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.”

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.”

 I think it could be cinema’s answer to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, for being something of a rollercoaster ride through the dark absurdities of the collective Russian unconscious. Who am I to say though? Probably more than anything, it’s like Dante’s Inferno, penetrating and observing the hellish strata beneath the onion dome of Stalinism.

German described a recollection of his father’s, an NKVD officer telling Yuri German in detail about the about the mass murders he had participated in. When Yuri German asked why the officer was telling him, the answer the officer supposedly gave was that “You’re a writer, you should know.” Later the same night the officer went to a sauna and killed himself. Soon after, secret police came to Yuri German asking why the officer had spoken to him right before committing suicide, and they wanted to know what had he said. Apparently Yuri shrugged it off to the police saying that the officer was just drunk. Aleksei German said that that incident had greatly haunted his father. I think for Aleksei German, a writer or filmmaker is someone who has a responsibility to know.

Adam Louis-Klein