Written by Aleksey German and Svetlana Karmalita from the novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Directed by Aleksey German
Russia, 2013
“The scholar is not the enemy. The enemy is the scholar who doubts.”
Aleksey German’s Hard to Be a God is in the running for the most disgusting films I’ve ever seen. The film produces an enormously affecting, intricately detailed, and thoroughly realized visceral nightmare, one that never wanes or becomes numbing over its three-hour runtime but instead accumulates into an at-times overwhelming journey into a world run by a phantom regime of hedonist ignorance and reactionary cruelty. Built upon a twist on science fiction that probes fascinating questions about politics, morality, and the myth of the arc of human progress, Hard to Be a God uses this genre framework as a platform to manifest a carnival of depravity and filth. Decades in the making, German’s astounding and ambitious final film (the director died in 2013) is a work of art that depicts a world of artlessness, before aesthetics, and unafraid to immerse itself in all the implications that such a study would require. Hard to Be a God stages a bold confrontation with the supposed boundaries of what cinema can (or should?) do, ultimately realizing an enormous, singular achievement in the process.
Based on the 1964 novel of the same name by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (who also wrote the novel from which Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker was adapted), Hard to Be a God begins with a provocative conceit that seems at first like uncanny genre misrecognition. Sometime in our future, people of Earth learn of a planet populated by humans that is enduring its own Dark Ages – a society recognizably similar to medieval Europe that has made a nasty habit of executing all of its would-be intellectuals with impunity. An Earthling operative, Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), has disguised himself as a noble descendant of a pagan god. While his job is ostensibly to protect the would-be critical thinkers of this forsaken planet, he cannot interfere too directly in its attempted disposal of “scholars” either because of the risk of revealing himself or the potential consequences of interfering with the planet’s own historical trajectory.
This conceit becomes clear only as a result of a few economic lines provided by an unidentified narrator. The entire runtime of Hard to be a God takes place within the quarters of the cordoned-off village Don Rumata inhabits. Where the novel explored the psychological tension of the protagonist’s difficult circumstance by establishing his history on Earth and exploring his changing philosophical attitudes to the idea of intervention, German’s film forgoes Don Rumata’s inner struggle in order to follow his encounters with slaves, villagers, fellow nobles, and possibly other Earthling operatives as he observes the village’s preparation to execute a prospective scholar, Budakh (Yevgeni Gerchakov). Beyond a few other interventions by voice-over, Rumata’s own psychological journey is rarely evident. Rumata/Yarmolnik convincingly plays the role of a domineering “god,” and as a result his degree of actual complicity within the cruelty around him grows ambiguous.
The film’s central conceit affords German several unique opportunities. Hard to Be a God essentially portrays the Dark Ages without the beneficial hindsight of history. We are immersed into a cynical, ugly, cruel vision of humanity without the “comfort” of knowing that an Enlightenment or Renaissance will follow. Nor do we know where we are geographically with respect to this alien world. All of which permits German to dive into the immediacy of the world onscreen, to endure what is exposed to the eyes of someone in a position of knowing nothing – nothing of the possibilities of a future, nothing of the world beyond these walls, nothing of the rules of time and space. Hard to Be a God is stunningly and pungently concerned with what our eyes perceive and our ears endure, and how to produce a way of seeing, hearing, thinking, and smelling that exists entirely without regard to the binaries that have shaped the development of human reason and morality: beauty/ugliness, good/bad, life/death, justice/mob rule, etc.
The film is a sensory exploration of depravity par excellence. German and cinematographers Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenko utilize mobile long-takes to follow Don Rumata through the village’s seemingly endless and claustrophobic corridors, with its many characters occasionally referencing an enigmatic “boy” that embodies the perspective of the camera itself. This is a remarkable technical achievement on its own, especially considering the elaborately cluttered production design that realizes German’s vision, and it’s used to effectively place us intimately within this world, confronting the audience out of any promise of comfortable distance. Although the simultaneously stunning and vulgar imagery features no shortage of onscreen undesirables (from gouged eyes to falling shit), it’s the film’s audio track that delivers the stomach-churning color of the film’s setting, with off-and onscreen sounds of phlegm, flatulence, disease, and death serving as a collective, wall-to-wall leitmotif of violent, self-determined idiocy. Occasionally, something that Earth recognizes as “pleasing” (flowers, a whistled tune) breaks through the monotony only to be drowned out by it.
There needs to be no king or tyrant that dictates the dedication to ignorance represented in How to Be a God – it thrives as a force unto itself, a circular and reactionary law of non-thinking to preserve the way things are because that’s the way things are. Here exist numerous horrifying and evergreen cautionary implications that speak against the guarantee of the arc of human progress and to the possibility that reactionary ignorance can return as an organizing principle. By presenting a retooled image of medieval Europe that thrives without the tyranny of various churches as governing bodies, German manifests a horrifying farce of anti-intellectual violence untethered by any recognizable and enduring bulwark of justified power. But that’s only where this remarkable film begins. The epic journey through Hard to Be a God produces an affecting and complicated experience that is, no doubt, impossible to fully represent in our post-enlightenment language – a fitting reaction to a film about a world without it.
Hard to Be a God opens January 30th at New York’s Anthology Film Archives before expanding in a limited release elsewhere.