Experiencing the struggle, after starting to reflect on how the Tibetan ethnicity and culture have been changed in the contemporary Tibet in The Silent Holy Stones, Pema Tseden goes on in the next step of his Tibetan cinematic representational period to identify the marginalised and to search for disappearing Tibetan culture in the context of the PRC. In his second Tibetan film, The Search, a “Road Movie”, Pema Tseden begins a search for the lost Tibetan traditional culture that “takes the viewer straight into the heart of a changing
131 Tibet”.108
This film tells a story of a Tibetan film director travelling from village looking for actors to star in a film based on a Tibetan opera, The Story of Prince Drime Kunden. In the film, the “search” not only means looking for an actor, but is also “a search for the soul of Tibetan civilization in…contemporary Tibet based on Pema Tseden’s observation of younger generations of Tibet who are losing touch with their ancient [Tibetan] tradition” (Yu 2014:135).
A B
Figure 15. The Search
The Search has applied the same logic of painting and storytelling employed within the
traditional Thangka. As can be seen in Figure 15, Pema Tseden uses an extreme long shot to create a calm visual style, through a depiction of basic Tibetan areas’ environment, which establishes a certain social space of contemporary Tibetan life visible in an all-encompassing picture to the audience. Pema Tseden has said that it is important for his films to focus on “the basic condition of people in Tibet, as well as their basic emotional life”.109
In this process of searching, to search for an actor is very hard, as in the film space, from one village to another, one town to another, the young Tibetan generation begin to suspect the prince, Drime Kunden, who sacrifices everything, including his wife and children, and finally even his eyes, for the benefit of others. On his journey, the director comes face-to-face not only with the rapid changes occurring across the Tibetan areas but also with immutable aspects of Tibetan traditional culture, for example, that “compassion embodied is hard to find” (Robin 2009:41), which Pema Tseden has called “the fundamental principle of Buddhism in
108
Asia Society (2010), Film Series: Soul-Searching in Tibet, http://asiasociety.org/film-series-soul-searching- tibet.
109
Asia Society (2010), Pema Tseden: Tibetan films for Tibetan People, http://asiasociety.org/arts/film/pema- tseden-tibetan-films-tibetan-people.
132 Tibet”.110
In this case, Prince Drime Kunden seems to “have become a past tense of the present Tibet to the collective memory of Tibetans” (Yu 2014:135).
Therefore, in the film space, searching for an actor to play the role of Prince Drime Kunden in the Tibetan opera becomes very difficult. To be sure, as Pema Tseden has said, “that’s really how things are” in the current social space. Discussing the challenges of Tibetan opera, he added:
In some areas, villagers always used to perform the Tibetan operas, and everyone would go to watch. But people aren’t interested anymore, and it’s harder to see them performed. Some places still want to continue, but they’ve received many challenges. Tibetan opera is a symbol of Tibetan culture.
(2014, 27th Jun)111 As the above comment suggests, it can be understood that, in the social space, Tibetan operas represent a form of Tibetan traditional culture that seems to belong to the past in present-day Tibet. It can be seen in the film space that the young Tibetan generations are interested in non-Tibetan (Western/Han Chinese) popular art performance, for example disco and modern dance, instead of Tibetan traditional opera. In this case, it can be argued that Tibetan culture is now marginalised and disappearing under pressure from outside cultures, namely the culture of the PRC’s “national modernity”. Tibetans in the PRC, like other ethnic minorities in Mainland China, are characterised using the trope of exotic customs; thus, “[t]heir ‘primitivity’ contrasts with supposed Han ‘modernity’” (Gladney 1994:102). In other words, “Han Chinese almost universally had looked upon Tibetan tradition as backward and feudal” (Karmel 1995–1996:486). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) usually takes advantage of a discourse of “liberation” to frame and explain their practices in Tibet. They suggest that since 1951, the CCP has attempted to build up “modernity” in the Tibetan areas – for example through road construction (as we can see in Figure 15B), through encouraging the use of the car instead of the horse, and through the promotion of government schooling instead of the monastery – to draw the Tibetan people from an assumed “primitivity” to “modernity”.
However, as has been discussed in the Literature Review, the fact cannot be ignored that both Han Chinese and Tibetans “are ‘prisoners of modernity’”, a modernity whose terms have been dictated by the West as a political actor as well as an ideational construct” (Anand
110
Trace Foundation (2010), On the Road with Pema Tseden, http://www.trace.org/profile/road-pema-tseden.
111
The interview’s quotation comes from Director Seeks to Capture Life in Modern Tibet (Lim 2009). This can be accessed at https://www.mprnews.org/story/npr/106089201.
133 2006:285). In the postcolonial discourse, if we look at the framework of “dominant/elitist construction” of Tibetan issues,112
usually the PRC can be seen as the political subaltern relative to Western countries (e.g. the USA) in international relations; and then Tibetans as the subaltern/ethnic minority controlled by the Han Chinese majority in the PRC. As a result, Tibetan traditional culture is disappearing through the intersections of Western and Han Chinese influences. As Pema Tseden shows in the film space, pop music and disco can catch the young generation’s attention rather than Tibetan traditional opera, and Han Chinese Mandarin looks more useful than the Tibetan language. At the end of The Search, Pema Tseden does not tell the audience whether the search for disappearing Tibetan disappearing culture was successful or not. However, two years later, in his third fiction film, Old Dog, Pema Tseden attempted to express a dramatic and clear metaphorical message and attitude through the tragic death of an old Tibetan mastiff, to disclose the Tibetan powerlessness experienced in the face of Hancentrism and globalisation.