While the nation state has been defined as an “imagined community” by Benedict Anderson, at the same time, it has been widely accepted for a long time. It can be read that:
I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community…It is imagined, because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion…It is imagined as a community, because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. (Anderson 1991: 5–7)
In other words, each nation is imaginary and “national identity is understood not as something that is naturally given or pre-existing, but as something that is made” (Winter and Keegan-Phipps 2013:12). This also leads us to consider Said’s (1993) concept of an “imaginative geography, history and representations”. Karim (2004:91) has explained that notions of the nation state have concerned “the coalescence of ethnicity and territory to imply
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99 the existence of an ancestral homeland belonging to a particular volk or people who have kinship ties that are reflected in a common culture and language.” However, this idea has been regarded as problematic. “Pure ethnicities” have rarely existed in any territories, as migration under globalisation has a tendency to ensure diversity in a nation and its people. Though it is common sense that the inhabitants of a nation may have never met with each other, nevertheless they probably share a common identity and interests, and “maintain themselves with an adherence to a distinctive mythology, symbolism and culture associated with an ancient homeland” (Smith 1989, cited in Karim 2004:91). Once they have come to believe in these authenticities of culture and symbolism through education and mass media/communication, then an identity of “imagined community” will have been established. At the same time, it has been agreed that in this respect, like the nation state, diasporas are frequently described as “imagined communities” (DeSantis 2003, Tsaliki 2003 and Karim 2004:93).
Ross and Bürger have noted the important “use and impact of social media as tools of and for political communication” (2014:47). Considering the dissemination of the identity of an “imagined community” as political communication, “cyberspace provides the Tibetan diaspora with the constellation of community, ‘global citizenship’, and egalitarianism seemingly necessary to fuel any movement in a social environment shaped increasingly by the use of new media” (Santianni 2003:200). This echoes Anderson’s (1991) attention to the rise of nationalism through print media such as newspapers, in which people based in the same country or group read the same information, creating a common basis and coming together as a “nation”. The media, through sharing common interests and identities, repeatedly creates a space for people who come to think that they are all members of the same unit or entity, even though they may have never met or interacted with each other. For example, New Tibetan Cinema (as made by Pema Tseden and Sonthar Gyal and screened at the TFF), has definitely been involved in the Tibetan diasporic discourse and has made a symbolic dialogue with the diaspora, sharing a common basis and a sense of belonging (to Tibet) through imagination. In other words, New Tibetan Cinema creates an illusory space which reflects a common Tibetan culture and Tibetan language for Tibetans in the diaspora, who may have never met or communicated with each other but still see their cultural identity in the same unit. Tibetans in the diaspora then believe in this created space as a reflection of Tibetan culture, society and historical authenticities through the imaginary, where the
100 “imagined community” has been disseminated through the new Tibetan cinematic representations.
However, diasporic film festivals are different from other media (for instance, film). Film festivals are live events that are organised in one place and at one time, normally as yearly events. This suggests that the (Tibet) “imagined community” may be different at each film festival, depending on various conditions. At a festival, organisers and audiences must meet with each other in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. In this sense, the film festival has practically paused the facts of the “imagined community” and replaced it with a “real” one which is, however, “configured around the same axis of imagination that drives the ideas of nation and nationalism” (Iordanova 2010:13). At the same time, I share the view of Iordanova, who has argued that there are two layers of imagined process in diasporic film festivals:
There is a double-step process when transnationally-positioned film festivals are involved. On the one hand, audiences and programmers involved with the festival are invited to experience themselves, by an undisguised act of imagination, as an extension of a community that is “headquartered” somewhere else but to which they, by virtue of their very attendance at the festival, are now related to through a mental image of affinity and through the act of their very real togetherness. Yet, a secondary act of imagination is implied as well, linked to the need to experience a certain degree of identification with imaginary, fictional characters whose stories are told in the films projected at the festival (Iordanova 2010:13).
In other words, two layers of imagined process are employed in the diasporic film festival events which the film festival establishes in “somewhere” far away from the “homeland”. Firstly, organisers and audiences in attendance imagine that they have the same cultural identity or interests through a very real gathering together. Secondly, the imagined process is disseminated through illusory film space to link the “real” cultural experience. The imagined community can be expanded to be not only diasporic but also transnational through its figuring within transnationally positioned film festivals: the diasporic film festival’s set-up extends an invitation to engage in what is essentially a political act of imagined belonging and to continue the presupposed nation-building process, by extending it to the diaspora and beyond. Ultimately, then, film festivals also work toward extending the “imagined communities” by allocating their very different geography and temporality in mediating transnational identities (Iordanova 2010). It can be seen that, through the Tibet Film Festival, Tibetans-in-exile or Tibetan diasporas are invited in the same place at the same time to
101 practise in a space where they establish their Tibetan nationalism and Tibetan “imagined community” through face-to-face communication and watching Tibetan films. In this space, they share a common identity in a political act of Tibetan imagined belonging, and they believe in this “authentic” “imagined” nationalism and national identity.
Then, this Tibetan “imagined community” will also have been extended by mediating their transnational identities. In this case, the TFF seems to offer a space herein, linked in a way to the conception of the nation/diaspora as an imagined community in the case of Tibetan transnational stateless nationhood, where they share common interests and identify as part of the same Tibetan group. It can be seen from the available data that most of the film festival team members and Tibetan audience members are second- or third-generation Switzerland- born Tibetans, who have never been back to “Tibet”, though it has always been called their motherland and their “imagined” nation state. They identify themselves as Tibetan, but they do not know where Tibet is geographically and what Tibetan culture/food/religion is. German or English is their mother tongue rather than Tibetan. They hold Swiss passports, but continue to believe and imagine that they are Tibetan, and that their country or homeland is Tibet. This indicates that their national struggles have been fully driven into the transnational or supranational sphere, and postcolonial discourse. It can be considered that the Tibet Film Festival in Zurich is a remaining isolated space for the “pure” identity of the “Tibetan” diaspora, taking place in the context of a “global city” where hybridisation can and does take place. As Iordanova (2010:23) has mentioned,
[film] [f]estivals of…Tibetan and other stateless groups, with their respective national struggle causes, also foster various “narratives” of nationhood, while reconfiguring the supranational space by bridging the post-colonial nation and its transnational diaspora.
That is to say, this identity of “Tibetan” “imagined communities” has already fitted into the imagination of Western countries. In other words, “[w]hen Tibetans went into exile [or diasporas], they found out that ‘Tibet’ was already there in the Western imagination and, given their limited options, they had to conform to the image in order to gain support” for maintaining the vision of “Free Tibet” (Anand 2000:280). However, if our understanding of the nation state/nationalism departs from the platform of “imagined communities” and our social media (films and film festivals in this case) have been reconfiguring the supranational space for nationhood, I doubt the extent to which the significance and contribution of identifying Tibetan cinema and their directors’ national identity and belonging could be discussed within international/global discourses. As Stuart Hall (1996:708) has said, “[w]e do
102 not stand in the same relation of ‘otherness’ to the metropolitan centres. Each has negotiated its economic, political and cultural dependency differently. And this ‘difference’, whether we like it or not, is already inscribed in our cultural identities”.
It is worth noting that although the New Tibetan films made by Pema Tseden and Sonthar Gyal have been screened in the TFF, neither of them have ever attended this film festival to represent their “Tibetan” national identity in the international, Western, or diasporic discourses. As I have mentioned, for example in the introduction to this chapter, the dates of two film festivals have overlapped, so that Pema Tseden was attending the first Chinese Film Festival in Milan while the Tibet Film Festival was taking place in Zurich. This indicates that although their Tibetan films have taken advantage of their cultural identity to present or “speak” in the Western discourse a political “imagined community” of “Tibetanness”, in the international sphere they always represent their films as having a “Chinese-Tibetan” identity. It is also the case that their Tibetan films have been offered opportunities in the context of the generalist film markets taking place alongside large international festivals, such as Venice, Cannes, and Berlin. Specifically, Pema Tseden’s Tharlo represented the PRC in the Orizzonti section at the 72nd Venice Film Festival.71 Also, Sonthar Gyal’s The River, representing the PRC in the 65th Berlin Film Festival, was nominated by the new generation unit to compete for the Crystal Bear award.72 This also closely links to discussion of the “Chinese ethnic minority” discourse. Further discussion about this discourse will be presented in the next section.
4.2 The Film Festival as Tool of Cultural Policy – The Beijing International Film Festival Ethnic Film Festival
As has been discussed in the literature review chapter, The PRC is “a multicultural and ethnically diverse nation state” (Gladney 2004:6) where there are altogether fifty-six official ethnic groups. The Han ethnic group makes up the majority of the population (accounting for 92% of the total population of the PRC), and the other fifty-five non-Han ethnic groups are customarily referred to as the “Chinese” ethnic minorities. For this reason, a special genre – “ethnic minority film” – has been positioned in Chinese film studies to sort out the landscape of “Chinese” ethnic minorities, involving the “main melody” films which promote dominant
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The information can be found on the following websites: http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/archive/72nd- festival/line-up/off-sel/orizzonti/tharlo.html, http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/f/2015-08-06/doc-ifxfsyiv7425377.shtml.
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The data can be found on the official website of Berlin International Film Festival: https://www.berlinale.de/ en/archiv/jahresarchive/2015/02_programm_2015/02_Filmdatenblatt_2015_201511024.php#tab=video25, and also in this Chinese news report: http://ent.people.com.cn/n/2015/0127/c392729-26458904.html.
103 and state ideologies for safeguarding national harmony, promoting ethnic unity, and “exotic otherness” into “minority discourse”. At the same time, Chinese ethnic minority film festivals (whatever national or international) have been established as a tool relevant to the Chinese government in promoting its ethnic minorities cultural policy: for example, the Ethnic Minority Film Exhibition in the Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival73 and the Beijing International Film Festival Ethnic Film Festival, to express one “Chinese national style” and nationalist practice. Apparently, in the terminology of the PRC, native Tibetan filmmakers such as Pema Tseden and Sonthar Gyal have been labelled as “ethnic minority” directors in the context of the Han Chinese majority. Therefore, in this section, I would like to identify New Tibetan cinema through the discourse of the “Chinese ethnic minority”.