The Fall of Otrar: From the Ruins of Otrar

The structure of Otrar is certainly all of a piece with German’s own work. But as a total film experience, it feels distinctly different from Khrustalyov, Ivan Lapshin, or German’s posthumously completed Hard to Be a God (2013, a years-in-the-making adaptation cowritten by German and Karmalita, traces of which can be felt in Otrar). “They were two of the most renowned filmmakers of Soviet cinema,” said Amirkulov in conversation with production designer Umirzak Shmanov. “We were, of course, very lucky to have them as the screenwriters. The script was extensive, extremely cumbersome, and completely uncompromising in the sense that they never settled for bypassing historical facts or circumstances, and they never came up with any easy solutions. On the one hand, it was very difficult to film. On the other hand, it was incredibly energizing because the script itself read like good literature. That’s why I’m grateful to fate for bringing me together with people like Alexei and Svetlana. I learned a great deal from their script because I had to put in a lot of effort, thought, and research to bring it to life. I even studied music, painting, read a lot of literature about the period, and watched films to match the material they had written.”

In German’s films, and in Otrar as well, we are dropped into a mazelike world with no apparent points of entry or exit, where nothing is certain and where nothing makes complete sense apart from absolute power and its merciless enforcement. As the films unfold, the horizontal narrative progression is overtaken by a vertical accumulation of details, repetitions, strange proclamations and rituals, sudden capricious assaults, and coded transactions, layer upon layer of unease gradually evolving into horror.

Amirkulov met the challenge of German and Karmalita’s massive script with a cinematic conception that goes far beyond mere visualization or dramatization. Where German in his own films deftly choreographs, orchestrates, and reiterates an atmosphere of chaos that edges and sometimes lurches into terror-laden absurdism, Amirkulov thinks graphically, texturally, and physically, all at once. He wanted Otrar to feel and move “as if it were all filmed in a past life, perhaps, in ancient times . . . So we had to work hard on the actors’ physiology, and their behavioral physiology, so that it would be as different as possible from modern times.” He also builds a very unusual and uneasy momentum, setup by setup. “I realized that I always needed to tighten the frame,” he told journalist Gulnara Abikeyeva in an interview. “I called this the ‘Kurosawa effect.’ This is a special form of concentration that creates a special rhythm.” Nothing in Otrar is framed or staged for beauty or repose; every cut is driven by tension rather than resolution.

There are no ordinary or strictly functional images or transitions in The Fall of Otrar. Every element of cinema is put to creative use. From the singular physical vocabulary, to the always unexpected shifts from sepia to vibrant color, to the extraordinary visual tactility (which suggests thatching or rough embroidery), Amirkulov’s film looks and moves like nothing else. “I didn’t aim to make a ‘historical epic,’” he told Abikeyeva. “The plot, costumes, sets—all surface elements—are historical. However, the internal dramatic arc, I think, has to be current, even a little bit futuristic.” In essence, Amirkulov fashions his own version of a “science fiction of the past,” the term Fellini used to describe his Satyricon.

I know I am not alone in finding it difficult to sort out or even try to keep track of all the fraying political allegiances and betrayals in this film, to figure out which people are in service to which power and to what degree, to understand what place the Turkic Kipchaks occupied within the greater Khwarazmian empire or the importance of Otrar’s proximity to the Silk Road and the Syr Dar’ya river. But in the end, historical and political clarity is not really the goal of the film. What is crystal clear, from start to finish, is the arc of destruction and dominance. In that sense, The Fall of Otrar is less historical than archetypal. The names and the particulars may change, but the drama is always the same.

For Auezov and his fellow Kazakhs, a film that on the one hand recreates the city-state of Otrar and on the other hand visualizes its complete destruction would evoke the memory of a more recent cataclysm: the Asharshylyk, or famine. Kazakhstan was hit with one famine in the early 1920s, a by-product of drought and the new Soviet policy of grain requisitioning that resulted in half a million deaths. The greater famine of the early thirties, which wiped out a third of Kazakhstan’s population and sent hundreds of thousands more on the refugee trail, had just one causal factor: the policy of Soviet collectivization, which simultaneously robbed the country of its harvests and livestock, destroyed the ecology of the vast grazing lands, and came very close to wiping out the country’s distinctive nomadic culture. For many years, whitewashed Soviet histories of the famine displaced on-the-ground accounts written in the Kazakh language, which was scorned by Moscow. Even in the era of perestroika, the overwhelming tragedy of the Asharshylyk could be dealt with in fiction only from an oblique angle. Films about the famine have only recently started to appear: they include Amirkulov’s most recent film, The Land Where the Winds Stood Still (2023).

With their depiction of Genghis Khan, Amirkulov, German, and Karmalita fashioned an archetypal omnivorous conqueror, evoking parallels from throughout recorded history, from Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler to Mao to Hutu leader Théoneste Bagosora to Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Amirkulov visualizes a catalog of horrifyingly brutal acts and details of medieval warfare and torture, climaxing in the now famous moment in which Genghis Khan’s men encase the captured and humiliated Kairkhan’s head in an iron mask and pour in molten silver to create a likeness of his head for display. But Amirkulov is no connoisseur of beautifully choreographed violence. Rather, he is concerned with the greater goal of reenacting the terrible, hair-raising momentum of dominance.