Hard to Be a God: German's Medieval Mud and the End of the World

Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013) is the most physically overwhelming film I have ever sat through, and I do not say that lightly. For nearly three hours you are dragged through the streets of a planet called Arkanar, a world stuck forever in a Middle Ages that never produced a Renaissance, and the film’s project is to make you feel that filth in your teeth. Mud, pus, spit, snot, blood, offal, rain and rot fill every frame. Faces loom into the lens and back away. Hands reach out and smear the camera. By the twenty-minute mark you have stopped watching a film and started enduring a place. German spent something like fifteen years making it and died in November 2013 before the final mix was complete; his wife and co-writer Svetlana Karmalita and his son Aleksei German Jr. finished it. It is a deathbed film, and it feels like one.

The source is a 1964 science-fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, the same Soviet authors whose Roadside Picnic became Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The premise is pure science fiction and the film almost buries it: scientists from a future Earth have been sent to observe Arkanar, forbidden to intervene in its history, forbidden to accelerate its progress. Our man on the ground is Don Rumata, played by Leonid Yarmolnik, a god to the locals who believe he is a noble descended from a pagan deity, a helpless observer to himself, watching a society murder every thinker, artist and doctor it produces. The Renaissance cannot come because Arkanar kills anyone clever enough to start it.

The camera is inside the crowd

German’s method is unlike anyone else’s, and understanding it is the key to the whole film. The camera never sits back and composes a shot. It is always down in the throng, jostled, brushed, obstructed by shoulders and beams and hanging carcasses, and characters constantly notice it, glancing at the lens, touching it, addressing it, handing objects across it as if the camera were another filthy inhabitant of Arkanar shoving through the mob. The effect is total immersion of the most aggressive kind. You are not shown Arkanar from a safe seat. You are pushed through it with your face in the muck.

This is why the film’s long takes feel less like showing off and more like drowning. German choreographs enormous, deep-focus tableaux in which dozens of people, animals and objects move through every plane of the image at once, and the eye cannot find a resting point. Something is always leaking, dripping, chewing, dying at the edge of the frame. The black-and-white photography, wet and silver and merciless, refuses the beauty that monochrome usually smuggles in. There is no relief, no cutaway to a clean sky, no musical cue to tell you how to feel. German removes every handhold the cinema normally offers and leaves you clinging to Rumata’s back as he wades through the slaughter.

The sound design matches it. The film is a constant wet mutter of coughs, grunts, farts, dripping and half-heard speech, so that dialogue swims up out of the murk and sinks again before you can hold it. Names, plots and factions blur. This bewilderment is deliberate and it is the film’s argument. Rumata cannot make sense of Arkanar either. He knows the history is going wrong and he cannot find the lever that would set it right, because there is no lever, only mud and men who love the mud.

The lineage: Tarkovsky, Bruegel, and the anti-fantasy

Here is where the collector reshelves the film. The obvious ancestor is Andrei Tarkovsky, the other great Soviet adapter of the Strugatskys, and Stalker is the film everyone reaches for. But German is doing something almost opposite to Tarkovsky’s serene, slow spirituality. Where Tarkovsky finds transcendence in the long take, German finds only weight and rot, a materialism so total it becomes its own kind of metaphysics. The proper visual ancestor is older: Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, the northern painters who packed every inch of a canvas with grotesque, teeming humanity. German has built a moving Bruegel and set it in the rain.

The film also belongs on the shelf of monochrome medieval nightmares, and it makes a perfect double bill with Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, which uses the same black-and-white filth and the same claustrophobic confinement to argue that history is a swamp we never climbed out of. Both films strip period drama of its costume-shop prettiness and leave the dirt. And for sheer maximalist visionary excess, its cousin is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, another film that assaults the viewer with a dense, symbol-crammed frame and dares you to look away. Set beside John Boorman’s ambitious sci-fi disaster in Zardoz and the case for watching it anyway, German’s film shows what real control over an outlandish idea looks like, because where Boorman’s reach exceeds his grasp, German seizes exactly the horror he was aiming for.

It is, at bottom, an anti-fantasy. Every image is a rebuke to the clean, heroic Middle Ages of sword-and-sorcery cinema. There are no gleaming knights, no noble quests, no cathedrals catching the light. There is a god who cannot save anyone, watching a species that murders its own future, and the film asks the oldest question in the book: if you had the power of a god and the rule against using it, could you keep your hands clean while the innocent die around you?

Is it endurable, and is endurance the point?

The honest warning is that Hard to Be a God is punishing to a degree that will lose many viewers inside the first hour, and calling that a flaw or a feature depends entirely on what you want cinema to do. The plot is nearly impossible to follow on a first pass. The imagery is relentlessly repellent. There is no arc that delivers the usual satisfactions, no swelling climax that pays off your patience with catharsis. A reasonable person can find it unwatchable and I will not argue them out of it.

My case for it is that the difficulty is the meaning. German is not being obscure for fashion. He is building an experience of moral paralysis so complete that you feel Rumata’s helplessness in your own body, and the only way to make you feel that is to trap you in the same mud for three hours with no exit. The film earns its cruelty because the cruelty is the subject. When you finally stagger out of it you understand, in your gut rather than your head, what it would cost to be a god in a world that refuses to be saved.

The verdict: it is a masterpiece that most people should never watch, the ultimate demonstration of total directorial control aimed at total immersion, and one of the great final statements in film history. Come for the science fiction. Understand, by the end, that the future never arrives and the mud always wins.

Where to find it: it lives on the arthouse streaming services and has a superb subtitled physical release from Arrow. Clear your evening. Bring nothing to distract you. It demands the whole room.

Spoilers below

There is not much conventional plot to spoil, which is itself part of German’s design, and the film’s structure is closer to a spiral than an arc. Rumata’s cover on Arkanar is that of a noble, and his position lets him shelter a handful of the planet’s persecuted intellectuals, the doctors and scribes and would-be scientists that the regime is systematically exterminating. The ruling clique, first under Don Reba and his grey-shirted enforcers and then under an even worse ascendancy of black-clad monks, is dedicated to stamping out literacy and thought, drowning the intelligent in the swamp so that Arkanar can never advance.

The turning point is personal. Rumata’s beloved, Ari, is murdered, and the rule of non-intervention that has held him back for the whole film finally breaks in him. The god, who has spent three hours refusing to act, picks up a sword. What follows is not shown as heroism. The offscreen aftermath of Rumata’s rampage, the piled bodies glimpsed in the mud, makes plain that a god who intervenes only produces more slaughter, that his violence is another kind of filth added to Arkanar’s endless supply. He has proved the film’s thesis by breaking it.

The closing images find Rumata surviving, hollowed out, trudging away across a snowbound landscape with his ragged retinue, playing a mournful jazz clarinet, an instrument from a future civilisation that Arkanar can neither recognise nor deserve. The historians on Earth were right that intervention was forbidden and wrong to think the observer could stay clean. Rumata has learned that it is hard to be a god chiefly because godhood offers no clean choices, only the mud, the killing, and the long walk into the snow with a tune nobody around you can hear.