Russian history, as German has said, is an endless process of degradation, abuse, and humiliation[…] The temperamental flux of Cassavetes, Fellini's carnivals of daily life, Tarkovsky's poeticism, Malick's precarious voice-overs.

It is set in what appears to be a horrendous central European village of the middle ages, as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch, where grotesquely ugly and wretched peasants are condemned to clamber over each other for all eternity, smeared in mud and blood: a world beset with tyranny and factional wars between groups called “Blacks” and “Greys”.

Each shot is a vision of pandemonium: a depthless chiaroscuro composition in which dogs, chickens, owls and hedgehogs appear on virtually equal terms with the bewildered humans, who themselves are semi-bestial. The camera ranges lightly over this panorama of bedlam, and characters both important and unimportant will occasionally peer stunned into the camera lens, like passersby in some documentary.

The most startling lines are those in which people complain about the lack of a Renaissance: “Where’s the art? Where’s the Renaissance?” moans one. In my view, this is the key. Just as in Narnia it is always winter and never Christmas, so in Hard to Be a God it is always the middle ages and never the Renaissance. Cultural and human advances never arrive in this alternative Earth, and what we are seeing is not the middle ages but the present day.

“Hard To Be A God” is a fantastical examination of man’s inhumanity to man, and as replete as it is with persistent visceral disgust, it also pulses with intelligence, a mordant compassion, and yes, incredible wit. Its vision is so monstrously realized that even as it repulses, it makes almost any other film you would care to put next to it seem puny, silly, unnecessary.

German orchestrated his film as a series of long-take sequence shots, every plane of the frame a turmoil of activity, including the extreme foreground, in which objects – Rumata’s flexing gauntlets, fish and poultry, agog onlookers – are frequently thrust towards the viewer in the manner often attributed to chintzy 50s 3D movies. The result is a carnivalesque processional of sodden grotesques, trudging through an endless torrential autumn rain.

Shot in co/ntoured, high-contrast black-and-white, Hard to Be a God isolates faces from the crowd in chains of choreographed vignettes – in a real sense, the mob is the star of the film. To name but a few standouts: there’s the muzhik who breaks from tooting a rude pipe to pantomime humping at the camera, the uncertain POV of which frequently realigns in the space of a single shot from that of Rumata to a third-person perspective. There are the Don’s slaves, enchained by collars which, like almost every piece of forged-and-hand-tooled set dressing here, serves to ground the viewer in the all-consuming reality of this world, showing the mark of the artisan’s practice as well as the wear of years. (The film doesn’t just feel ‘lived-in’ but lived-and-died-in, for unchanging generations. If we take it as a period piece, it is the most immersive instance of its type outside of Rosellini and Hou Hsiao-Hsein, though expressionist where their films are austere.)

Not sure of the source.