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

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Stalker: The Zone as a Test of Faith

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in an unnamed country there is a forbidden, fenced-off region called the Zone, where an unexplained event — a meteorite, an alien visitation, no one knows — has left the ordinary laws of the world unstable. At the heart of the Zone is a Room, and the Room is said to grant the deepest wish of anyone who enters it. Guides called Stalkers smuggle desperate people past the soldiers and the wire, through the shifting traps, toward the Room. That is the entire plot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and it takes roughly two hours and forty minutes, and almost nothing in it is what a synopsis would lead you to expect.

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

Stalker: The Zone as a Test of Faith