Aleksei German – the unknown genius of cinema

“I am not interested in anything but the possibility of building a world, an entire civilization from scratch.” A. German

I have been wanting to write a post on Aleksei German (1938-2013) for some time, but I needed to make sure that I could do justice to his films. (I should also add at the outset that he shouldn’t be confused with his son, Aleksei German Jr, who is also a film director but none of whose films I have seen.)

I first came across the work of German in 2015, when I read the synopsis of Hard To Be A God in the Manchester HOME Cinema programme. It immediately intrigued me and I knew that this was a film I had to see. And I have to say it was a film unlike any other I had seen (the nearest in comparison is Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev but even that doesn’t do it justice). From the first frame to last, my jaw was on the floor and it felt like my eyes were popping out of their sockets. It was as if I had forgotten to blink! There was so much going on in each frame that I didn’t know where to look. This film that just came out of nowhere (to me at least) portrayed in minute detail an immersive, hellish world the like of which I had never seen before, other than in the works of painters like Breughel and Bosch. And in my opinion this film is entirely worthy of being spoken of in the same breath as those great painters. The level of detail in this film is simply astonishing. It’s a film of texture and sensory overload. It’s grotesque, brutal, harsh, but it’s also beautiful in its ugliness. Indeed in a way I find the film quite life-affirming which seems bizarre given the subject-matter but I think it’s a tribute to German’s ability to infuse every scene with a sense of “realness”.

The dialogue is full of sentences that go nowhere and cryptic non-sequiturs that don’t move the narrative forward. There is a bare minimum of exposition. I’ve seen the film more than once and, strangely, I can only remember fragments of the dialogue.

Something else that impressed me about the film was German’s use of sound. This was evident right from the opening frame when one hears an atonal wailing but one never finds out where it is coming from or who is doing it. All the sound in the film is diegetic too. I was gripped from the moment Rumata plays modern jazz on his clarinet. The incongruity of that modern sound expressing itself in a medieval setting was startling and I knew from that moment that I was in for something special. German (like Orson Welles) knows how important sound is to a film. It’s not just about the visuals (hello Ridley Scott). To me, German’s cinema is the ultimate expression of total cinema.

The shot composition is breathtaking in its use of high-contrast black and white photography. What I found most unique about it was the way German has action occurring on three planes- near, middle and distant. We may see someone’s hand close to the camera, which may partially block out our sight of what is happening in the middle distance, and then we see something else significant in the far distance. And this all happens virtually at the same time. Another time we may see some chicken legs dangling in front of the camera, or some sausages. One wonders if there were a lot of out-takes where the camera crashed into something! German is creating a hyper-real world which has more truthfulness than many films depicting the “real” world. He once made a comment about Fellini being “cinema’s only realist” and watching Hard To Be a God one can see exactly what he means. Who needs 3d when you’ve got this? Who needs colour when you’ve got this? Who needs non-diegetic sound when you’ve got this? Who needs plot when you’ve got this? One feels that German’s film is going in one direction but the rest of modern cinema is going in a different direction.

I see the world portrayed in Hard To Be A God as one in which entropy and stasis have taken over. The force of gravity may well be stronger on this planet too, which would explain things like the nosebleeds that Don Rumata gets from time to time. The movement is one of constant downward motion, whether it be the inventor trying to fly his plane or the bird-droppings that fall at points throughout the film. (And that’s another thing – just how did German get such great performances from the animals in the film?)

Since seeing Hard To Be A God, something about the film really got under my skin and I have to say that it is the film I have thought about more than any other film I have seen since. It seems to be permanently lodged in my psyche. (Which probably doesn’t say much about my psyche, but that’s another matter). I was also shocked that I had never heard of German before as I pride myself on my film knowledge. I have since read everything I can find on him (which isn’t a lot) as I find him an immensely fascinating film-maker, who really deserves to be more widely known. I’ve since found out that Russian film critics voted My Friend Ivan Lapshin the best Russian film ever made, even above Tarkovsky. I’ve also sought out his other films and apart from Lapshin have also seen Trial on the Road (1971) and Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998). Both of which I loved. That only leaves Twenty Days Without War (1976) of his fully realised films and my eventual viewing of that will be tinged with sadness knowing I won’t have any more German films left to see.

The critic Robbie Collins made an insightful remark when he said that watching Hard To Be A God was like having an “encounter with the Necronomicon”, in the sense that you feel as if you are watching something that shouldn’t exist. And that is exactly it, the film has such verisimilitude and sense of authenticity that one feels that German has gone in a time machine back to the Dark Ages and simply filmed what he sees without any filter. One aspect of his technique which I found startling was the way he has characters break the fourth wall by occasionally looking into the camera. Now this is breaking one of the rules of film-making, but it works brilliantly here because it conveys the impression that we – as the viewer – are observers on Arkanar, like Rumata himself, and hence it really adds to the sense of authenticity. In other words, rather than breaking the spell of believability, it actually increases it. Which seems counter-intuitive I know, but it makes me wonder why more directors don’t try this approach. Another product of the breaking of the fourth wall is that it raises the question, what are the inhabitants looking at when they look into the camera? We know that Rumata wears a camera round his head (disguised as jewellery) so it’s certainly possible that we – as the viewer – are seeing everything through another disguised camera filmed by another visitor from Earth.

I was also impressed at German’s mastery of narrative and structure. Again, he never takes the obvious approach. Key events happen off-screen. A couple of important characters are killed and we only see the aftermath, as if the camera is having to catch-up with events as the sense of momentum increases. Life is happening beyond the camera. The camera is merely a blinkered observer.

German was once asked, why is it taking so long to make your film? (It was filmed between 2000 and 2006 and post-production was between 2006 and 2013, making it one of the longest shoots in film history). He replied by mentioning a famous painter whose painting took 20 years to paint. And this raises an interesting point – why shouldn’t a film take as long to make as a masterpiece of painting? Why shouldn’t it be accorded the same respect as a great painting or a great novel or even a great piece of architecture? Look at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which is still unfinished after about 100 years of building.

So to return to the quote at the beginning of this piece: “I am not interested in anything but the possibility of building a world, an entire civilization from scratch.”

With Hard To Be A God, German achieved that objective. And a film that can be compared to any of the great artistic masterpieces in any medium.

I can’t wait to enter its world again…