Hard to Be a God · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Somebody reaches into the frame and wipes the lens. Mud, probably. The hand belongs to no one you can name, and it isn't clearing the view for you; it's clearing it the way you'd wipe a window you happened to be standing next to. Something is almost always in the way in Hard to Be a God: a carcass on a rope, a bird, a beam, a shoulder, weather. Aleksei German shot in that condition for roughly six years, spent six more in post-production, and died in February 2013 before the sound mix was finished. He wasn't putting obstacles between you and his film. The obstacles are the film.

Most viewers come out saying it has no plot, and in practical terms they're right. The Strugatsky novel's events are all still in there (the healer Budakh, Don Reba's Grey Guards, the purge of Arkanar's book-readers, Kira, the massacre), but German declines to narrate them. They surface as fragments, mentioned rather than staged, or staged without preparation. Nothing is flagged as important. In a single frame you may get a hanging in the far plane, someone defecating at the edge, a joke, a slaughter, and the line of dialogue that would explain the last twenty minutes mixed at the same level as a cough.

Here's where a philosopher earns his keep. Gilles Deleuze divided film into two big regimes. In the first, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation. That circuit, the sensory-motor link, is the engine of nearly all narrative cinema. In the second, the time-image, the link snaps. The character can no longer act adequately on what they see, so they watch and endure instead, and time stops being the measure of movement and becomes the thing you are actually looking at. Deleuze's name for a character in that state is the seer, the voyant.

Rumata is the seer written into a contract. The observers sent to Arkanar may not interfere violently and may under no circumstances kill. In Deleuze the sensory-motor break is usually a wound of history: postwar rubble, a man who will never find his bicycle. German's is policy. Rumata has knowledge, technology, an unkillable body and total moral clarity, and none of it moves Arkanar an inch. His divinity comes down to being immune to consequence, which is nothing like the power to save anyone. So the film gives him nothing to do but walk, and the camera walks with him, and the world accumulates. Deleuze calls stretches where nothing advances the action temps mort, dead time. Here dead time isn't a stretch. It's the weather. What fills it are opsigns and sonsigns: pure optical and sound situations, where looking and listening are the only available verbs.

Now German's actual invention, which nobody else has attempted at this scale. The camera is a body in the room. Extras look into it, speak to it, block it, shove things at it, wipe it. This is not a Brechtian wink reminding you it's a movie. It's the opposite: it insists a witness is physically present in the mud, which quietly restores the science-fiction premise the film has otherwise thrown away. We are, in effect, watching Rumata's feed. Deleuze has a term for an image that shows us a perception being had, where the camera's own presence as a perceiver is part of what we see: the dicisign. German builds three hours out of one, and it costs us something, because the observer under interdiction is now us. We watch a pogrom assemble itself and we don't intervene. The film's refusal to make that comfortable is the most direct thing it says.

The mud isn't set dressing either. Deleuze has a category for worlds like this: the impulse-image, where a recognisable social milieu turns out to be the thin skin over an originary world of pure appetite (eating, rutting, defecating, killing), and everything in it slides down a line of slope toward exhaustion and death. Arkanar's slope is the film's only real structure: grotesque comedy darkening into massacre. Bosch and Bruegel are the right references, and everyone reaches for them, but notice what German actually takes from those painters. Not the monsters. The composition. A crowded panel where no event is centred, so the atrocity and the joke get the same square inches. That is what Deleuze called the dividual, a crowd rendered as one affective mass rather than a set of persons, and in German's hands it is an argument rather than a texture. If the camera won't rank the important above the incidental, you have to do the sorting yourself: decide, in an undifferentiated mass of human matter, who is worth saving. That is exactly Rumata's job, and the film makes it nearly impossible.

Bazin praised deep focus because it hands the viewer freedom to choose inside the shot instead of letting the cut choose for them. German honours that and converts it into a punishment. The wide lenses, the depth, the sound mixed without hierarchy (voices from speakers we never identify, shouting from off somewhere) make an image you have to decipher rather than simply read: what Deleuze called a lectosign. And the off-screen here isn't just the adjacent room. Someone is watching this footage. Earth is out there. The Renaissance is supposed to be coming. None of that can be located in space, which makes it the absolute out-of-field, and it's the closest thing to hope the film contains.

Watch Leonid Yarmolnik, cast against a career as a popular television comic. He doesn't perform. He shifts weight, adjusts his gaze, tolerates. Deleuze called this cinema of the body, and its unit, a posture that exposes a whole social relation, the gest. Rumata's gest is the sated, faintly amused slouch of a man who cannot be harmed in a place where everyone else can. Godhood as bad posture.

The politics run under all of it. The Strugatskys wrote the book in 1963–64, just after Khrushchev turned on unofficial artists. German first tried to film it in 1968, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia killed the project. He finished it under Putin. Deleuze said the condition of modern political cinema is that the people are missing: the collective subject that would carry history isn't there to be filmed. Arkanar's Renaissance never arrives. The intellectuals Rumata rescues are as venal and filthy as the men killing them, and German refuses to let their extinction look beautiful. Where the greys triumph, the blacks come to power.

He didn't invent this alone. Andrei Rublev gave him monochrome deep-focus medieval Rus, extras working continuously in the far plane, mud and rain photographed as subjects with their own tonal register. Marketa Lazarová gave the refusal of geography and a narrative laid down as sediment you reconstruct afterward. Come and See tethered the camera to a body's head-height and let layered off-screen noise carry more than the image does. Welles in Chimes at Midnight supplied the near-plane clutter, bodies and pikes jammed into the foreground, plus the Rabelaisian grease. And German had already built the machine himself: the glance into the lens in My Friend Ivan Lapshin, the jostled camera and unranked shouting mass in Khrustalyov, My Car!. Hard to Be a God removes the last handholds those films still offered. Its own influence is gravitational rather than genealogical, since the method is unrepeatable, but it became the reference point for total-environment filmmaking, the case invoked around Khrzhanovsky's DAU. Sokurov dematerialises the image; German buries it in matter.

What it did to the art was establish an outer limit. It proved that a film can withhold hierarchy and orientation for three hours and still hold you, that legibility is not a precondition of attention.

Then the last passage, in snow. Rumata plays his crude reed instrument, an anachronistic jazz-inflected phrase, the one trace of elsewhere the film permits. A child complains that it makes his stomach hurt. Nothing resolves.

Watch it again and watch the far plane, the back of the frame, the people German never asks you to notice. Then ask whether the interdiction Rumata hides behind is a moral position or the alibi of someone who came only to look. It's our alibi too.