This month (June, 2018) writer Martin Kessler takes over The Pink Smoke with his five part series on Russian director Aleksei German, a titan of le cinema who is surprising obscure in the West.

Join us as Kessler explores the filmmaker's career, step by step: from medieval sci-fi to Soviet noir to wartime romance - German's body of work is brilliantly wild and unpredictable.

{PART I: ANOTHER CENTURY. ANOTHER PLANET}
{PART II: ESCAPE VELOCITY}
{PART III: APOAPSIS}
{PART IV: ECLIPSE}
{PART V: EVENT HORIZON}

~ martin kessler ~

Hard to Be a God would end up being Aleksei German’s final film, but it was nearly his first solo-directed film. The project found its origin in the 1964 novel of the same name by the science fiction authors, the Strugatsky brothers.

The novel is about a scientist from Earth named Anton, who travels to an alien planet that happens to be nearly identical to Earth during the Middle Ages. Anton is supposed to be a neutral observer, playing the role of a noble Don to blend in. However, as the planet becomes gripped by a totalitarian sect, Anton is forced to intervene. The Strugatsky brothers began writing it as a sort of Alexandre Dumas-inspired swashbuckling adventure, but by its completion the novel had taken on a serious political subtext, with allusions to the Communist regime. For instance the villainous character Don Reba was created as a stand-in for Lavrentiy “The Butcher” Beria, who was the head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) under Stalin.¹

Aleksei German had been given a copy of the novel by an editor friend, and immediately after reading it seized on the idea of adapting it into a film. German wrote the first version of the film’s screenplay in 1968, in collaboration with Boris Strugatsky, the younger of the two brothers. “He knew everything, but he was also wrong about everything,” German would say with a chuckle, describing his friendship with Boris Strugatsky. Supposedly they spent most of their time together debating virtually every subject over tea and candies, rather than actually working on the script. That script bares a number of differences from both the novel and also the 2013 version that German would eventually make. I’ll elaborate on that in a later chapter, but to give you an idea, German characterized the 1968 script as “less philosophical and more adventurous” than the film he would eventually make.

German cast as his leading man in the film, Vladimir Retsepter. Retsepter was mostly associated with the theatre, not only as an actor, but as a writer and director too, though he would accumulate a number of film credits in the following years. With hindsight, German mentioned that he thought Retsepter would have been interesting, but likely wrong for the role of the Don-impersonator from Earth.

Hard to Be a God was set to begin shooting in Central Bohemia, Czechoslovakia in 1968, but the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which began on August 20th of that year, derailed the project. The practicalities of shooting went out the window, and the subject matter of the film immediately became too sensitive. The following day, German received a telegram from the editor-in-chief of Lenfilm telling him that the film was cancelled. For a while the script would be banned for its politically provocative premise of a Russian ‘spying on and then violently interfering with another nation’. German was advised to even throw the book out and to, “Forget about it. Forever.”

The Strugatsky brothers wrote German a kind conciliatory letter. They asked if German would make a film out of the novel they were then working on, Inhabited Island (also known as Prisoners of Power), though nothing would come of that. I think German wasn’t looking to make a sci-fi film, so much as he was interested in what Hard to Be a God in specific had to offer.

German would return to Hard to Be a God in the ensuing years, but at that time he had to move on to something else. So, as circumstance would have it, German’s first solo film would be Trial on The Road.

Trial on The Road is based on an older screenplay titled Operation Happy New Year, that had been written by Yuri German.² Aleksei German had collaborated with his father in writing a revised draft, but had set it aside when when his father died in 1967.

Aleksei and Yuri German:

Aleksei German insisted that his father wasted his own talent by often writing quickly without revision. “He wrote things for just one day. He took good stories, and then he destroyed them. He made them worse. It was a big tragedy of an intelligent and good person. At least I think so.” Aleksei German’s approach was much the opposite, spending a great deal of time and care in research and revision.

The synopsis for the original version of the script described its main character as “a merry fellow accidentally caught in the clutches of the Germans, and now redeems involuntary guilt with feats and blood”, which doesn’t seem quite right when applying it to what Aleksei German would go on to make. The Operation Happy New Year script would be altered in subtle but important ways. To complete the final screenplay for Trial on The Road, Aleksei German brought in two collaborators. One was Eduard Volodarsky, who was still in his twenties, and fairly inexperienced, but would go on to become a respected and prolific screenwriter. Only Eduard Volodarsky and Yuri German would receive credit for the film’s screenplay, but it was also Aleksei German’s first film written in collaboration with Svetlana Karmalita.

Svetlana Karmalita, was born in the Kiev, Ukraine, and like German, had a Jewish background. She had a degree in philology, and no prior experience in film. When German met her on August 15 1968 (while he was still readying to shoot Hard to Be a God), she was involved in the medical field, “doing something with bone marrow” as German phrases it. Apparently she was already engaged to a doctor, but German swept her off her feet. On her importance to his life, German mused, “As they say, loneliness is a good thing, but you need to have someone to say that loneliness is a good thing to.” Their first date was on the day of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She would be his greatest artistic collaborator, and would also go on to write a number of screenplays of her own.

Karmalita helped greatly in filling in the the genericism of the story for Trial on The Road with narrative specifics. It was also her idea to cut a romantic subplot present in the original script. Aleksei German and Svetlana Karmalita went into production on Trial on The Road as newlyweds.

Trial on The Road is a film set during WWII, and it begins with a girl’s raspy voiceover elaborating on a memory as the German army digs up Russian potatoes and ruins them by pouring petrol all over in an attempt to starve the local partisans. Sight & Sound contributor Michael Brooke beat me to the punch in comparing it to Linda Manz’ voiceover in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, though I might be original in saying that the long take that follows of cows being loaded onto train cars greatly resembles the opening of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó. It’s a stark and mood-setting image, though the cows do become crucial to the plot by the end of the film.

A folksy balalaika plays on the soundtrack, which gives way to a full orchestra as the cattle car doors are closed. It’s a piece of music that’s a little reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s film scores. Isaac Schwartz who had composed the score for The Seventh Companion (and who as far as I can tell isn’t directly related to Evgeny Schwartz), composed the score for Trial on The Road. He would also score Akira Kurosawa’s Soviet endeavour, Dersu Uzala.

With the stakes set, the story that follows is of a Russian named Lazarev. A former taxi driver who had been fighting on the German Reich’s side during WWII. It’s something that was common, though rarely acknowledged by the Soviet Union after the war, and has largely fallen out of common knowledge.³

Lazarev is captured, or rather lets himself be captured by Russian partisans and tries to convince them that he is willing to switch sides. The leader of the partisans is understandably skeptical.

Lazarev is played by Vladimir Zamanskiy, who despite looking like he’s made of stone, keeps the character from ever falling into bland stoicism. He makes Lazarev a real person who is vulnerable, but with a conscience, trying to navigate the doomed scenario he’s found himself in. Zamanskiy had previously acted in Andrei Tarkovsky’s short film The Steamroller and the Violin, and would go on to be quite prolific (as of writing this, he’s still alive in his 90s). He has a face for black and white, I think. Even his eyes are grey.

Lazarev is locked up with another Russian in a German army uniform who has been taken prisoner by the partisans. He’s played by Nikolay Burlyaev who was the young bell maker in Andrei Rublev and Ivan in Ivan’s Childhood, and here looks like he’s just grown his first moustache. He cries that the partisans won’t even give him a last drink of vodka before they execute them.

Before the two prisoners can be execute, there’s an attack by an SS punishment devision, and in the chaos of retreating, the young prisoner escapes. Lazarev doesn’t even try to escape, which gives the partisan leader a reason to hesitate in having Lazarev executed. The political officer, who rivals the partisan leader believes the proper thing to do would be to kill Lazarev, but the partisan leader thinks the turncoat may be someone he can count on.

The partisans use Lazarev in his German uniform to flag down a German officer and their escort, so that they can ambush them. The partisans hesitate in assisting Lazarev, waiting to see how he handles the shootout. The ambush is a success, but one of the partisans is killed. The Political Officer assigned to the partisan group is suspicious that Lazarev himself may have killed them, but the partisan leader has faith in Lazarev.

Lazarev himself is very aware that the partisans may decide to kill him at any moment, and there’s a particularly eerie scene where he’s awoken at night and told that he’s invited to a New Year’s party. As he’s escorted into the woods, he becomes more and more certain that he’s about to be shot. This is it, this is the end, but it turns out the party in the woods is real! There’s an accordion and no political officer.

It’s difficult to articulate something of what the film expresses simply through relating its plot. So many of the film’s details and moments linger in my mind long after and seem as important as anything else; a horse chewing the bark off of the inside walls of a log cabin, the SS punishment devision emerging from the cold mist, a woman killed while rushing to take down her laundry during a mortar attack, the record scratch-like sounds of hot bullets hitting snow, a retreating peasant crossing themselves over a religious painting they have to leave behind in the woods… They all add up to a film that’s more than the sum of its scenes.

In contrast to The Seventh Companion, German’s personality is properly on display here. For instance there’s German’s distinct (and often scatalogical) dark sense of humour. “I wasn’t saluting, I was just showing how deep in shit we are,” one partisan in the film would joke. Aside from being the sort of humour that might naturally be observed in life and the sorts of jokes that people really would make to break the tension, I think it helps anchor the film from drifting into a selfserious blandness common to war films. For instance, I remember how the perpetual bleakness of Kon Ichikawa’s beautifully crafted Fires on the Plain beat me into an emotional monotone. Despite the dourness of his film’s scenarios, once you get onto a certain wavelength, I think you’ll find that Aleksei German’s films always have something funny in them.

Stylistically, the Trial on The Road deviates from the stagnant Social Realism that was common to Brezhnev-era films. One of the most striking aspects of the film is German’s tendency to have people glance or stare into camera (which he would build on with his subsequent films, even having characters speak to and interact with the camera in his later films). It’s used to great effect in Trial on The Road’s most memorable scene; a flashback in which the partisans have been ordered to destroy a bridge just as a Nazi train crosses it. At the precise moment that the train crosses, a barge full of Soviet prisoners of war, passes beneath the bridge. The partisans stare with tears in their eyes, and the decision to not blow up the bridge is reached without a word spoken. The barge simply drifts by. It’s one of the most haunting and human things I’ve ever seen put to film. German managed to cast real Gulag prisoners to play the POWs. I don’t think you could fake that sort of sadness in so many extras:

It’s a politically provocative sequence as well, evoking sympathy for the soldiers who survived Nazi prisoner of war camps only to be declared traitors and sent straight into the gulags. The gulags are a subject that Aleksei German would address more thoroughly in his later films.

The flashback is used to explain the tension between the leader of the partisans and the political officer who has been assigned to them. There was a natural tension, in that many partisan groups arose spontaneously and were initially independent from the Soviet government. Some even fought both the German and the Soviet armies alike. Political officers were assigned to ensure that there was some government control over them. However German doesn’t just rest on this, and adds additional depth to both characters. In the following scene, the political officer is angry for the bridge not being blown up and makes it clear that anyone who is captured by the Germans is a traitor. The partisan leader counters by suggesting that the political officer’s own son may have been captured when his plane was shot down. The political officer insists that his son would have died heroically, but you can see how deep a nerve is struck in the political officer and how much he resents the partisan leader for raising the issue.

Tarkovsky fans may recognize Rolan Bykov, who had a small role in Andrei Rublev, who plays the partisan leader here. German would say “I think he was the only genius I ever worked with, though his acting could be quite bad.”

Tarkovsky fans will definitely recognize Andrei Rublev himself, Anatoly Solonitsyn as the political officer. Often German would resort to saying, “This is great for Tarkovsky, but I need something simpler” when the actors would pitch him ideas of how to play their scenes.⁴

Anyway, to finish off the plot, the partisans hatch a plan to steal back the train full of cattle from the opening sequence. They intend to use the German army uniforms, vehicles, and equipment they captured in their ambush to send Lazarev and three other partisans to his original destination where no one would know yet that he has defected. It’s a train yard guarded mostly by a unit of Russian soldiers in service of the German Reich.

The night before the mission, Lazarev tries to kill himself, but is saved. Lazarev, like Lazarus, brought back from death. The partisan leader tells him that “dying is not allowed, that’s an order”, and that they need him for their mission to succeed. There’s desperation in the partisan leader’s voice.

Things don’t quite go according to plan. When do they ever? During the operation, the young Russian prisoner who had escaped the partisans earlier is among the guards at the train station. He recognizes one of the partisans after he stops to flirt with her. All hell breaks loose, and Lazarev is forced to kill one of his old buddies. One person’s hero is another’s crook.

Lazarev picks up a machine gun and fights off the oncoming young soldiers, killing one just before he can switch the rail line, allowing the partisans to escape with the train full of cattle.

With the climax being a lone belt-fed machine gun wielding hero facing off against an army, you might think of the 1934 classic Chapaev.⁵ Lazarev’s an action hero, but it’s compounded with the strangeness of having Russians in German uniforms fighting Russians in German uniforms. There’s an air of dark absurdity to it. In part it undermines the sense of the war as something in moral black & white terms, but I think too that it’s Aleksei German deliberately muddying the notion of ‘taking action’ having any inherent virtue. It’s a theme he’d expound upon later in his career. In a later interview, German would say that it wasn’t until the film began shooting that he began to think of it in terms of the Western genre. He was inspired by what Italian filmmakers had done with the moral landscape of the mythic west. So with that in mind, I think it’s possible to not just think of Chapev when that machine is picked up, but perhaps also antiheroes like Franco Nero as Django.

Lazarev taking action seems about as much a redemptive act as it does a damnable act. It tangles my emotions. German described it as a film that was “not about fighting the fascists, but about the truth of the trenches”. Of course Lazarev ends up dead, face-first in the snow.

The film concludes with an epilogue focused on the partisan leader, forgotten and left behind to push an armoured vehicle as the Soviet moves toward Berlin in the last days of the war. German gives the man who would be lost to history a closeup to end the film. It’s a tonal note that may be unique amongst Soviet era war films (I watch a lot of them on youtube), not going for the sort of melancholy, or triumph, or melancholy tinged collective triumph that’s so common. It evokes a more elusive emotion.

Needless to say, the film was something of a scandal. There was an investigation by the Politburo to figure out why the film wasn’t axed in the screenplay stage. The expense of filmmaking meant that it was preferable to ban or censor films before they were ever shot, so a completed film facing the possibility of destruction was rare. As German would explain, “We were lucky that the previous film, The Seventh Companion, was not very successful. So we were not really controlled from the artistic point of view. It was easier in that situation because no one expected us to produce such an artistic explosion.”

The film would make Aleksei German enemies, but earn him allies and champions as well, both among his filmmaker peers and also with people of some political influence. Vitaly Akseyanov, the head of Lenfilm at that time supported German and lost his job over it. Alexander Soburov, a prominent general who had been a partisan leader during WWII, was convinced of the film’s importance and added his support. The result was a sort of stalemate in which the film was not destroyed, but would be shelved with no intention of it ever being released.

However, Trial on The Road wouldn’t go entirely unseen. German and Karmalita managed to swipe a print of it, that they would hide under their bed. They would screen the film in secret for close friends. German said that one of his greatest regrets was turning down an opportunity to show Trial on The Road to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who was at that time working on The Gulag Archipelago in secret), but he had to be very secretive when it came to showing the film.

Two of the people German did screen the film for were the wife and husband filmmakers, Larisa Shepitko and Elem Klimov. The influence of Trial on The Road can be felt heavily in Shepitko’s 1977 bleak and snowy war film, The Ascent (which would also cast Anatoly Solonitsyn), and Klimov’s 1985 film Come and See, which is about a boy who joins up with a partisan group, and makes use of German’s device of having characters look directly into camera. Through some ups and downs, Shepitko and Klimov would be lifelong friends of German and Karmalita. Klimov would also be instrumental in Trial on The Road’s eventual release, fifteen years after it was initially completed.

When Trial on The Road was finally released, Lenfilm tried to fine German twenty percent of the film’s budget for making an unreleasable movie. German haggled them down to five percent.⁶

After the controversy of Trial on The Road, it’s a wonder how German’s film career continued at all, but like I mentioned it did bring him to the attention of some influential people. The key one for his follow-up film would be the war journalist and poet Konstantin Simonov whom German had met in Arkhangelsk as a child. After seeing Trial on The Road, Simonov decided that German was the right person to collaborate with on a film.

Initially they began work on a screenplay about a Hungarian soldier who was killed during the Spanish Civil War, but eventually dropped that in favour of adapting Simonov’s own wartime notes. Simonov would go on to use the same notes to create a story titled From Lopatin's Notes, which Twenty Days Without War is often attributed to being based on, though really they’re parallel projects which only vaguely resemble one another. In addition to Simonov’s notes, German’s also used his own memories of civilian life during the war. In addition to that German and Karmalita also took a short story that had been written by the Nobel Prize winning author Ivan Bunin in 1933 and used it to give a narrative spine to all the anecdotes and structure their screenplay around. Simonov is the only one who would receive a writer’s credit though.

The resulting film is about an officer, Major Lopatin, retuning from the front on a twenty day leave to an Uzbeki town far away from the fighting of the war. During his leave he’s obligated to consult on a propaganda film based on his journalism, deliver the possessions of a young killed comrade to their mother, and give a motivational speech to factory workers. On his train trip (in a series of scenes that are a little reminiscent of the beginning of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot) he’s seen by a woman who is at first resentful of him, but as it turns out she is a seamstress named Nina who is doing costume work on the film based on his writing. As they meet and meet again Nina and Lopatin fall in love.

The love story ends up being incredibly powerful. It’s all played with extreme subtlety. There’s no swelling music, no grand romantic gestures. Instead the power of it comes from what goes unsaid, what the two characters can share, and the realness of it. German singled out a specific shot to describe his approach to keeping the romance grounded, explaining, “I used a shot that showed them through a window. They are sitting at a table, eating, talking. For a long time I didn't like this shot, until suddenly something wonderful occurred to me. Do you know what the two were doing? They were scolding each other! They were trying to outdo each other with barbs. Before, that shot threatened to be too sentimental.”

German resists sentimentality, but when the two leads finally come together it’s as if all the goodness in the world exists entirely in between their embrace. Of course there are no twenty days without war. The officer’s leave is cut short (making the film’s title into a cruel joke) and he’s forced to return to the front earlier than expected. The love story ends with a handshake. The last image of the heroine is of her stepping in a puddle. The officer heads back to the front where they’re far away from victory. Of all of German’s films, I think Twenty Days Without War is the most immediately emotionally accessible.

Reflecting on the middle-aged love story, German said, “The love of young people is never very interesting for me because it's a time of getting to know yourself. The love of an older, more mature person is something else entirely. More precious, more genuine.”

For the two leads, German made the perhaps unlikey choice of casting actors who had previously been known for their roles in lighthearted musicals and comedies from the 1950s and 60s. Signing pixie Lyudmila Gurchenko plays Nina, and famed clown (with clowning being generally more respectable as an art form in Russia) Yuri Nikulin plays Lopatin.

By coincidence I had watched the 1956 musical Carnival Night on the Mosfilm youtube channel shortly before seeing Trial on The Road, which starred Lyudmila Gurchenko. It perhaps gave me some sense of how her presence in Twenty Days Without War may have come across to audiences when it was released. Knowing her when she was young and pretty,and colourful, here looking still beautiful but also weary and hardened. It holds a certain power, in addition to Gurchenko’s performance being truly fearless.

Originally German had cast Alla Demidova as Nina, but she dropped out to instead play a role in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. I think things worked out for the best. It’s hard to imagine Twenty Days Without War without Lyudmila Gurchenko’s particular bittersweetness. From what I understand, Twenty Days Without War gave her something of a career resurgence, and she would have a string of respectable roles throughout the 1980s and beyond.

I’d imagine the effect was similar for audiences familiar with Yuri Nikulin. A bit like seeing Mr. Hulot thrown into a uniform and looking depleted. When one character asks Lopatin if he likes jokes, Nikulin delivers a tired, deadpan “Only when they’re funny”. There are comic aspects of the character, but they’re subtle and naturalistic, like for instance when an acquaintance comments that Lopatin looks like he lost weights, and he replies with “It must be the haircut.” Nikulin gives Lopatin a wit that’s often self-effacing, and a quality of someone exhausted by open-heartedness in the face of awfulness. I know too that Nikulin fought during the war and brings an authenticity and sensitivity to the role. It also wasn’t the first time he had a serious turn (actually it’s kind of a funny role), with a small part in Andrei Rublev. While Yuri Nikulin Remained a comic icon, Twenty Days Without War would lead into a less active period of his career, with only three more film roles between its competition and his death in 1997.

German was put under heavy pressure to replace Nikulin, with State Committee members declaring, “This is not a Soviet writer, but some sort of wino. This defames our foundations.” Simonov intervened, throwing his weight behind German’s casting choice, allegedly at one point yelling “I invented Lopatin. He's out of my head! You cast whoever you want as Zhdanov. Leave me Nikulin. Do not touch German, leave him alone!” at a member of the Central Committee. Zhdanov was a mass murdering politician strongly associated with Stalin, so you get the gist of what he was implying. When I hear about German’s legendary stubbornness, I wonder if some of that came from Simonov’s personality rubbing off on him.

I think it’s worth saying that the supporting performances are excellent too. It’s a mix of professional and non-professional actors. Another Andrei Rublev actor and Tarkovsky regular, Nikolai Grinko appears in the film, though it’s not his voice you hear speaking. Grinko had difficulty saying his lines as he was recovering from a heart attack during production. Grinko suggested that they ask another actor Innokenti Smoktunovsky, to dub him. Smoktunovsky was one of the most acclaimed Russian actors who ever lived, and he’s probably best known for playing Hamlet in the film version directed by German’s former-mentor, Grigori Kozintsev. To convince Smoktunovsky to fulfil their request, German and Karmalita screened Trial on The Road for him, which apparently caused him to break into tears and say, "How do you know all this?" I was in captivity, I served with the Germans, then I was in a gulag ... All this is about me.” So that’s why and how a highly-acclaimed voice comes out of Grinko’s mouth in the film.

I think the stand out supporting performance though is by Aleksei Petrenko who plays the foreboding and nameless officer on the train who delivers a nearly ten minute monologue, telling the dark story of how his marriage fell apart, ending it with asking Lopatin if he can write a letter to his wife. It’s the film’s most mysterious scene. Lopatin sees the officer as potentially dangerous after that monologue and tries to keep a polite but cautious distance from him after.

Petrenko would become best known for playing Rasputin in Elem Klimov’s film Agony (which is also heavily informed by Aleksei German’s style, particularly in the recreated newsreel style footage), but Petrenko would say that his relatively small role in Twenty Days Without War was the best of his career.

German built on the style he begun developing in Trial on The Road, and it seems properly solidified here. I’ve seen German’s style described as ‘hyper-realism’, but I’m not sure even that entirely does his style justice. There are moments where I thought I must have been looking at a bit of stock footage from the war cut into the film, but then surprised to see the camera tilt over and there the actor is! Or the opposite where the camera lilts away from the main characters and seems to just happen to catch a soldier being reunited with his mother and sisters who thought he was dead, in a scene of such raw emotion with ostensibly extras that it gives the feeling that it was just something that happened to happen in reality and could only be filmed once, like a documentary. That’s not how it was made of course, but that’s the effect it has when you see it.

In her book, The Imperial Trace, Nancy Condee points out the contradiction of how German’s films may resemble documentary, but his process is antithetical to the documentary process, carefully orchestrating everything you see and hear. It’s also not what someone today might think of as a ‘documentary style’ either. There’s a distinct lyricism too. I don’t know if saying that a film is “poetic” is one of those things that doesn’t mean all that much anymore, but it seems right. That notion that film can be to sight what music is to sound. Like a piece of music, you don’t have to focus on one thing at a time. NYU professor Mikhail Yampolsky wrote that “The history of Aleksei German is the story of the liberation of cinematography from the yoke of the accumulated cliches.” I’d find out that German would read poems to the cast and crew between takes.

It might be easy to assume that because so much of German’s filmmaking seems to reject ‘aestheticized cinematic beauty’ that there are no beautiful moments in his films, but with a bit of patience and an open mind you’ll start to notice that they’re full of them. I’m not sure there’s any other filmmaker that keeps me in the moment so well as German.

While watching I try to guess which may be the moments that came from German’s own childhood. One I’d be willing to bet money on is when the camera tilts up to reveal that a man who had just dressed up as Santa Claus had been observed by a very young boy through their bedroom window.

German said that “We all remember that special atmosphere of the war. And so I tried to reconstruct the loudness, the rumours, the speech of the war so as to build something like a polyphony, to hear an echo of the voices of war.” I think much of that sentiment is reflected in the film’s sound design and mix. The film’s soundscape is heavily layered with overlapping dialogue and sound effects. It’s a quality that would only become more complex and prominent with each German film. The effect it has is incredibly immersive, but also presents a challenge for subtitling and being understood. Often an important line comes not from the person who the camera is focused on who is speaking, but from someone in the background or offscreen speaking over them.

German took an interesting approach in researching the soundscape of the period. He described it as follows: “For the sake of veracity, I looked for people who had been blinded during the war and therefore could still remember the sounds of the war. I found a man who could recite poetry and sing songs as they were heard during the war. You should know that recordings of radio broadcasts do not exist any more. This man and his wife helped us very much. Both had been blinded during a bomb attack, so the acoustical side of the war years was well preserved in their memories.”

There’s a sequence in the film that might as well be a mission statement by German. It’s while Lopatin is present to advise on the film based on his writing. He points out several details that were untrue to how things were on the front. “It’s a lie” he says. It gets the officer into an argument with a commissar who insists that what goes on screen must meet regulations and be ‘how things are supposed to be’.

I’ve read German describe similar interference by state officials when making his films, saying “It was strange that the bureaucracy, the state, was trying to get into everything. For example, their insistence on quality. Who cares what kind of village is shown? what kind of costume is worn? But it was supposed that everything must be common. The average type. And it was considered terrible when something just stood out of line.” German’s filmmaking is too specific, too individualistic, too concerned with the anomalies of life, to make average films.

The director of the propaganda film sides with Lopatin as much as he can, making changes, but then there’s a flashback sequence to show the officer’s experience. The flashback is presented with the spontaneity and feeling of reality that German is so skilled at creating. The only moment of artificiality is when the family the film-within-the-film is about, stop to pose for a photograph. However that one artificial moment is there only to be shattered by a shell exploding behind them the moment before the photo is taken, violently impacting the family.

When the flashback is over, German has the film-within-the-film not played badly or exaggerated. It just feels like a movie you might easily find from that time, even though the director is happy to tell Lopatin that he ‘fixed the scene’ to meet his suggestions. The contrast between that flashback and the film-within-the-film sharply highlights that you can get the details right, but still not capture the truth. I think German’s style and approach deviates from more traditional methods of filmmaking out of necessity for that pursuit of truth.⁷

German’s attention to verisimilitude was frequently called into question during the production. For instance not everyone was onboard with shooting on a real train for the film’s first few scenes. Typically that sort of thing would be done on a set or mock-up, with maybe a projected background or intercut with stock footage to give an impression of movement. There was a push by the studio and some of the crew to do just that, but German persisted through the challenges of shooting, and especially recording sound on the moving train. It may not be the most practical approach, but it’s hard to argue when seeing the result. Like everything else in the film, there’s no need to suspend your disbelief, what you see simply registers as reality. It’s quite breathtaking too when Lopatin glances out the window of the train and sees for instance camels and trucks and a soldier waving. They’re all period correct, and choreographed so that the camera seems to just happen to catch them as the train goes by. It expands the scope of the film so well.

Twenty Days Without War would be the beginning of German’s reputation for taking an exceptionally long time to make his films. When asked why it took two years to complete the film, German would shrug and say, “From the point of view of people who live in the West, it's not even understandable how you can make a film for two years. So we were working. Then we stopped. Then some actors left, and new people came. Then we started again. And we continued. Then we were short of money. Then someone got ill. It lasted for two years. We had to go through all of that.”

Like Trial on The Road, Twenty Days Without War would be banned, but this time only for five years. It’s not really obvious why it was banned. I’ve seen some critics assume that it was due to the film’s anti-war themes, but when looking at other Soviet war films with anti-war sentiments, I’m not sure that would necessarily be a reason. It’s in the tradition of films like Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, which was (rightly) much celebrated. Not that they needed a reason. German's explanation was that, “If there’s too much art in it, they’ll ban it just in case.”

I’d wonder if the film being banned may have had something to do with German’s brazenness. I know that around the time Twenty Days Without War was shelved, German had begun feuding with Filipp Ermash, who became the president of Goskino, the State Committee for Cinematography in 1972. It was a feud that reached its climax during a memorial for Larisa Shepitko, who died suddenly in 1979, a great loss to film. As German describes the infamous incident, “They let me go to the podium, because they thought that decorum would prevent me from saying something seditious. But I said from the rostrum, Why are you afraid of him? Who is he? A small official, that's all! He himself is afraid of everything. Why are you afraid of him and, by his word, change one film into another? While I was yelling all of this, the whole presidium fled. The only one who didn’t leave was Semyon Lungin (the screenwriter of Elem Klimov’s Agony.)"

Simonov passed away in 1979, so he didn’t live to see the release of Twenty Days Without War, but at least the film was well received when it was released in 1981. For many it was the first film by German that would be seen, and amongst the first westerners to be introduced to his filmmaking were English directors Sally Potter and Derek Jarman.⁸ It brought German recognition as a noteworthy talent.

It’s funny to see that with The Seventh Companion under the radar and Trial on The Road still banned, Twenty Days Without War would earn a number of ‘best debut’ awards. I have a touch of sympathy for any first time filmmaker who would have been in competition with Aleksei German then, because Twenty Days Without War is so clearly the work of an assured, considerate artist and confident, seasoned director.

In Ian Christie’s 1981 interview with Andrei Tarkovsky, when asked which Soviet filmmakers he most admires, Tarkovsky would say, “I regard the Georgians Iosseliani and Sergei Parajanov as the best Soviet filmmakers, and I would place third the Leningrad director German, who made Twenty Days Without War.” Tarkovsky’s praise of German would be less reserved after the release of German’s next film...

Aleksei German would return to his father’s writing in finding his next film. He would incorporate material from multiple stories written by his father, but mostly utilize the 1938 novella Lapshin, which is about a devoted communist detective, written in the socialist-realist style. It’s closer to Bulldog Drummond than to high literature. The film is a loose adaptation, which I think should be emphasized since I’ve seen a few synopsis and reviews that have misinformation, seemingly relying on the novel to explain what’s on screen.

German wrote the first version of the script in 1969 with the title of Head of Operations, and would dust it off nearly a decade late to revise it with the same collaborators he had written Trial on The Road with. Once again Yuri German’s work would be transformed into something else entirely in the hands of German and Karmalita, along with screenwriter Eduard Volodarskiy (who again would be the only one to end up with a screenwriter credit).

German would say, “My father was more naive than I am. He had a harder time seeing bad things.”

Before going into production, German said that at Lenfilm he was forewarned about criticizing 1934 and 1935, the period that My Friend Ivan Lapshin is set during, because Stalin was bad, but those years were beyond reproach. Those were good years under communism. German would wryly punctuate that anecdote by letting you in on the joke, “There were no good years under communism”.

The resulting film in an unparalleled depiction of life at that time. There’s a framing device of the narrator in present day, thinking back to their childhood. As a child they’re one of the characters we follow, though only a minor one, living in the same flat as the main characters and often observing them from across the hall. I think the purpose of the framing device is to look at the story both with hindsight in mind, but also perhaps some of the understanding of a child.

The film follows the titular Ivan Lapshin, partly in his pursuit of a notorious criminal and their gang, but also in his every day life and the lives of those around him. Watching it, I’m reminded a little of Edward Yang, the way the lives of many characters are delicately interwoven over a longer period of time. The fact that German can convey emotional depth comparable to a film like Yi Yi or A Brighter Summer Day in an hour and thirty-five minutes strikes me as miraculous. My Friend Ivan Lapshin is more than a slice of life film though. A massive dark cloud of irony hangs over it all, knowing that Stalin’s brutal purges are just around the corner. German said that, “We wanted to show life and some of the things that brought people to death later. So this is a film presentiment. It shows the people who will die. They don't know about their deaths yet, and they think they will live. They think they will have a very good and happy life.”

Lapshin himself is a bit of a boyscout character. Trying to follow the rule of law and be a decent person. There’s maybe a touch of Jimmy Stewart via Capra about him. Lapshin’s friends call him “Our local Pinkerton. The star of many a hair-raising drama”. His and what becomes his fellow detectives’ motto is “We’ll clear this land of scum and build an orchard”. When someone asks him what is the psychology of a killer, Lapshin shrugs and says simply “They’re killers.” He’s a proper communist, a romantic, who believes in the system and its rules.

Even though he has the aura of a high school basketball coach, Lapshin’s not a one-dimensional character. He has a darker side that he tries to hide and suppress. He’s developing a growing grudge against the word for things not working out the way he thinks they should. As the film goes on we find that he fought in the Civil War and still suffers nightmares and post-traumatic stress.

One prominent character is the free-spirited actress Natasha Adasova, whom Lapshin has a crush on. She’s played by the formidable actress Nina Ruslanova, who thankfully would work again with Aleksei German, and also appear in the much beloved sci-fi comedy Kin-dza-dza!

Natasha is prone to practical jokes, and at one point walks up to Lapshin’s friend and roommate, Vasya Okoshkin (played by Aleksei Zharkov, who would also work again with German) while he is flirting with a group of women. She pretends to be his neglected wife and makes a scene just to embarrass him.

Natasha is an actress, though it’s implied that she may not be a very good one. She was fired from the leading role in one play, and acts as a potato in children’s matinees, where she repeats “come on, cover me with dirt.” She has the role of a prostitute who has a political awakening in an upcoming play, and wants to prepare for it as best as she can.

Lapshin helps Natasha out by introducing her to a real prostitute to research her role. The prostitute goes by Kate Napoleon, and she was arrested by Lapshin for stealing a pair of shoes, and will be sent off to a gulag for it by the end of the film. Her apartment has hammer and sickle wallpaper, which seems as ridiculous as it does believable. Lapshin tells Kate to give Natasha the facts, but “No smut though.”

Not long after, Lapshin finds out that his writer friend Khanin’s wife has just died. Natasha feels sorry for him. Lapshin takes his depressed friend in to stay at his apartment. Khanin tries to commit suicide, but gags on his pistol and is unsuccessful. After that, Lapshin promises to take Khanin with him to catch criminals, partly to keep an eye on him. It sounds like a somber character, but there are surprising touches of dark humour to the character, who is played by Andrei Mironov. Mironov was mostly known for his comedy roles in classics like Beware of the Car, The Diamond Arm, and a popular television adaptation of The Twelve Chairs.

When Natasha Adasova’s play premiers, it’s the sort of socialist realist style performance that was common at the time (I think the play is or is based on Nikolai Pogodin’s The Aristocrats, but I’m not positive). German’s direction of the play-within-the-film is much like his direction of the film-within-the-film in Twenty Days Without War, something typical of the period, and he even throws in elements to give the sense of spontaneity of live theatre, like the wheel that pops of a wagon and topples Natasha over. I’m reminded of the bit of cat-chaos during German’s theatrical production of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, as a student.

The play flops, and Natasha Adasova in particular is panned. Lapshin bristles when his friend Okoshkin points out that “the prostitute wasn’t convincing at all”. After the play’s disastrous premier, Lapshin uses a ladder to climb up to Natasha’s window to confesses his love for her. You find out that Lapshin’s the kind of guy who, when she changes her clothes in front of him, makes sure to look at the painting on the opposite wall. When Natasha mentions how much the theatre director yelled at her, Lapshin promises to “put him in his place”. He’s a white knight. Lapshin kissing Natasha goes over about as well as you’d expect a romantic gesture from a man like that to go over. She tries to let him down easy, but explains that she’s really in love with Khanin instead. Finding himself on the wrong end of an isosceles-shaped love triangle, Lapshin’s romantic letdown sends him spiralling into bitterness.

The love triangle plot and the criminal plot don’t overlap in any obvious way, which has given some viewers and critics the impression that they are irrelevant to each other, but I think the love triangle plot is essential in understanding Lapshin’s motivation later in the film. There’s a sort of transference with his embittered feelings over Natasha into the criminal plot. To feel like utopia is within his grasp, but the important things, the human things, don’t actually improve for Lapshin, I think is the source of a resentment building inside him. Lapshin takes a turn toward the authoritarian.

There’s a small subplot about an experiment where a fox and a rooster are caged-in together. The fox is fed in an attempt to prove that without hunger, the fox and cock will be friends. Still, nature prevails and the fox kills the cock. It comes across like a parable within a parable.

Lapshin makes headway in his pursuit of the criminal gang. It’s never said outright, but it’s strongly hinted at that the gang is selling dead people for meat. Frozen bodies are removed from a secret root cellar out in the middle of nowhere. A butcher is interrogated as an accomplice. It’s likely as a direct result of the 1932-1933 famine, where cannibalism wasn’t unheard of.

There are less extreme allusions to shortages across the country throughout the film. All out of sugar. Characters daydream about the promised increased production, with “by nineteen thirty-eight our country will be producing four million bottles of champagne, and twelve thousand by nineteen forty-two” being proudly stated in smalltalk. Of course things will only get worse, but they don’t know that. There’s optimism in the air. German points out in an interview that, “They talk about how things will look in 1937. Although it's quite clear that these people are not going to see the year 1937.”

There are also allusions to the growing climate of terror, of course all told with great subtlety. One example is a brief exchange between two characters halfseriously threatening to have one another arrested and taken away. German explains that “Of course, that's a little bit of a joke. But a joke of those times. If you look closely at it, it means that it was something that was happening. In other words, the sequence does show that people were being taken away.”

Lapshin ends up tracking down the criminal and his gang, and leads a raid on the rural co-op they’re using as a hide out. Khanin tags along. Things go badly and Khanin has his stomach ruptured by the criminal while trying to arrest himself. Khanin is found still alive, and Lapshin has him rushed off to a hospital.

Wounded, the criminal hides out behind a shack. Ivan Lapshin takes matters into his own hands and shoots the wounded criminal who asks for help as he tosses away his pistol and tries to surrender. It’s genuinely heartbreaking to see straightas- an-arrow Lapshin kill a man so cold bloodedly. What’s the psychology of a killer? They’re killers.

The film ends with a celebration, but the characters all seem to be disillusioned and going their separate ways. One of the theatre actors is off to play Sancho Panza in Don Quixote, and promises to try to find a role for Natasha. Living in La La Lamancha. Natasha is moving on, but asks if Lapshin will come and visit her. “Some day. Thanks” he answers coldly, giving her a little salute. She leaves unimpressed.

The film ends on an eerie note, full of things unsaid. No one ever thinks that they’re just a background extra in the first act of a story about genocide, so to speak.

I think part of the film’s brilliance is that it peels away the romance of and nostalgia for the time period. There’s a narrative of a sort of communist fall from grace that was common at the time the film was made (and that I’ve still heard parroted to this day); that the communism of The Soviet Union was essentially good, but was somehow corrupted or twisted by something external, turning that ideology into something murderous and terrible along the way. My Friend Ivan shows that things didn’t go from good to bad, they went from miserable to cataclysmic. It’s a film that’s ultimately about tragedy’s roots in unexamined idealism. Implicit in the film’s subtext is the notion that the immense death and suffering that followed the events on screen were not a consequence of communism gone wrong, but a direct result of the communism that Lapshin and the people around him deeply believed in and were optimistic about. There's a well placed line near the end of the film spoken by Lapshin’s friend Okoshkin that states plainly that “It was just a bad year.” It’s as bold a statement as your likely ever to find in a Soviet film.

I don’t meant to make it out to sound like some sort of polemical film (if anything it’s closer to a parable rooted in history). The film achieves everything simply by showing life at that time as unvarnished as possible. I don’t want to short change just how vital and human My Friend Ivan Lapshin is. Life still moves at the pace of life, even as it’s all about to come crashing down. There is no The People, there are only people. German shows it all, the good and the bad, the funny and the sad.

At the center of it all is the character of Lapshin himself. German said about him, “He's a man who actually comes out of this time, out of this regime. And this regime in the end will destroy him.” I think it’s German's genuine compassion for these doomed people that elevates the film. I think too that maybe the best humanist filmmakers don't shy away from humanity's darker face.

German cast Andrei Boltnev (in his first film role, though it would end up being the second film role general audiences would see him in) as Ivan Lapshin, because “he had the seal of death on his face” and that “it was clear he'd be shot and killed”. His face is well-utilized in the film’s gloomy poster artwork. Andrei Boltnev would perhaps also fulfil that doomed quality that German saw in him by dying of a stroke at the untimely age of 49. Andrei Mironov who played Khanin would have an untimely death too. He’d die unexpectedly from from a brain aneurysm at age 47.

As you might expect by this point, German and Karmalita went above and beyond in their attention to historical detail. They spent about a year in preproduction, collecting authentic period props, costumes, and vehicles. German didn’t trust Soviet archives and newsreels when it came to collecting information, so he sought out alternative documentation of the period. What they found especially useful were photos and films that only captured images of people incidentally, because it showed how people dressed and did their hair and moved and behaved when they didn’t know they were on camera as opposed to how they looked when they were posing or being directed. German would describe that research process, saying “For example, we watched some short films about building water pipes. Of course, the cameraman was showing all those pipes. At the same time, when he moved his camera from one place to another, he’d happen to point the camera at the boys in the street, who were not always very polite, who didn't have very good manners. Or we saw a woman carrying quite a few bags. So we could see the real life.”

I wonder if the fourth wall breaking that is common throughout German’s films, and used to great effect in My Friend Ivan Lapshin, might have its roots in the sorts of films German used for research that incidentally captured everyday life. It has much that effect, the sudden acknowledgment of the camera’s presence, that reinforces the reality of the film rather than breaks it. Nick Glichenko, a professor of Germanic and Russian studies at University of Victoria described the gazing into camera in My Friend Ivan Lapshin as bearing “all the innocence of the naive candid, captured in early documentaries and newsreels.” I think it’s such a powerful conduit to the past, having it state right back at you. It’s one thing to draw conclusions from the people of that era, but it becomes something altogether more when you’re asked without any words to feel compassion for them and see yourself in them. German said that “The device of the glance at the camera, which I used somewhat in Trial on The Road and so much in Twenty Days Without War, in My Friend Ivan Lapshin became the most important thing. The entire film is built around it. The glance at the camera is the glance of those people from over there, from out of that time period towards me and into my soul.”

One aspect in which My Friend Ivan Lapshin is apart from German’s other films is in its use of colour. It’s used very sparingly, mostly in the present day framing sequences, though a few of the past scenes as well. The effect might be comparable to the mixing of black & white and colour that Tarkovsky was known for. The artistic purpose of the use of colour has been the subject of much speculation, though there’s apparently a pragmatic reason for its presence in the film. According to Svetlana Karmalita, of the many restrictions the State put on them before funding the film, one was ‘feature length, colour’. German preferred black & white, and decided to shoot the film in black & white without getting permission from the studio. Karmalita described how they deliberately wrote colourful descriptions in the script, so it would be easily assumed that they planned to shoot in colour. On location German only shot two reels in colour when under studio supervision, and the resulting use in the final film was the minimum amount of colour they could get away with for it to qualify as ‘a colour film’. So the reason for the colour footage was “survival” as Karmalita would put it.

I’ve been framing much of my writing about Aleksei German around Hard to Be a God because it was my entry point into his filmography and can be regarded as a culmination of his work, but I wouldn’t hesitate in pointing to My Friend Ivan Lapshin as German’s best film, essentially perfect in both its intricate conception and elegant realization.

While shooting itself went quite quickly (especially in contrast to Twenty Days Without War), from writing and pre-production in 1979 to the film’s eventual release, would be about a five year-long process. Perhaps unsurprisingly by this point, My Friend Ivan Lapshin initially ran into the same distribution issues that faced Trial on The Road and Twenty Days Without War. German would find himself fired when the film was submitted to Goskino. Filipp Ermash was still president then (but wouldn’t be for much longer). German would say, “After the prohibition of Lapshin it seemed I was the most downtrodden person at Lenfilm. Who else can boast three shelved films?”

Very long story, short; the film would be shelved, but not for too long. Mikhail Gorbachev singled it out as an example of Perestroika, the movement for political reformation of which a key aspect was re-examining the past. Even though My Friend Ivan Lapshin technically precedes Perestroika, it’s often understandably lumped in with Perestroika era cinema. Still, it seems that there was some caution in releasing the film. It came out in a trickle. For instance at the 1985 Moscow Film Festival, when Come and See was the talk of the town, My Friend Ivan Lapshin’s screening was never publicly announced and by invitation only. Of course the film would receive some criticism for the ‘de-heroization of the 1930s’, and actor/writer/director Andrey Smirnov went as far as to call it “not a film, but a bowl movement” after its premier. However, any criticism was more or less drowned out by overwhelming praise. Amongst Russian films, it’s often cited as the very best, frequently topping polls and widely recognized amongst a generation who grew up with it on television.

An expatriated Tarkovsky declared My Friend Ivan Lapshin the greatest Russian film ever made. German politely demurred, saying he didn’t think his film was “as good as Mirror or Andrei Rublev.”

It found some success in the west too, although it seems it was not widely understood. Walter Goodman’s introductory description of My Friend Ivan Lapshin for its first screening at the Museum of Modern Art, doesn’t allude to any significance of the film outside its surface level drama, pitching it as a ‘soap opera without the soap’. Even Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review, while praising the performances and technical aspects, has him more or less shrug when it comes to the film’s meaning and themes. I understand that the film approaches the issues it addresses in an oblique way, and it takes a certain amount of reading between-the-lines, but reading much of the criticism, I don’t know if there was a reluctance (unconscious or not) to try to understand what the film is about.

CONTINUED IN PART 3