Aleksey German’s 'Hard to Be a God'

It’s a thought, and some Russians — Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov — were anticipating hard times even sooner. But 20th-century tyrannies were incomparably more brutal and totalitarian than their 19th-century predecessors, and the artists who responded to them had to be correspondingly more cautious. Some of the most trenchant criticism of Soviet society was embedded in science fiction, and some of this, notably in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), made it to the screen. It can be argued that cinema was the subversive art par excellence in Russia, beginning with Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1945), a work made under the nose of Stalin about the insane paranoia of a ruler who turned his country upside down.

Eisenstein and Tarkovsky are famous in the West; Aleksey German, who spent the last years of life adapting a 1960s Russian sci-fi classic by Arkadiy and Boris Strugatskiy (who inspired Stalker as well) is less well-known. His last film, posthumously completed by collaborators and only put into American release this year, might be likened to, say, Ray Bradbury as reimagined by Hieronymus Bosch.

A three-hour nightmare

Hard to Be a God — the film retains the book’s title, at any rate — is a phantasmagoric three-hour nightmare whose plot is lost and all but obliterated in an unrelenting, in-your-face series of horrific, stomach-churning images of abuse, torture, mutilation, and death dealt out as casually as the devil’s broth. It all but defies watching while, at the very same time, it’s virtually impossible to take your eyes off of it.

The film casts us in a time-warped world that is simultaneously future and past. A group of Russian scientists have landed on the planet Arkanar, which has been chosen for observation because of its earthlike flora and fauna, including an anthropoid species much like our own. This species dominates its planet as we do ours, with domesticated animals and no predator rivals, except that it is stuck, developmentally, in something like our Middle Ages. It is a world with muddy villages, rude carts for transportation, and an authority system that seems partly run by local strongmen and partly by a mysterious priestly order whose prime function seems to be to root out any intellectual activity, not on behalf of a jealous god but simply for the sake of pure obscurantism. What the Russian team finds, then, is the equivalent of a world of primitive superstition without genuine religious aspiration, and whose quasi-feudal power structure is an anarchic struggle in which the most brutal prevail.

The Russian visitors are instructed not to interfere with the culture of the natives, but merely to record it. On Earth, the Middle Ages were succeeded by the Renaissance, which is to say by secularism, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, but on Arkanar, the tide appears to be running backward: Books are burned and intellectuals hanged. The visitors, moreover, despite their superior technology, are too few in number to simply impose themselves; they are not invaders but privileged witnesses gathering material to test a hypothesis: Will a species comparable to homo sapiens exhibit a similar course of historical development, i.e., progress?

Straightforward satire

The satiric parable unfolding here is clear enough. The inhabitants of Arkanar are the Russian peasantry before the advent of modernity, which is to say, bourgeois society, industrialization, urbanization, and the ultimate Communist paradise. The Russian observers know how it is all supposed to turn out, but do the laws of historical inevitability apply on Arkanar as they do on Earth — which is to say, do they apply on Earth itself, for which Arkanar is the stand-in? Marx thought that revolution would arise among class-conscious proletarians, but Lenin took over a country in 1917 whose brutalized peasantry, steeped in violence and superstition, looked not unlike Arkanar through a mirror. Good intentions only made a bad thing worse, as Boris Yeltsin observed when he said that Communism had been an unfortunate experiment that should have been tried on a smaller country.

In German’s film, as in the novel, the visitors succumb to the temptation to intervene in Arkanar’s backward society, but, rather than lifting it up, they are dragged down to its level. The natives, meanwhile, not knowing what to make of the strangers in their midst with their odd clothing and manner, uneasily take them for gods. The result is a power struggle among the Russians gone native, which we see through the eyes of a protagonist, Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), who, finally exhausted beside one of Arkanar’s endlessly rain-replenished swamps, confesses that “It is hard to be a god.”

A vision of hell

The film presupposes acquaintance with the novel because its premise is never explained and the Russian warlords are, except for Don Rumata himself, indistinguishable from the native aristocracy. What German offers us instead is a vision of hell, sustained on a black-and-white canvas of amazing scope and variety, whose unrelenting visual power is such that one cannot turn aside even from its most gruesome sights — martyred flesh, spilled guts, and, perhaps worst of all, gargoylelike faces that radiate a terminal stupidity.

A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, a great filmmaker in the Age of Putin has offered us a profoundly dystopian vision of our 21st-century world, and of who, amid our technobarbarism, we really are. It’s hard to watch. But we avoid it at our peril.