This extreme precision also prevailed on the set, where German was known for his special attention to extras. Svetlana Karmalita, his co-writer and widow, explained that the words massovka (extras for the crowd) orstatist (an extra) were forbidden on German’s set. He would say that everyone was an actor, a foreground actor or a background actor, but still an actor (Svetlana Karmalita, interview with the author, 5 September 2014, St Petersburg). Nikulin remembered that ‘to the disarray and vexation’ of main actors in the film–Liudmila Gurchenko and Nikulin himself–the best takes were thrown out on account of extras, ‘because someone in the background had done something wrong’. Because of this particular method, German had the nickname of an outstanding ‘director’s assistant’, since traditionally the director’s assistant takes care of the extras, while the director concentrates on the protagonists […]
[…] another striking specificity of German’s style appeared already in his first feature films: the importance of the ‘diegetic life’ in the background. The director Aleksandr Ivanov noted the camera work in Trial on the Road: ‘I see very elaborate shots, a lot happens in every and each one. It all had to be minutely prepared’. German uses long and complex moving shots, choosing precision in all the details that constitute the profilmic, but not emphatic, as he tends to film all the main events from afar, such as the death of Lazarev in Trial on the Road or Lopatin’s and Nina’s first kiss in Twenty Days without War. German’s camera passes between the people and the buildings, catching glimpses of conversations, glances and emotion
In his next film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Moi drug Ivan Lapshin, 1984), the same peculiarities can be found again. Every extra was chosen by German from among photographs of people gathered by his film crew; on set everyone would be dressed in period clothes from head to toe, including underwear, even those whose faces were barely visible in the windows of a passing tram . The shooting period got longer with each new film. When asked about this dilatoriness, Viktor Izvekov, his executive producer on this last Soviet-era film, described his method in the following way: Normally a film director tries to adapt when told that something is impossible. We cannot shoot from this angle? Let’s shoot from another one. We cannot shoot in this courtyard? Let’s shoot in the adjacent courtyard. I don’t know how he behaved on his previous pro-jects, but on Lapshin, he never gave up on anything; he made no concessions. If someone would tell him: ‘We cannot shoot here today’, he would answer: ‘That’s even better, that will leave me time to think it over once again. We will shoot in three days, if necessary’.
his time, no limitations for the duration of shooting were imposed and a low but steady flow of finance was coming in while German shot the film over five years, with some foreign subsidies from France. The film was finished only in1998. This extraordinary tardiness was due both to German’s faltering health and to his conviction that he was entitled to take his time: ‘Before, I was always trying to be quick, but then they would forbid my films and they would be shelved for years. So now, let them wait a bit).
From the moment go I said: let’s try to make a film that would smell; film the medievalera through a keyhole, as if we had lived there ourselves'.The effect on the spectators seemed to be in line with this project, since critics around the world spoke about the physical impressions produced by the film, which almost created the sensation of smelling faeces and blood, and of sensing the over-whelming mud: ‘German is aiming to conjure a nightmarish, inescapably sensual experience, immersing us in an [sic] mud-puddled, amoral world where bodily-fluids flow and hideously intermingle, torture and battle are everyday events’. But this ‘gorgeous-looking feast of barbarous filth’ was at the same time described as terribly, sometimes unbearably hideous and monstrous, but also extremely beautiful in its framing, camerawork and details.
Dmitrii Bykov described the diegetic world of Hard to Be a God as ‘heavyset, dirty and luxurious, rude and refined, sanguinary, authentically medieval’, while Vasilii Stepanov talked about its ‘physio-logical realism’(Stepanov2008). After the screening of the finished film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2014, critics noted that ‘for each intentionally ugly shot there is one of stunning composition and beauty, despite all the fog, rain and caked muck’. These seemingly paradoxical comments stem certainly from the way in which German used art references and influences. For this film, German once again used the system of ‘inspiration panels’. This is how he described them to Anton Dolin: There were panels with many, many cut-up pieces of classical paintings. Paintings of Earth. A barrel by Brueghel. And near the barrel stands a guy. A palace. A John [sortir]. A sledge. Hats, gloves, boots. Classical paintings and non-classical ones. It was for the last film. There were approximately one hundred [images].
Another aspect that seems to interest German in the paintings selected for the ‘inspiration panels’is frame composition. Hard to Be a God, just as was earlier the case for Khrustalev, My Car!, is made of extremely long and complicated sequence-shots, which are choreographed to the extreme. The camera weaves its way through the castles and courtyards, in the middle of people scurrying about, eating, drinking, snorting and con-spiring.
As we have already seen, German’s logic is to push the vanitas to its logical conclusion, and instead of tasty, perishable food he places on the table already rotten food, as if the seventeenth-century Flemish painter had arranged the objects for a still-life, and then left them out to rot. The same applies to textures in the film: patterns, sceneries, silhouettes or faces may be recognizable, reminding us of paintings from the ‘inspiration panels’, but they are all covered in mud, rotting food, excrement, filth, blood and bowels. Whereas paintings are often an obvious inspiration source, German ‘brings them to life’ not only by setting them in motion, but moreover by making them dirty and displaying their frailty. Whereas in the paintings the tortures, however expressive, are represented as rather ‘clean’, leaving most of the physiological horror to the imagination, German’s film contains a lot of blood and bowels.
Khrustalev, My Car! was composed of long, elaborate sequence-shots, filled with authentic details, but ultimately resembling more a beautiful and monstrous nightmare than a documentary film.
Eugenie Zvonkine, 'The Artistic Process of Aleksei German'