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Hard to Be a God

Hard to Be a God
Tonight's show is 2 hours and 50 minutes long, but you don't have to watch it all in one night. You can use your ticket to come back for any of the other screenings of the same movie.

Engaging with a near-three-hour sci-fi set entirely within the bedraggled medieval milieu of a distant planet is a daunting proposition, especially one forged under the singular direction of renowned Russian filmmaker Aleksey German. Hard to Be a God (2013) is a cinematic behemoth, an unshakable monochrome nightmare of squelching bodily discharges that inhabits a world so noxious you can almost smell the pungent deterioration of humanity as it spews forth from the screen. German died of heart failure whilst Hard to be a God was still in post-production and it's with thanks to his wife Svetlana Karmalita and son Aleksey Jr. that we're able to appreciate German's work posthumously.

Adapted from the novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (authors of Roadside Picnic, the inspiration for Tarkovsky's Stalker), German's final film is a visceral voyage through the annals of human depravity. The narrative unfurls on Arkanar, a distant planet similar to Earth in all aspects except that it never enjoyed a Renaissance. Stuck in a perpetual barbaric state, the planet resembles the Middle Ages, with the suppression of culture and education employed to oppress the masses. A group of scientists and historians from Earth have arrived to usher in a new epoch, yet this distillation of knowledge must go unnoticed if they're to inconspicuously guide the planet's towards an new age of enlightenment. German chooses to consign the novel's plot to the fringes, focusing instead on Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), a scientist charged with finding a doctor named Budakh (Evgeniy Gerchakov) and protecting him from tyrannical Don Reba (Aleksandr Chutko).

Plunged head first into the cinematic mire, Hard to Be a God's baroque mise-en-scene feels like being funnelled through a Bruegel landscape - an earthy, unsentimental masterpiece depicting feudal serfdom, except remember this isn't Earth - it's the planet Arkanar. Filmed entirely in black and white - though you'd imagine the palette would look much the same had German been inclined to film in colour - lengthy choreographed shots escort us on a never ending trek through this fetid cesspool of barbarous debauchery. Similar in style and approach to Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) except with human excrement lining the walls instead of years of accumulated culture, German successfully manages to recreate the unsanitary conditions or pre-renaissance Europe in what feels like a salacious viewing experience.

The camera floats ominously behind Rumata's shoulder, caught in perpetual motion, as if swallowed whole and belligerently forcing its way through the digestive system of this putrid world. This is less an immersive experience and rather more of an invasive one. Overdubbed voices whisper, snivel and cough in your ears, whilst random characters continuously break the forth-wall staring directly at you, mocking your fake sense of progress. By submerging the viewer so entirely within this nightmarish landscape German effectively manages to infect the audience with the film's corrosive social allegory. German's wilfully opaque approach is one that may alienate even the most seasoned of arthouse patrons, demanding total servitude of the viewer and a desire to be submerged within a stomach-churning ecology, rather than the enthralling theoretical narrative the film's synopsis suggests.

Despite Hard to be a God's medieval environs, the film is very much an allegory for where we're heading, rather than where we've come from. Yes, German has crafted a primordial voyage into humanity's depraved history. Yet as we watch his mud-caked cast smile and gurn as they crawl through faeces, gnarl on putrid meat and expel inordinate quantities of phlegm, we should be asking how our own ineffectual educated elite can save us from the gloom of contemporary squalor and subjugation. Ultimately, it's this overriding sense of hopelessness that lingers once Hard to be a God comes to its conclusion; a pitying sense of acceptance that we're eternally destined to sift through the shit in search of enlightenment.

— Patrick Gamble, CineVue

Hard to Be a God

Sat & Sun April 4 & 5, 2015, 6:30 only, Muenzinger Auditorium

Russia, 2013, Russian, B&W, 170 min, DP, 1.85:1, NR

recommend

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

C.U. Film Program

(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

Thank you, sponsors!
Boulder International Film Festival
Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

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