This month (June, 2018) writer Martin Kessler takes over The Pink Smoke with his five part series on Russian director Aleksei German, a titan of le cinema who is surprising obscure in the West.

Join us as Kessler explores the filmmaker's career, step by step: from medieval sci-fi to Soviet noir to wartime romance - German's body of work is brilliantly wild and unpredictable.

{PART I: ANOTHER CENTURY. ANOTHER PLANET}
{PART II: ESCAPE VELOCITY}
{PART III: APOAPSIS}
{PART IV: ECLIPSE}
{PART V: EVENT HORIZON}

~ martin kessler ~

I have to take a bit of a detour from the films directed by Aleksei German, but I hope you’ll agree that this is a necessary detour. The fourteen year gap between the release of My Friend Ivan Lapshin and German’s follow up film may appear like a great gulf of inactivity, and is all too often written about as such. German kept busy though. If you want to skip ahead to Part 4, where I write about Khrustalyov, My Car!, I won’t hold it against you, but I think it’s worthwhile to touch upon the nondirectorial projects and filmmakers that German would be associated with, and some of his films that would never be made.

I’m still in Aleksei German’s orbit, even if I’m at my furthest out.

During the period of time when My Friend Ivan Lapshin was shelved, Aleksei German and Svetlana Karmalita moved onto another project, writing The Torpedo Bombers. I’m breaking chronology a little, because even though The Torpedo Bombers went into production after My Friend Ivan Lapshin had been completed, it would be released a year before it, in 1983.

In certain regards it comes across like an extension of their work on My Friend Ivan Lapshin. German wasn’t officially involved because he was persona non grata at Lenfilm then, but it’s an open secret that he co-wrote the screenplay with Karmalita, who would be the only one credited. Their screenwriting collaborator from writing Trial on the Road and My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Eduard Volodarskiy, wouldn’t be involved in writing the script this time, but he would be involved as an actor in film.

Even though German didn’t (or rather couldn’t) direct the film, I think it’s easy to make a case for why it should be mentioned when discussing his filmography. Like My Friend Ivan Lapshin, The Torpedo Bombers would be based on writing by Aleksei German’s father, Yuri German. In this case it was from an unfinished novella, which later German and Karmalita would complete themselves and have published. The film is set during WWII, in Murmansk which German remembered from his childhood, and like with Twenty Days Without War, he used those early memories in developing the script.

The Torpedo Bombers is about the lives and deaths of the bomber pilots stationed in the arctic during the war. There’s a focus on humanizing the pilots, rather than portraying them as purely heroic figures. There’s not a single driving narrative, instead the film weaves in and out of the story threads (German mentioned that there are eight main scenarios) of a number of characters, with the bulk of the film depicting their downtime with one battle scene near the beginning and one at the very end of the film. The pilots are portrayed as being very well off compared to the average Russian during the war. German also mentioned that while those pilots were well off, it was only because they lasted an average of three months before being killed, and trained pilots were not so common.

Some of the film’s plots are more thoroughly developed. For instance, there’s one pilot played by Aleksei Zharkov (who had played Okoshkin in My Friend Ivan Lapshin) who’s turned down by the shy nurse he has a crush on, gets drunk and then arrested facing the possibility of being sent into a penal battalion, but his friends bribe a General’s driver to use their car, and add extra medals to persuade the military police to release him. Then during the final bombing run the pilot finds that the ship his nurse left on (also carrying a troupe of dwarf performers who put on a Mayday show for the pilots) has been sunk, and has a mental break down as they enter danger.

Other plot threads are less fleshed-out, but add to the texture and personality of the film. One of my favourites is of the pilot who shows up late to roll call, so the commanding takes away his watch as punishment because, “it must be broken.” Before the final battle, the officer gives the watch back to the pilot, telling him that he, “had it fixed”.

In another story thread, Andrei Boltnev (who had played Ivan Lapshin) plays a pilot who decides to take care of a boy who is not actually his, telling everyone that the kid is his son. It’s a story that came directly from Aleksei German’s childhood in Arkhangelsk. When he was about five or six, German’s mother left him to be watched by a navy pilot for a few weeks. The pilot took him to the buffet and to the movies, and he made a request with great longing that German call him “dad” for a little while. German said that, “I didn’t know whether his child had died, or if he never happened to have one. I agreed to his request, but I never once told my father.”

In yet another memorable episode, the pilots of a scout plane make an unscheduled landing to investigate a downed enemy airplane, with its tail sticking upwards on a slant. They find the pilot dead and frozen inside, with their thermos still warm. I’d find out that the airplane used was an authentic Messerschmitt BF 109, with real bullet holes. In 1999 it was acquired by the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, so by happenstance I had seen it in real life long before seeing it in the film.

It all probably sounds like a lot, but there’s a strong sense of narrative economy as everything’s compacted into a robust hour and a half runtime. Initially, German and Karmalita wrote the film with the intention of German himself directing it, but Semyon Aranovich would be the one to helm the film. For German and Karmalita, it was a difficult decision to give their script to someone else, but they felt it was in good hands. Aranovich had actually been a naval pilot in the Northern Fleet, though during the 1950s, not during the war. After a near-fatal plane crash, he decided to change his career to filmmaking.

Aranovich would mostly be known for his documentary work, and apparently German had worked on one of Aranovich’s early documentaries, but I’m not certain which one. They had a long association leading up to The Torpedo Bombers, and Aranovich even cast German in a small role in his 1980 miniseries Rafferty, having him play a vivacious and flirtatious journalist. Somehow it reminds me of seeing Miloš Forman in Heartburn.

Even though Aranovich was four years older than German, he’d say that he looked up to German and considered himself, “a disciple of German”. However, they’d end up having their differences when it came to how The Torpedo Bombers should be made.

Some of German’s techniques are imitated, but there are also some pretty strong tells that it’s not a German film. One of the first giveaways is the use of stock footage, which you wouldn’t see in a German film. I think it’s partly Aranovich’s documentary side showing, but a sizeable chunk of The Torpedo Bombers is composed of stock footage. It’s incorporated in an ambitious, though only occasionally effective way, like during the bombing-run climax. Still, my favourite shot in the film is a bit of stock footage, showing reindeer pulling torpedoes.

Perhaps where Aranovich’s approach mostly greatly differed from German’s, is in his tendency toward sentimentality. A number of scenes and moments are played in a more typical way and go for the sort of easy emotion that makes The Torpedo Bombers more of a crowdpleaser-type film. Though one aspect of the film that could have easily been very conventional and sentimental, but I think instead is genuinely inspired, is its score. The score was composed by Alexander Knaifel, famous for his avant-garde operas. The music in The Torpedo Bombers is a deep sustained hum or chant that resembles Tibetan or Mongolian throat singing, which at first matches the sound of the airplane engines, and seems to rise out of the engine sounds. It’s quite unconventional. Eerie and beautiful.

Aranovich would drop or cut many of the scenes and moments from the script which might be considered very German. For instance, in the screenplay, the opening of the film was to be of pilots impatiently queued up outside of an outhouse, only to have it revealed to the audience that within the outhouse is one of the main pilots having sex with a woman dirtied with coal. A very German opening scene! German said that he was asked by Aranovich, "What kind of lover does it in the toilet?” before the opening was scrapped. Aranovich also made the decision to make one of the main pilots a traditional heroic type, casting handsome American-Russian leading man Rodion Nakhapetov in the role. Supposedly, Aranovich said to German, “Among your freaks there must be at least one hero.”

Aleksei German would be disappointed with a number of Aranovich’s directorial choices by the end of filming. They had a soft falling-out (German and Aranovich would still speak well of one another afterwords) though German acknowledged that the film likely wouldn’t have won the awards that it had if Aranovich had stuck closer to what had originally been intended.

The Torpedo Bombers would become quite popular when released. Praised for its authenticity and emotionalism, it’s much beloved to this day. When asked if he was pleased with the final film, German answered, “Not at all... However, I can not insist on this when it has such a large number of fans.”

The success of The Torpedo Bombers brought some much-deserved attention to Svetlana Karmalita, with her being the credited screenwriter. She was awarded a state prize, and it helped launch a solo writing career that kept her busy throughout the rest of the 1980s.

In the November 1986 issue of Soviet Film magazine, there’s a profile of Karmalita which covers some of the other films she’d write:

It’s hard to be a film director’s wife. Especially if he happens to be as highpowered as Aleksei German. And if the wife is a screenwriter? When Torpedo Planes [an alternate translation of the tile of The Torpedo Bombers], directed by Semyon Aranovich was released in 1983 many were asking: who is Svetlana Karmalita? How did she achieve such poignant authenticity in portraying life during the war, in the behaviour of the torpedo-plane pilots and in the life of a northern city? Perusal of documents, her husband’s reminiscences about his famous writer father Yuri German, and motives from his writings crop up in her script’s interweaving with fictional scenes. Her films Sit Down By My Side Mishka (directed by Yakov Bazelyan) and A Journey to the Caucus Mountains (directed by Mikhail Ordovsky) recreate the world as seen through the eyes of a child. The characters belong to different historical epochs but in either case there is a sense of authenticity. Her film Once There Lived a Brave Captain, directed by Rudolf Fruntov, tells a simple but dramatic story of the love of Anastasy Chizhov, North Fleet Captain, and Tosya, a girl from Leningrad. The action takes place at the very end of the war and the intonation is markedly from that of Torpedo Planes. Historical screenplays are the most difficult to write. Svetlana has brought this genre a new quality, her screenplays are sharp and concrete, looking at events from the inside, as it were. They are structured like poetic parables. One such film, The Tale of Brave Khochbar, is based on Rasul Gamzatov’s poem and will soon be released by Lenfilm Studios. Her screenplays are much in demand. Her ability to convey a scene’s atmosphere with precise, almost directorial accents is the hallmark of all her work. And if this not a feeling for cinema, then what is?

With those qualities in mind, I think it’s worth considering how her artistic strengths fit into the films she’d write together with German, and how vital her contributions are to the artistic success of their films.

Also, since I’m here, I may as well get it on record that the poster for The Tale of Brave Khochbar totally rips off Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band's Against the Wind album cover:

While The Torpedo Bombers is directly connected to Aleksei German, Semyon Aranovich’s would go on to direct a project that much more closely imitated German’s style, the 1985 six-hour epic, Confrontation. It borrows from Trial on the Road and Twenty Days Without War, but mostly from My Friend Ivan Lapshin, with many of its hallmarks: jumping from the present to the past, combining colour and black & white, having characters look into camera, and so on, and so on. Certain shots from German’s films are essentially recreated, and it even stars Andrei Boltnev. It’s to the point where I think you could say that it’s ripping German off more than paying homage. Confrontation went into production while My Friend Ivan Lapshin was still shelved, and privately German was anxious that Aranovich might become lionized for ‘discovering’ his actors, and ‘inventing’ the style, that had continued to developed with My Friend Ivan Lapshin, but no audience had seen at that point. German said it felt like “a miracle” when My Friend Ivan Lapshin was rescued from its shelf before Confrontation could be completed.

I think that if it hadn’t been released before, German needn’t have worried. Confrontation is an impressive work, but in its six hours, I don’t think it says as nearly as much as My Friend Ivan Lapshin does in its hour and thirty-five minutes. It’s humourless, spread thin in its sprawling scope, and on-the-nose in what it says. Maybe it’s from being so deep into this article, but in watching I think Confrontation lacks some fundamental (or ineffable) quality of German’s films. I think German’s style developed out of a necessity to express what he understood and believed in. Aranovich simply wrapping an imitation of that style around a narrative structure, makes it into a shell, not a style that goes all the way to the core, built upon carefully considered human experience.

With the success of My Friend Ivan Lapshin, coupled with Tarkovsky’s death in 1986, German inherited, more or less unequivocally, the position of ‘Greatest Living Soviet Film Director’. He had an abundance of opportunity, but finished the decade without directing another film. How do you even follow up a film like My Friend Ivan Lapshin?

Aleksei German in 1987:

German had no shortage of offers, even from Hollywood. This was a little after Andrei Rublev co-writer (and director of Siberiade and the superb 1970 version of Uncle Vanya) Andrei Konchalovsky had broke into Hollywood, directing Runaway Train, so the notion of a Soviet-turned-Hollywood director wasn’t so outlandish. Depending on who you ask, he either seriously considered or politely entertained the possibility of a move to the United States, as he traveled with My Friend Ivan Lapshin to New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles. German even had family in America; his older half-sister (by seven years, from their mother’s previous marriage to screenwriter, Nikolai Kovarsky), Marina. She had left Leningrad for L.A. when she was younger, and for two people who didn’t have a lot in common, she and Aleksei German had a lot in common. He became close with her during his visits to The States.

German would turn down those American offers. He said that while Americans were impressed with his techniques and the images in his films, they were not aware or interested in the problems he was addressing. He felt that his films were not understood. I think it was likely a prudent decision. Some international filmmakers manage to find success and maintain their artistic integrity in the transition to American filmmaking, but most seem to find only frustration. For every Miloš Forman, there’re dozens who retreat from Hollywood with only a scar or two in their filmography to show for it.

Instead, German would try to make Hard to Be a God once again. It’s a bit funny and a bit sad to see German’s Hard to Be a God eagerly anticipated in a 1987 Soviet film magazine, knowing how much longer it’ll be before the film would finally be made.

Once again German’s adaptation was made impossible.

The heads of the production company Sovinfilm, made the decision to take the film away from German while he was in pre-production. Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t for anything contentious on German’s part. It was a financial decision, made after director/producer Peter Fleischmann made an offer to co-finance with his company Halleluja Film (co-founded with Volker Schlöndorff).

Fleischmann’s version seemed likely to be a winner. He had been gaining momentum and respectability directing films like Hunting Scenes from Bavaria, Weak Spot, and the sci-fi, epidemic thriller The Hamburg Syndrome.

Fleischmann brought in a talented group of people to make his version of Hard to Be a God. Not the least of which was the screenwriter, the great Jean-Claude Carrière. By then already, Carrière had written screenplays for (and typically in collaboration with) Miloš Forman, Andrzej Wajda, Volker Schlöndorff, Louis Malle, and Luis Buñuel, to name just a few.

Ironically, My Friend Ivan Lapshin star, Andrei Boltnev would have a small but pivotal role in the Fleischmann version of Hard to Be a God, playing Budakh, the enlightened native of the alien planet. I’m not sure exactly how he came to be in the film that derailed Aleksei German’s version (I actually haven’t found anyone anywhere comment on this peculiarity of casting), but I’d suspect that if he was already attached to the project while German was working on it, he simply stayed on as it shifted to Fleischmann. When a large body passes through space, smaller bodies are drawn into its orbit.

Werner Herzog even has a small role in the film! Unfortunately his presence is wasted. I think it’s too bad that he ended up in the Fleischmann version and not the Aleksei German version, because a number of Herzog’s films like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, are so much more of a kindred spirit with the film that Aleksei German would eventually make.

Aleksei German made the decision to visit Fleischmann during production. Before embarking, the new president of Goskino, Alexander Kamshalov (who German was on astronomically better terms with than the former president, Filipp Ermash) subtly made the suggestion that German should take the film back from Fleischmann. He wrote to German in confidence, laying out a plan to get rid of Fleischmann for being a bad debtor. Kamshalov told German that he would “support him in a coup.” German shrugged off the notion of usurping another director’s film out from under them.

German was received with civility on set. He described Fleischmann as a little man who smoked cigars. Fleischmann was polite to him, despite the awkwardness of their situation, and offered to let German observe filming and take photos as a sort of propitiatory gesture. German was impressed with the scale of the production (“I have never seen such a thing in my life. A huge area of the city… houses, squares, alleys…all made from some strange metal foil!”), but when he observed how Fleischmann staged a scene with a horse and a man waving a sword, thought to himself that the film will not work.

German offered to rewrite some of Carrière’s script, but Fleischmann declined making any changes because as he said, “there’s an entire bank full of money behind every shot”. German was sure that he was mostly a nuisance to Fleischmann and decided to head back to the Soviet Union before overstaying his welcome.

Released in 1989, the end product of Fleischmann’s version feels a little like a cross between Highlander II and David Lynch’s Dune. There’s daring-do, spaceships, and explosions, but I’m not sure it’s much more than a curio for science fiction fans. The Strugatsky brothers hated it. German refocused his ideas and creative energy into other similar projects.

I think German was determined to put a film with a medieval flavour out into the world. He and Karmalita wrote a loose adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, with their screenplay having the mouthful title of The Sad and Instructive Story of Dick Shelton: a Baronet Who Never Became a Knight. I’ve read several comparisons between the script and Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, though I can’t imagine German ever making something so stately. German said that his and Karmalita’s version of the hero was to be a dangerous fool. It would never go much further than the screenplay and research stage. I wonder if German may have felt a bit burned with The Torpedo Bombers, because there were a number of directors who were interested in the script who likely could have gotten it made, but German insisted that if it were to be made he should be the one to direct.

German moved on to adapting a play by the man who read him fairytales one Summer as a child; Evgeny Schwartz’s The Dragon. It’s an allegorical story adressing the complexities of totalitarianism. In it, the knight Lancelot sets out to save the people of the land by slaying the cruel dragon that rules over them, but he’s surprised to find that the people do not want the dragon slain. They’ve become used to it and the dragon bureaucracy that’s developed around it. Lancelot has a philosophical dialogue with the dragon about the human soul’s weakness to power. Then he kills it. It turns out that killing the dragon changes nothing, as one of its underlings takes up the dictatorial position. The princess who was to be fed to the dragon, that Lancelot had come to save, ends up marrying the new dictator. Upon reflecting on how the situation is more complex than he originally believed, Lancelot concludes that “It is all small-scale work ahead. Worse than embroidering. We will have to slay the dragon in each and every one of us.”

Reflecting on the political subtext, German said of Schwartz that, “I still do not understand how he survived after The Dragon. The only reasonable explanation is that people were afraid to believe their eyes and their ears. They were afraid to even admit to themselves that a person could write a play about this.”

The Dragon bears quite a bit in common with German’s vision of Hard to Be a God, wrestling with the complexities and contradictions of power and oppression, with its hero’s journey, despite all noble intentions, leading the hero to turn against the people he had wanted to save. I think that in the final film version of Hard to Be a God there are aspects that seem to have carried over from The Dragon, to the point where German’s Hard to Be a God might be regarded as a sort of fusion of Schwartz’ play with the Strugatskys' novel.

Like Hard to Be a God, The Dragon would also be poached from German in the late 80s. Mark Zakharov adapted it instead, with the slightly modified title of To Kill A Dragon. It would also be released in 1989.

It’s a fair bit goofier than I imagine German’s film would have been, and deviates from the play in some key aspects, but honestly To Kill A Dragon is an impressive film. Zakharov’s style is comparable to Terry Gilliam’s, and the film could easily fit into a triple feature with Jabberwocky and Brazil. It’s a world of medieval muck and forced fascist smiles.

The most famous actor in To Kill A Dragon is Oleg Yankovsky (who had played Tarkovsky’s father in Mirror, and starred in Nostalgiah) who plays the titular dragon. It’s great to see Yankovsky having fun in a role, and I like when at one point the dragon resembles Thin White Duke era David Bowie. I can’t help but be reminded of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth when I watch the film.

I’m not sure if German liked the film or not, but when it came time to cast a lead for his Hard to Be a God, he chose Leonid Yarmolnik who had acted in Mark Zakharov’s film, The Very Same Munchhausen (which also start Oleg Yankovsky, as Munchhausen), in one of his earliest roles.¹ So I’d guess there was at least some admiration for Zakharov as a filmmaker, or at very least his taste in actors.

There’s also a little reference to the character of Munchhausen, who tells highly exaggerated or fictitious stories, in Khrustalyov, My Car! and German’s Hard to Be a God. In Hard to Be a God, one of the Earlthings in the film is called out for lying about how close he came to being killed. “I’m Munchhausen,” he says slyly.

German would spend much of his ‘unproductive’ period being a bit of a personality, with his newfound noteworthiness. It seems like most of the video interviews and appearances on talk shows with him would be from around this time. I know it’s during this time that he met as a peer, filmmakers who he had previously only looked up to: Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa. “All appeared close to death,” German would add, which turned out the be true expect for Bergman who lived another eighteen years or so after their meeting.

German would even land a few roles as an actor. His performance in Aranovich’s Rafferty was his first acting role, but it wouldn’t be an anomaly. He would have more acting credits than directing credits, by the end of his life. They’re typically not cameos either. They’re usually more like small character actor type parts, appearing as a doctor, or an engineer, or a judge. In a few instances he had to display some emotional range, and he was actually pretty good! I think if you know how to direct actors, you can usually act with some degree of effectiveness.

In 1990, German was a part of the jury for the Cannes Film Festival. He aggressively butted heads with Bernardo Bertolucci who was jury president. Apparently they often argued, which would escalate to yelling at one another, with Bertolucci at one point screaming “You're poisoning me, because I'm a former communist!” before storming off in tears, to the discomfort of the rest of the jury.

German at Cannes in 1990:

German mentioned that he didn’t like David Lynch’s Wild At Heart very much even though it won the Palme d’Or that year. German thought that instead the award should have gone to Idrissa Ouédraogo’s film Tilaï. Ouédraogo (who passed away this February, just after giving this anecdote) said that when he finally met German, German handed him a bottle of vodka and said, “Listen, we squeezed your film out of what it deserved, but at least have a bottle of vodka, eh?”

German was offered the cushy position of chairman of the Union of Cinematographers, but he turned that down. Instead he would spend much of his time teaching film. He’d say that “In general, there is one main point in the whole process of training, that one should know how to correctly recruit people. The rest will follow.”

German would end up collaborating with some of his former students, and help launch the careers of others. I’ve read that ‘a whole generation of filmmakers came out from Aleksei German’s coat.’ I’ll just mention a few here:

Lidia Bobrova, who was a history grad before studying under German. She would direct the much-acclaimed film Babusya, which is a bit of a Make Way for Tomorrow / Tokyo Story type film.

Another of German’s former students was Yevgeny Yufit, who would often be compared to Guy Maddin for the highly stylized, retrograde aesthetic of his films. I don’t think they’re nearly as madcap as Guy Maddin’s film though, they remind me a little more of some of Jim Jarmusch’s films like Dead Man. Yufit died unexpectedly in 2016.

Undoubtably, the best known of German’s former students would be Aleksei Balabanov. Upon seeing Balabanov’s documentary, From the History of Aerostatics in Russia, German offered to make make a film with him.

The result was Aleksei Balabanov’s 1991 adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which German produced.

For a while Balabanov and German would continue to be affiliated. Balabanov even cast German in a small role in his adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle in 1994. As I understand it, German and Balabanov would have a falling out around that time, over Balabanov becoming increasingly nationalistic and anti-semitic. On that German wrote, “Balabanov is not so talented that, having this defect particular to bastards, he could count on me to continue paying attention to him.”

After that would Balabanov develop a reputation as something of an enfant terrible of post-Soviet Russian cinema, and would even be described as a “Russian Tarantino” in western publications. There’s much more discuss with Balabanov and his films, but I may save that for a later piece. For now, I think just his connection to German will suffice. Balabanov would die in 2013, at the age of 54, while trying to put together a ‘crime epic’ biography of Stalin in the vein of Coppola’s Godfather films.

I think German would have much greater artistic success with his collaboration with another former student...

The big success for German during his ‘unproductive years’ would be The Fall of Otrar, which he and Karmalita would write and produce together, but would be directed by a former student of his, Ardak Amirkulov.

The Fall of Otrar is about the destruction of the 13th century Kipchak fortified city, Otrar (located in present-day Kazakhstan), by Genghis Khan and his army. It’s portrayed from the perspective of a Mongol named Undzhu, a lesser Khan who is also a muslim.

Undzhu warns The Shah and the governor general Kairkhan of Genghis Khan’s army. The Shah does not believe him, being more concerned with his rivals in Baghdad, and when Undzhu tries to explain the Chinese siege machines that Genghis Khan has, the Shah’s Chinese interpreter pretends to not understand his dialect (even I can understand his Mandarin!). Kairkhan believes the mongol, but The Shah has Undzhu tortured and imprisoned as a spy.

Undzhu’s strung up on a pole next to an old man who has been left there to die for his controversial interpretations of the Koran. The old man believes Allah has sent Undzhu to save them. “You can only pull the bow-string, but Allah guides the arrow’s flight,” the old man tells him.

The Shah’s mother intervenes because of Undzhu’s status as a Khan (it isn’t until later in the film when he hooks back up with the Mongol army that we find out his Khan-hood is practically a joke). She has him removed from the pole he was left to die on, but makes it clear that he’ll be killed if he persists in his warning. Undzhu insists that “Genghis Khan will saturate the earth with human fat. I’ve seen it done.” When finding out that The Shah’s mother has poor eyesight, he tells her that he knows Chinese doctors who could help her, but she snaps at him for it not being his place to comment on her eyesight. There’s no helping some people.

Undzhu escapes, and naked and unarmed manages to kill a guard in one of the film’s most memorable sequences. He asks that the dead man’s soul forgive him, and Undzhu raises his hands to his eyes and says to himself “Allahu Akbar”, God is great. It’s something he continues to do throughout the film whenever he sees death or something horrible. After, Undzhu would also say to himself, “I think Allah chose me to be his arrow... only for a little while, of course.”

Kairkhan catches Undzhu, and because he believes him that the Mongol army poses a threat, he wants Undzhu to be a martyr and die to convince The Shah of his sincerity. Undzhu tells Kairkhan that if he really believes him then he should be the martyr, “...but you have golden shoes, so you won’t say a thing.” Kairkhan tells him that there are “many ways to live life, choose the longest” and lets Undzhu go.

When Genghis Khan finally appears in the film, he’s a rhetoric-waxing god of death and destruction. He’s played by Bolot Beishenaliev, who had played the Turkic Khan in Andrei Rublev. He gives Genghis Khan’s moments of brutal common sense the same bemused and indignant tenor as his character in Andrei Rublev shaking his head at the notion of the virgin Mary having a son.

It’s revealed that Genghis Khan has spies in the city, one of which is a rich merchant who reports to him. When the merchant humbly asks that Genghis Khan spare the mosque when he conquers the city, Genghis Khan makes it clear that he doesn’t have anything against Islam, but says simply “God is everywhere, so one can pray to him anywhere.” I remember, when I visited Mongolia, hearing that it was against the old Mongol religion to build permanent structures, which is why even the Great Khan would live in a yurt rather than a palace. With that in mind, the very idea of a city may have seemed sacrilegious.

The Shah has most of his army sent to fight his rivals in Baghdad. Even though the city is mostly defenceless, when three envoys of Genghis Khan arrive asking for a ransom to be paid to spare the city, the Shah hubristically has two of them tortured, and one of them killed by having their throat cut. It’s one of the film’s many horrific images, and might be the sort of thing you’d run into when spending too much time on liveleak. Of course the actual money of the demanded ransom wasn't the point for Genghis Khan. Submission was the point. I think of the meaning of the word ‘Islam’, submission.

As Genghis Khan’s army approaches, it becomes clear that it’s a credible threat. The people of Otrar prepare for the worst. There’s an old slave who comes into Undzhu’s service, who Undzhu offers freedom to, but the slave is worried it’ll only mean he’ll be free to die when the Mongol army arrives. There’s also a young girl with poor eyesight who thinks Undzhu must be a spy, but he tells her that he knows Chinese doctors who can improve eyesight, which makes her happy.

There’s one memorable sequence of the Otrar archivists; an old man and a young man, writing the final scroll of the city’s history, “It happened in the year of the dragon, and we Kipchaks are saying goodbye to one another.” The old archivist decides to stay behind to die with the scrolls, but he wants the young archivist to live. The young archivist seals the cave with all the scrolls and his mentor inside, but then the young archivist is killed by a Mongol archer as soon as he leaves.

Even though none of the major characters are in the scene, it was considered crucial to the film. Production designer Umirzak Shmanov described it as, “a metaphor for the death of not only the city itself, but of a whole layer of medieval Turkic culture.”

When the film was made, the common assumption amongst historians was that the Otrar archive had been burned, but now evidence suggests that the city’s archive likely was buried. German & Karmalita’s speculative writing that it had been hidden away, turned out to probably be correct. It’s worth keeping in mind that while German & Karmalita were experienced in researching and writing screenplays set in the past, their previous films were all set in the not-too-distant past, often relying on the memories of eye-witnesses. Tackling an event from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, posed a number of challenges to their typical research methods. They wrote a forward to their screenplay for The Fall of Otrar which states: "Only after we began writing and systematically collecting research material, did we realized what we had gotten ourselves into. For there was practically no material. The era was silent. Almost nothing authentic came from there to us. All materials we collected angrily contradicted each other..."

Kairkhan, repels the initial attack on the city, with Mongols tunnelling under the city walls. After the first battle, the cupola of the city’s mosque topples, perhaps caused by the tunnelling or perhaps spontaneously. Some take it as a sign that Allah has abandoned them, but an imam orders that anyone who repeats that will have their tongues cut out, with two tongues being cut on the spot to set an example. Kairkhan’s hands shake while he prays, “Allah, I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”

The character of Kairkhan is an interesting foil for Undzhu. They have certain things in common, and Kairkhan even points out to Undzhu that they serve their masters with a similar reluctance. However, while Undzhu earned his title through military service, Kairkhan was born into his and he has an aversion to sticking his neck out. Kairkhan’ll use his elegant curved blade to slice off fingers or hands with uncanny ease as punishment, but shies away from risk to himself even when it’s what his moral compass tells him is right. Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov, who played Kairkhan said that the intent with the character was to portray a man who was “proud of his nomadic warrior ancestry, but who had become complacent.”

Genghis Khan has small engraved planks distributed to the spies and traitors in the city, to hold up when the time comes to show their allegiance and save their lives. The old slave who had been serving Undzhu, takes one of the planks in exchange for opening the doors to the city...

What follows is less of a final battle and more of a massacre. Kairkhan rips bits of cloth from a fine robe and stuffs them into his ears to blot out the noise.

There’s no mercy shown to those who are captured by the Mongols. “My horse tramples this land so that something different may grow here”, Genghis Khan announces. We’ll clear this land of scum and build an orchard. Kairkhan begs Genghis Khan to spare his son, but Genghis Khan says matter of factly, “If I let such children live, they’ll kill my grandchildren”.

Genghis Khan has Kairkhan’s face encased in molten silver (a scene that Amirkulov described as a double-homage to Andrei Rublev, combining the brutality of the molten metal being poured into the deacon’s throat, with the beauty of the process of the casting of the bell). If Kairkhan had been willing to martyr himself at the beginning when Undzhu suggested, he might have saved the city and ended up just as dead, but he chose the longest way to live life and for that would be immortalized in a most horrible way. After his brutal death, there’s a traditional Kazakh folk song that plays with the lyric, “Life is Short and Pleases Few.”

The film concludes with Undzhu wandering through the destroyed city, where he sees the young girl with poor eyesight holding a plank. The old slave appears and confesses to Undzhu that he was the one who opened the city gates for the Mongol army, but did it in exchange for a plank so he could save the girl’s life. The old slave asks what will be his punishment, expecting Undzhu to kill him, but Undzhu tells him that his punishment will be his freedom. They laugh and it’s a surprising moment of joy and optimism. The fall of Otrar may have been inevitable, but for even one life to be saved means some degree of hope. He who saves a single life saves the world entire, or something like that.

The final scene is of Undzhu visiting the destroyed mosque where he reflects on everything that transpired. Was he really torn between two masters? For in this film Allah and Genghis Khan may be one in the same. In that regard, Undzhu is like the prophet Lot (who’s neither a drunkard nor incestuous in the Koran version of events), whose warnings went ignored by the cities of Sodom & Gomorrah, which Allah wiped from the face of the earth.

It’s an overwhelming experience, seeing an extinguished culture meticulously resurrected and then obliterated on screen. Antithetical to its epic premise, much of the film is shot in close-up, giving for instance the way a character’s hair is braided a greater visual significance than the film's army of extras. The film is always directed toward intimacy rather than grandeur.

Here’s a costume design by production designer Umirzak Shmanov:

There’s a moment towards the end of the siege sequence, when a mongol warrior doesn't just kill the Kipchaks drummer, but slashes the drum too. I see it as one of the film’s examples of the film emphasizing that what you’re seeing is not just a massacre, but the end of a civilization. In a 1992 interview Amirkulov said that, “I wanted to express my pain for us, the Kazakh people. The ancient city of Otrar was the cradle of our civilization, and we still haven’t climbed out from its ruins.”

In that same interview Amirkulov insists that the film is not just about depicting the past but is also meant to relate to contemporary concerns and is perhaps even futurist. I think there’s something to that, and not just in vague terms of the erosion of culture. There’s a specificity and immediacy to it, as I’m reminded of relatively recent events relating to the destruction of historic cultural artifacts while watching the film. For instance the Taliban blowing up the giant ancient Afghani statues of Buddha, the burning of the Timbuktu library by Islamic fundamentalists, or even the Syrian professor and archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad who was beheaded by ISIS for not revealing the location of a dig site of an ancient civilization, which they intended to destroy. I mean if it came down to me or the last print of Citizen Kane, I’d certainly choose myself, but I’m grateful to those martyrs to the preservation of history and culture.

I should take a moment to highlight Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev’s portrayal of Undzhu. It’s an unexpected balance of cavalier and soulful. He has an energy and spontaneity, and even a sort of gallows humour woven into his performance which sets the tone of the film as much as anything. He breathes life into a character who could face death with a smirk while still feeling sorrow for the doom he observes around him.

Kydyraliyev was already a known actor when he starred in The Fall of Otrar, having previously broken through with Tolomush Okeyev’s handsomely-shot, 1985 historical epic, Descendant of The Snow Leopard.²

It’s disappointing to see that Kydyraliyev has so few film roles to date, but I was happy to learn that he would work with Amirkulov again on two other films. The first being the 1995 film Abai, a smaller scale historical film about a poet which also featured Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov and Bolot Beishenaliev. A reunion of the three Khans. The second time would be in the 2008 film Farewell, Gulsary!, which is a heartfelt story about the hardships of a war veteran and his horse in Stalinist era Kazakhstan.

“During chaotic periods, when there are no rules in the arts, the traditional is the most avant-garde,” Amirkulov would say. The Fall of Otrar was released during a chaotic time, when the Soviet Union was in the process of dissolving. Kazakhstan had only recently become independent, and the film would become somewhat lost in the shuffle when it came to international distribution. I know Martin Scorsese would speak highly of it and he presented a screening of the film in 2008, but it seems that The Fall of Otrar has yet to receive the international recognition that it warrants. Still, it played a major role in launching a new wave of Kazakh film and made Amirkulov an important figure in Kazakh cinema (as I understand he has so few films since because his career was slowed by dealing with a severe personal illness, but he’s taught other filmmakers, and as of writing this seems to have a new film on the way).

Strangely, The Fall of Otrar was my first encounter with Aleksei German’s filmmaking, though I didn’t know it at the time. I had seen a lengthy excerpt projected at the Beijing Film Academy in 2010, and left the screening not really knowing what I had seen. In the years following, it stayed on my mind and I attempted to find ‘the sepia Ghengis Khan movie’ without any success. It wasn’t until after seeing Hard to Be a God and delving into everything Aleksei German had done that I re-encountered it.³ From the perspective of having seen Hard to Be a God, it’s easy to see The Fall of Otrar as something of a dry-run for Hard to Be a God or repository for German and Karmalita’s ideas for Hard to Be a God that might otherwise have faced the possibility of never being seen, Many lines and moments (like the aforementioned drum slashing) are common to both films. Sometimes very noticeably. For instance, The Fall of Otrar has ‘The Merry Tower’ and Hard to Be a God has ‘The Tower of Joy’ (it’s possible the names are ever more similar if the leeway of translation is taken into account), both of which are alluded to as places of extreme torture.

Knowing how involved German and Karmalita were as producers, I think it’s safe to assume that they’re responsible for the texture of rain, mud, piss, vomit, blood, and burned flesh that gives a credibility to the world of film without compromising the soulfulness that runs beneath it, perhaps even strengthening it. That quality would return with a vengeance in Hard to Be a God.

Some of the strongest connections between The Fall of Otrar and Hard to Be a God are on a thematic level, particularly on the relevance of art and cultural artifacts to the value of human life and spirituality. I’ll delve further into that theme in a later chapter, but I’m reminded of German’s regard of Andrei Rublev above Tarkovsky’s other films. With the specific allusions to it in The Fall of Otrar, I would guess that at least part of what appealed to German about Andrei Rublev in specific is its emphasis on the necessity of material objects to the soul. Paintings and a bell are tangible and concrete, and you understand in Andrei Rublev how miraculous they were in the medieval age, but so much of The Fall of Otrar is about how easily miracles can be burned and broken, and lost forever.

Even with many similarities, I do want to say though that The Fall of Otrar is a tremendous film in its own right. I wonder too if it’s roots could be traced to the encouragement German found as a child when meeting the scholar, Joseph Orbeli who doubtless would have been been knowledgeable about the incident the film is based on. A little encouragement may have gone a long way.

~ CONTINUED IN PART 4 ~