Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar (1991) is an elemental masterpiece, whose retelling of the Mongol siege of the oasis town on the frontier of the Khwarazm Empire, Otrar, transformed historical account into political analogy for the Soviet era.
Despite a mostly faithful recreation of the Mongols’ decimation of Otrar, as recounted in many Muslim accounts of the time, Amirkulov situates his work firmly within the political milieu of the crumbling USSR. Amirkulov’s film can be seen as part of the ‘Kazakh New Wave’, the film movement that issued a challenge to the Soviet cinematography that had dominated Kazakhstani culture since the 1930s, and which weaved criticisms of modern politics seamlessly into historical recreations. In this film, a retelling of the Mongol conquests in the Near East, specifically the conquest of Otrar, Amirkulov draws numerous parallels between the Kazakhstan of his time and one of the past. More specifically, Amirkulov’s epic can be interpreted as a plea for the renegotiation of Kazakh identity in the period when Kazakhstan could take its first breaths independent from the Soviet bloc that collapsed in the same year as the film’s release.
The Fall of Otrar follows Unzhu, a member of the Qipchaq tribe from which the Kazakh people descended, and a nomad, who was once a part of Genghis Khan’s advancing forces. Unzhu acts as a neutral messenger who advises Gurkhan, the governor of Otrar, on the potential malicious intentions of the incoming Mongol caravan, a trade mission of 450 Muslims carrying gold and silk.
The caravan that symbolised goodwill and the opportunity for free trade with the Mongols, is sacked by Gurkhan. What had started as a diplomatic opportunity between the Mongol Khan and the Khwarazmian Shah turned into a bloody frenzy when Gurkhan, consumed by avarice, spies the Mongol fortunes being offered and seizes them, massacring the members of the caravan. Unzhu plays a passive role in the skirmish that ensues, but the audience nevertheless identifies with him. The Mongol Khan, furious at the sacking of the trade mission, initiates a flurry of brutal raids on the border town of Otrar, before riding through the Khwarazmian empire and unleashing Hell on its people.
Unzhu remains separate from this conflict, defiant in his unwillingness to politically align himself. In his neutral positioning, Unzhu is an agent of possibility and reinterpretation in a world whose ideological unity, the promise of trade and peace, is inverted by otherworldly force in the shape of the Mongol invasion. Ultimately, Otrar, the old oasis for traders, is shattered by distrust. From this destruction emerges a subtext of survival: rather than the greed that brought about the levelling of Otrar, Amirkulov points us to a moral of unity and community in the form of Unzhu and warns of the possibly destructive implications of greed in the post-Soviet era.
As a Qipchaq, Unzhu demonstrates his autonomy by rejecting both the hegemonic forces of the Mongols and the Khwarazmians he is caught between. Unzhu has escaped Genghis Khan’s army ‘of his own free will,’ and yet, unlike many Qipchaqs who sought refuge in the Khwarazmian Empire of the thirteenth century, he equally rejects Gurkhan and his greed. In this way, the Khwarazmians stand in for the old Kazakhstan quashed by the Soviet bloc, whilst the Mongols represent a new order of uncertainty. Caught between two powers, Unzhu secures his own position and, following a moral directive independent of either military force, plays mediator. In this sense, Unzhu’s rejection of both powers can be read as a metaphor for the exploration of Kazakhstan’s national unwillingness in 1991 to participate in either the Soviet ideological hegemony that came before (the Khwarazmian presence) and this uncertain future prescribed to post-Soviet countries (the Mongols); instead, for Amirkulov, Kazakh identity ought to be constructed from a simultaneous identification with the past (a Qipchaq history), but also a perilous new unknown.
The damage caused by personally motivated greed is seen in the case of the governor of Otrar, Gurkhan. In the closing scenes of the film, Gurkhan is thrust into an audience with the imperious Mongol Khan, his face pressed into the floor by a Mongol boot; what follows is a close up of Gurkhan as his defiant expression melts into fear and resignation, fixed by the glare of the warlord. In this moment, the temporaneous structures dissolve to reveal a frightful historical symmetry; Gurkhan, the symbol of the old weakened Kazakhstan under the Soviet rule that Unzhu rejects, is crushed by the imperious Mongol khan, who is no longer a medieval warrior but a Stalin, or a Soviet president. After this audience, Gurkhan, in a symbolic inversion of his confiscation of Mongol treasures, has molten silver poured into his face, his defeated expression crystallised and made eternal, a reminder of the dangers of greed and pusillanimity.
As an alternative reading, the replacement of the Khwarazmians with the Mongols in the film suggests a greater change in terms of belief and identity. The destruction of Otrar frames induction into the Mongol Empire as participation in an ideological movement that replaces old structures of thought with new ones. In other words, the Mongols represent not just violence but liberation from strictures of belief and a transition to a syncretic system. The Khwarazmian Empire, a Muslim empire that had deposed the Seljuks and had designs on the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, represents a religious and moral system whose ambition ultimately outstrips its might; it is strictly juxtaposed with the ostensibly secular Mongol empire, which is an emancipatory albeit violent force. In the Soviet era, this idea was paralleled in some ways and inverted in others. The Soviet Union marked a period of distrust of religion and institutional religious repression. Emerging from this ideological, spiritual oppression, independent Kazakhstan proposed secularism as a crucial point of cultural identity formation; in other words, a new secular world emerged from the chaos of the Mongol destruction of the city.
Unlike the historical accounts of the siege of Otrar, there is no ascension of the minbar by Genghis Khan to proclaim the surrendered Otrarians sinners and recipients of God’s willing punishment. Instead, there is little religious imagery at all in this conquest. What replaces religious imagery, however, are scenes of shamanistic quality that emphasise the natural origins of Kazakh folk belief. Juxtaposed with the brutal sentencing of Gurkhan, for example, is a scene of two horses play-fighting in a naturalised steppe background. The scene is reminiscent of the great oral histories of the region, with horses as wind spirits riding through the endless plains of the pasture steppe. Through this sudden connection to a millennia-old history after the conclusion to the skirmish, Amirkulov posits the origins of Kazakh cultural identity as something tied to nature rather than politics.
To conclude, Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar participates in a new wave of Kazakh cinema that uses history to critique modernity and to reassess cultural identity. By situating the Kazakh archetype character, Unzhu, as a neutral party in an historical conflict, Amirkulov models Kazakhstan’s historical relationship with the Soviet Union and criticises the greed and lack of unity that had led to fractures in Kazakh identity. For Amirkulov, the beginning of a new secular nation with growing independence from a previous form of ideological hegemony is a productive space of potential and growth, but a society that needs to reconnect with its past to negotiate the terms of its present.