Zalmax’s Dominion

Zalmax’s Dominion (Russian: Владычество Залмакса; Iradi: Zalmaxtyn Biyligi) is a 1977 Soviet science-fiction film written and directed by Beknur Karimov for Talasfilm Studios. It was a Soviet attempt to remake John Boorman's Zardoz (1974). Contemporary audiences dismissed it as incomprehensible. It has since become a cult film, valued for its dadaist absurdity.^[1][2]

Plot

In a distant future the steppe is ruled by Zalmax, a giant stone horse's head that floats over the land. Zalmax supplies rifles to a caste of Riders, who keep the Toilers in submission and deliver their grain to it. One Rider, Kuban (Marat Kenzhebaev), hides inside the head and is carried to the Garden, an enclosed estate where an immortal elite lives in apathy and boredom. Kuban learns that Zalmax is a fabrication of the Elders. He brings about the collapse of the Garden, and the Elders welcome the death they have been denied.^[2]

This outline follows Zardoz. Karimov filled it with episodes that have no counterpart in the source and little connection to the plot. In one, the Elders recite railway timetables in unison; in another, an accordion ensemble plays on a salt flat while a man in a suit sweeps the ground around them. The head lands in a collective-farm canteen and is served soup. There are intertitles in Syriac script that are never translated, and a debate held entirely in numbers. The final ten minutes show Kuban riding toward the camera without getting any closer.^[2]

Cast

• Marat Kenzhebaev as Kuban
• Larisa Voronova as the First Elder
• Erkin Sultanbekov as the Keeper of the Garden

Production

Karimov saw Zardoz in 1975 at a closed screening for film professionals in Moscow. He proposed a version to Talasfilm. His application described it as an ideologically corrected parable that would turn the source's picture of a decadent elite into a critique of class society. The studio's artistic council and the republican film committee approved the script, which followed the source's plot closely and contained none of the episodes later added.^[3]

Filming took place in 1976 in the industrial zone of Kobozev and in the Moiynkum sands. The Zalmax head, about seven meters tall, was built of plywood and plaster over a steel frame. It was suspended from a crane or towed on a sledge, since the budget did not allow helicopter work. The absurdist episodes were written and shot during production. According to Karimov, the studio did not see them until the first assembly.^[3]

Release

The republican committee accepted the film in 1977 after minor cuts, but assigned it a limited release with a small number of prints. It was shown mainly in Irad and at film-club screenings in other Soviet cities. Audiences walked out in large numbers. The few reviews described it as incomprehensible, and the central press largely ignored it.^[1] After Karimov was barred from directing in 1983, the film was withdrawn from circulation.

Reception and cult status

Zalmax's Dominion was rediscovered in the 1990s through bootleg video copies that circulated among students in Talas and Nurzhan during the territorial period. Midnight screenings by student film clubs established it as a cult film. Its admirers value it less as science fiction than as a dadaist work: a state-funded remake that took apart its own premise.^[2]

Writers on Iradi cinema place it alongside Zarina and Rise of Glory as an example of the experimental and unsettling tendency in Iradi Soviet film. Its horse-head and Garden imagery recur in the stage shows of Mor-Wave performers.^[4] The Talasfilm Archives restored the film from a duplicate negative and surviving prints in 2011, and it has since been shown regularly at the archive's cinematheque.

References

1. ^ Soviet Film Heritage Institute (1984). Directory of Central Asian Cinematographers. Iskusstvo, Moscow, pp. 160–163.
2. ^ Talas Journal of Cultural Studies (2023). 'Surrealism and the Nomadic Soul in Karimov's Cinema.' Vol. 11, Iss. 1, pp. 112–129.
3. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 415: Minutes of the Talasfilm Artistic Council (1961–1991).
4. ^ Central Asian Cultural Studies Review (2022). 'Nocturnal Steppe: Electronic Subcultures in the ISEZ.' Vol. 14, pp. 88–104.