‘Inside the belly of the whale’: epistemology and aisthesis in the work of Aleksei German

Abstract

ABSTRACT Considering the relative dearth of English-language scholarship on Aleksei Iu. German’s work, this essay attempts to provide a totalising account of German’s filmography, elaborating on the themes formulated by Nancy Condee (2009) and Alexander Graham (2012), both published before the release of German’s magnum opus Hard to be a God (2013). By encompassing German’s last film, this essay will consider German’s oeuvre as a single continuous text, gradually shifting from a politically subversive realism to a Dionysian formalism of endlessly proliferating time-images. Drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, it is our argument that, rather than representing the ‘sensation of recall’, German gradually presents the aisthesis of his characters’ loss of control over symbolic reality. It is the surplus of realism effects, the sheer quantity of mimetic detail and the proliferation of peripheral events over narrative information that amounts to reality’s collapse: the stage of the carnival, the grotesque, where movement extends everywhere and nowhere.