumata, an aristocratic swordsman of supposedly divine birth, the scientist-observer can neither intervene in these dire developments nor convince his fellow observers of the dangers he foresees.
But such a summary does little to convey what watching the film is actually like. One moment, it seduces with a world of intimate, tangible detail that feels genuinely lived-in; the next, it repels any sustained attention with its sheer chaos, its brutality and filth. Firelight gleams in the eyes of a dead cow, shining like polished onyx; a body hanging from the gibbet glitters implausibly, momentarily baffling the viewer, before the revelation that fish-scales have been slathered onto the condemned to attract carrion birds to peck out the eyes. Jonathon Romney describes feeling as much "exhausted by it as bewitched," and I suspect many viewers will feel the same.
Still, Hard to be a God is more than just an elite challenge to spectatorial endurance, another Calgary for us cinephiles to enact our martyrdom to a beloved medium. Problems of sight and seeing, vision and visibility, of observation and neutrality beset the film, in both its narrative and its visual style. Hard to be a God is a film that scrutinizes just how impossible it can be to see with any clarity, to maintain the neutrality of the observer, to watch without being either petrified or transformed.
Hard to Be a God, Aleksei German (2013)
The Three Musketeers, "… only with medieval piss and filth."
The original vision of the brothers Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris, on whose novel the film is based, lies some distance from German's singular treatment. In the relative optimism of the Thaw of the 1950s, the Strugatskys began to discuss an idea for "an exciting story... full of jokes and adventures, with pirates, conquistadores." While they agreed not to shy away from the unpleasant material conditions of the world they would create—depicting "how the wine is full of dead flies," a detail literalized early on in the film—Arkady implored Boris to keep this story closer to sheer escapism than satire. He wrote to his brother: "What I'd like to do is to write a novel about abstract nobility, honor and joy, like Dumas … just one story without modern problems in naked form."
But before they could finish this story, the climate surrounding the Thaw took a new plunge in temperatures, and a wave of criticism broke across the Soviet literary and artistic scenes. Following comments by influential figures in government, critics fell over themselves to denounce tendencies such as abstraction and formalism as 'undesirable' in the arts. Boris Strugatsky describes his dismay as he watched the repressive tendencies of the Stalin/Beria years begin to seep out once more—a "purulent stream" overflowing from newspaper pages, a "rapid return to the abscess"—as his friends and colleagues were harshly condemned by critics from behind the parapets of official ideology. The relative innocence of their new literary project was besmirched by the experience.
Deciding that the time for 'light things' had either passed or not yet arrived, the brothers quickly agreed that they could not watch these developments and continue on as they had been. Their new project required 'ideological adjustments.' Instead of swashbuckling escapades and derring-do, their protagonist would now look on in helpless confusion as the kingdom of Arkanar fails to follow its envisioned historical path, according to 'basis theory' (an invention of the Strugatskys, extending a materialist theory of history, drawn from Marxist-Hegelian dialectics, into the pseudo-science of the novel's Institutional of Experimental History on Earth). Instead of rescuing damsels and fencing with pirates on rooftops, he would struggle to see past the atavistic violence that enmires him, that, increasingly, he is a part of. The final result of these changes was Hard to be a God (Trudno byt' bogom, 1964).
Hard to Be a God, Aleksei German (2013)
"I can see, but it feels like I can't…"
Even before his own directorial career had begun, German was drawn to the possibility of adapting the Strugatskys' work for the screen. After a treatment written in collaboration with Boris during the late 1960s was rejected by the state censors, and another attempt was forestalled by a comparatively conventional adaptation (Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein, 1989, dir. Peter Fleischmann), it took until 2000 for German's dream project to begin shooting. It's possible that this long gestation period somehow embedded the story and its details so deeply into German's mind that he saw no reason to illuminate any of them in his film. Whatever the reason, one could easily emerge from Hard to be a God with very little idea of its plot. But in fact, even on repeat viewings, it still comes as something of a surprise to realize how closely German follows the events of the source material.
The problem—if an aesthetic strategy so deeply considered, so thoroughly implemented can be so called—is that German makes it very difficult for us to see what is going on. There is a literalism in this treatment of the story's manifold problems of vision that might be ridiculous, if it were not so deeply ingrained into the construction of the film. Eyes, in particular, have a hard time of it. They do not merely appear repeatedly as sightless, blinkered or covered up; they are poked, prodded, pecked out, plucked out (by Arkanar's king, no less), and even offered for sale by one of the film's innumerable, grotesque extras, who scuttles up to the camera and reveals his grisly wares from under a helmet. "They really catch the light," he announces, conspiratorially.
This last, fourth-wall breaking device is another fundamental element of the film's vocabulary. Gnarled faces that look as if they might have modeled for Hieronymous Bosch loom constantly into the foreground of the mise-en-scène; they grimace, gurn and gesticulate, often ejecting snot from their nostrils to dangle brazenly before us, for no discernible reason other than to manifest the stultifying, anarchic atmosphere that besets this place.
Hard to Be a God, Aleksei German (2013)
On the subject of dangling, there is scarcely a scene in which some object is not held directly in front of the camera, obscuring any clear view of the events transpiring behind it. A choice selection of these objects includes hanging chains, foliage, assorted tools and instruments, a dead fox, and a range of unidentifiable, dripping fluids that likely originate somewhere in the human body. In another film, the moment in which Don Rumata must drink the potion—potentially poisoned—offered to the king by an agent of Rumata's rival might provide a moment of peril for our hero, and a bit of narrative tension for the viewer. Here, however, the scene may pass by almost unnoticed, hidden by what appear to be two severed chicken legs being waggled provocatively, mere inches from the camera.
The result is a radical foreshortening of the cinematic plane. Only occasionally does German allow us the temporary relief of looking deep into the image, enjoying what one might call a vista, or viewpoint. Or, in other words, German steadfastly refuses to allow his diegetic world the development of the invention that so characterized the Renaissance—perspective. Without this depth of vision, without the symbolic appropriation of space, we remain stalled in an earlier epoch, scarcely able to see past our own noses, let alone conceive of the techniques and devices of observation that drove science into its Enlightenment.
Other filmmakers have exploited similar ideas as part of an aesthetic strategy for visualizing past epochs: silent epics set in or near Egypt often mimicked the bizarre flattened geometry and postures that feature in tomb paintings, while the likes of Walerian Borowcyk's Blanche (1971) or Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (1969) used tableaux and the appearance of two-dimensionality to comparable effect. Yet German goes one step further, maintaining crisp deep-focus while simultaneously blocking any of its visual pleasures, almost negating even the notion of a single effective viewpoint. In this, it offers up the conceptual opposite of the multi-perspectival, post-modern medievalism of Frantisek Vlácil's Marketa Lazarová (1967)—a film with which Hard to be a God might otherwise bear close comparison.
Given that the Strugatskys are perhaps best known in the West for Roadside Picnic, the work that inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), German's own Strugatsky adaptation has inevitably been compared to that of his famous compatriot. Yet as a number of critics have noted, Hard to be a God lands closer in tone and content to Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966). Once again, it is problems of vision that separate the two. Hard to be a God presents us with a world every bit as brutish as the turbulent 15th Century Russia of Tarkovsky's film; yet here, there is no Andrei Rublev to see beyond, no visionary iconographer to transmute the violence and suffering of this world into transcendent art. A telling moment in Hard to be a God has Rumata perform a semi-comic double-take upon passing a crumbling, near-destroyed wall-painting somewhere in the Royal Palace, apparently obsolete and close to unique in this benighted world.
Even the music of Arkanar is monotone and almost shapeless. One of the grotesques breaks off his tuneless piping to mime pelvic thrusts at the camera; elsewhere, monks clad in black chant a single, wordless syllable ad nauseam. A drunken Rumata responds by throwing a flask of urine (his servant's, not his own) at them. Only the music played by Rumata, a bluesy tune played on something that looks somewhere between a cornet and a clarinet, breaks the mould. Upon hearing his wailing, mournful melody, one peasant remarks to another: "It makes my tummy hurt."
Hard to Be a God, Aleksei German (2013)