- Hard to Be a God
Tonight at 6:30 PM the Siskel Film Center presents the last Chicago screening of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013). It’s perhaps the most important movie in town—an epic, philosophical work by one of Russia’s most venerated directors, who worked on the film for over a decade and died during postproduction. In God every image—every sound effect, practically—reflects years of serious thought, although the filmmaking itself feels spontaneous. As in his previous features My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984) and Khroustaliov, My Car! (1998), German’s camera is almost always roving the scene (the Wellesian camera movements are breathtaking), creating the impression that the filmmaker is first discovering the setting—an alien planet that resembles medieval Europe—along with the audience. And given how densely realized the setting is, he achieves the effect with extraordinary ease. The narrative of God can be difficult to follow, since so many stray details are vying for one’s attention, but the film’s opacity is deliberate. Not only that, it’s essential to German’s artistic achievement: God is a meditation on humankind’s propensity for barbarism, and German made this horrible aspect of our nature indigestible.
