Compared with The Silent Holy Stones and The Search, at the end of Old Dog Pema Tseden gives a clearer attitude to contemporary Tibetan culture and ethnicity. Old Dog is also more political and controversial, its narrative showing a sense of the frustration and pain of lost Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary Chinese society and economic globalisation through a series of tragic events and the death of a Tibetan mastiff. This breed of dog is used by Tibetan nomads and herders to guard their tents and farms as a part of their family, but has become an object of desire and vulgar display of wealth among Han Chinese people. This has created a lucrative trade market in Tibetan mastiffs, which has forced Tibetan families to sell their dogs before they are stolen. Therefore, a comparison regarding Tibetan manhood has been made in the film space, in which the son thinks that it is better to get money before the mastiff is stolen, while his father, an old Tibetan herder, draws on Tibetan tradition and rejects the idea of selling the Tibetan mastiff as a commodity. There also is a conflict between the old Tibetan herder and his son in the transportation they use (Figure 16). The son travels by motorcycle (Figure 16A) to sell the Tibetan mastiff, while the father rides a horse (Figure 16B) to redeem the dog. Through this depiction of the different
112
This kind of framework of “dominant/elitist construction” of Tibetan issues has fully been discussed in the Literature Review. The framework updates Guha’s definition (1988) of social production in India and has been influenced by Spivak (1988). Although the limitation of “dominant/elitist construction” is that it has the character of mobility, which means it can change depending on different micro conditions, it provides a macro socio-political structure which makes us look at and consider Tibetan issues from different sides and conditions.
134 transportation used by the son and the father, Pema Tseden creates a conflicted space which shows the argument between the young generation and the old generation in the context of the social transformation in Tibetan civilisation caused by the PRC’s “national modernity”.
A. The Son B. The Father (old Tibetan herder) Figure 16. Different transportation used by son and father
TV appears again in this film space, with the playing of a vulgar commercial advertisement in Chinese Mandarin, which delivers an uncompromising reflection on the abrasion of old values by the economic promises posed by consumerist culture under the PRC’s national modernity. It can also be noted in the film space that the old Tibetan herder’s son is infertile, which can be understood as representing a symbolic castration of the Tibetan younger generation’s manhood, and a symbolic castration of Tibetan culture in modern PRC/international society. This all leads the film towards a more politically controversial discussion about the practice of “cultural genocide” by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “that rapidly erodes traditional [Tibetan] lifestyle and values” (Lo 2016:158) than can be found in the previous two films, which also depict Tibetan culture’s past and future in the face of Han Chinese domination and globalisation. However, interestingly, Pema Tseden himself offered an ambiguous response on this subject, saying that “If you think it is political then perhaps it is political; it was not made deliberately as a Tibetan film involving a discourse of “Tibet–China” political criticism, and all I have done is to try to show life as it is in Tibet today.” 113
Old Dog’s highly observant film space narrative reveals artistic insight into the current social challenges facing Tibetans, gently moving toward the final tragic sequence (Figure 17) 114
113
Q&A responses at the China Independent Film Festival UK Celebration, Newcastle upon Tyne, 12th – 15th May 2014.
114
As I mentioned in Chapter Four, this final tragic sequence was cut out by Pema Tseden for political reasons (because of Mainland China’s government film censorship), in order to gain the release permit for Old Dog to
135 that epitomises the old herder’s conflicted view of the future of Tibetan culture. This final sequence is very important to Pema Tseden; he has said that it was because of the idea of this ending that the film was made. If we look at this sequence, it can be seen that there is a very limited amount of sky in the film space, as the film is intended to show repressed emotion and an oppressed environment. Through the low-angle and long or extreme long shot, the film emphasises the status of Tibetan humans within the film space environment and social space background, to show the relationship between Tibetans and the current situation. In Figure 17, at the climax of the film, the Tibetan mastiff is killed by being hung from a fence pole in the open grassland (Figure 17 B, C). The fence pole (Figure 17A) highlights the cinematic representation, as a symbolic object. The reason is that such fences in the Tibetan grasslands were erected by the state as a means of dividing and distributing the land, and in this way act as symbols of the PRC’s “national modernity”.
A B
C D Figure 17. The Tibetan nomad mastiff is killed by the old herder in Old Dog
be shown in public cinemas in Mainland China. Therefore, there are two editions of Old Dog. But the edition with this final sequence is the one mainly analysed in this thesis, as it is the core version of the film, and the one that can be watched overseas or on DVD release.
136 Although the film’s ending is cruel for the Tibetan mastiff, this cruel death will free the dog from the tragic destiny in which it becomes a commodity to sell among Han Chinese, or to be stolen by a dealer in order to be sold among Han Chinese. In other words, Tibetan culture is under a process of cultural commodification. Not only have Tibetan material and artistic production/artefacts responded to a growth of commodification (Anand 2000:279), but the Tibetan mastiff has also become involved as an expansion in the market for “ethnic/exotic” goods has occurred in Han Chinese circles. In this case, the Han Chinese can be considered to have inherited the values of Western consumerism due to the influences of globalization in the postcolonial discourse, which echoes the framework of “dominant/elitist construction” of Tibetan issues. Although Pema Tseden points out that he did not want to deliberately evoke a political discussion, for viewers, the Tibetan mastiff symbolises Tibetan culture and therefore the death of the dog is suggestive of the destruction of Tibetan culture and ethnicity in the contemporary PRC’s national/international power/conditions. Therefore, Pema Tseden has offered up the phrase “spiritual suicide”115
to describe this metaphorical meaning of the Tibetan mastiff’s “death”, which appears philosophically to be the only way for Pema Tseden as a Tibetan intellectual to guard the dignity of Tibetan ethnicity and culture when “everything has changed”116
due to the forces of outsiders in Tibet.