In the early morning of May 8, 2023, the famous Tibetan director and writer Wan Ma Tseden died in Tibet at the age of 53. At 15:10 on the same day, "Manishi Pictures" released an obituary, confirming that Wan Ma Tsedan's "sudden emergency treatment was ineffective", and his unexpected death caused shock and widespread mourning in the film and cultural circles. Wan Ma Tseidan was active in film and literary creation during his lifetime, and not long ago, the films "Snow Leopard" and "Stranger" directed by him were completed one after another.
On the evening of May 8, when the Southern Weekend reporter contacted director Song Taijia, he was traveling by car from his hometown of Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province to Xining, the provincial capital more than 200 kilometers away, preparing to take a flight to Lhasa early the next morning to attend director Wanma's farewell ceremony. At about 4 a.m. on May 8, Songtaijia received a phone call to learn that Wan Ma Tseidan was being rescued, and that morning, he learned that Director Wan Ma had been transferred to the Tibet Autonomous Region People's Hospital and his treatment was ineffective.
A still from the Wan Ma Tseidan movie "Balloon" (2019). (Infographic/Figure)
Like Wanma Tsedan, Sontaijia is from the Amdo Tibetan area, and the two have worked together many times. In the films "Quiet Mani Stone", "Looking for Jimi Genden" and "Old Dog" directed by Wan Ma Tsedan, Matsuchika has worked as an artist and photographer. The last time the two met was in 2022, Songtaijia's mother died, and Wan Ma Tseidan rushed from Beijing to Qinghai to mourn, and the two chatted for half an hour. Later, they made an appointment to meet again several times on WeChat, all because the time was not coincidental, and they "passed by".
Songtaijia was shocked to learn of the bad news, and was in a trance all day, telling Southern Weekend Reporter: "Wan Ma Tseden is a pioneer in Tibetan areas and Tibetan culture, especially in native language films, and he has made great contributions to spreading the voice of our ethnic group to other places and the world." ”
In December 1969, Wan Ma Tseidan was born in Nianna Village, Guide County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai, graduated from Northwest University for Nationalities and Beijing Film Academy, and began film directing work in 2003, his main film works include "Quiet Mani Stone" (2005), "Looking for Wisdom and Beauty Genden" (2007), "Old Dog" (2011), "Colorful Divine Arrow" (2014), "Tharlo" (2015), "Hit a Dead Sheep" (2018), "Balloon" (2019), etc. He has won important awards in Venice International Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, Shanghai International Film Festival, Chinese Film Golden Rooster Award, Chinese Film Media Award, Hainan International Film Festival and other film festivals.
Wan Ma Tseden is a bilingual writer and translator, whose collections of Tibetan novels include "Temptation", "City Life" and "Gang", and Chinese novels such as "The Dream of a Wandering Singer", "Mani Stone, Knock Quietly", "Tharlo", "Killed a Sheep", "Wujin's Teeth", "The Story Is Only Half Told Half", and the main translated works include "Tibet: Untold Stories" and "Debenga Novels", etc., and his literary works have won the Qinghai Literature Award, Lin Jinlan Short Story Award, Huacheng Literature Award, and Zhangchar Literature Award.
Flew to Lhasa early on the morning of May 9, along with Zhou Jialu, a former colleague of Wan Ma Tsedan, an associate professor at the Film School of the China Academy of Art, lamented that "life is impermanent and manpower is small", in Zhou Jiali's eyes, Wan Ma Tseidan is a "pure, kind, modest artist with earth-like qualities", and "Wanma Tsedan's family wants to say goodbye to the ceremony from Jane, just like his person," she told Southern Weekend.
Wan Ma Tseden stands in front of the poster of the movie "Balloon" he directed. (Infographic/Figure)
Fall on the horizon
Wan Ma Tseden once recalled his childhood: "When I was grazing on the plateau, I liked to lie on the grassland and listen to the sound of movies broadcast on the radio, one after another, intermittently. ”
Wanma's hometown, Yesterday Village in the Amdo Tibetan region of Qinghai, is a semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral area. Wanma's uncle was a monk of Nyingmapa and had many scriptures, and his grandfather believed that Wanma Tseidan was the reincarnation of his uncle. Wanma's side also has the deeds of "divine teaching", a completely illiterate sheep herding baby, suddenly fell asleep for seven days and seven nights, and when he woke up, he could talk endlessly about the "Legend of King Gesar", and his vocabulary was very large, completely beyond his level of knowledge.
In 1987, after graduating from the normal secondary school, Wan Ma returned to his hometown to become a primary school teacher with a monthly salary of 99 yuan, which is a profession that everyone envies. He completed his debut novel "Man and Dog" in his spare time, and then went to university with an iron rice bowl, and he wrote a letter of guarantee that if he failed the exam, he would give up public office. He was admitted to Northwest University for Nationalities to study Tibetan language and literature, and after graduation, he worked as a civil servant in an institution, and later obtained a master's degree in Tibetan and Chinese literature translation.
Due to a chance chance, Wan Ma Tseden came to Beijing Film Academy to study film. In 2005, Wan Ma Tsedan's feature film "Quiet Mani Stone" came out, was shortlisted for the Chinese Film Golden Rooster Award that year, and won the Best Director's Debut Award, which also coincided with the centenary of the birth of Chinese films.
In 2008, when the poet and critic Wang Wei was the chief writer of "Tibetan Human Geography", he and his colleagues planned a magazine selection entitled "How to Express Tibet", interviewing some cultural celebrities, Wang Wei felt that "the completion was not good" and "the worst answer came from Ma Yuan". "At that time, Wan Ma Tseden had not yet entered the public eye." In Wang Wei's view, "after the first wave of creators of scenery and anti-scenery, folklore and anti-folklore, there will definitely be new creators who are different from them." "How difficult it is for Tibetan creators with a unique language to be seen by the public," so the death of Wanma Tseden "is indeed a loss."
In September 2012, Indiana University held an academic screening event under the name of "New Wave of Tibet", screening Wan Ma Tsedan's "Hometown Trilogy", "Quiet Mani Stone", "Looking for Zhimei Genden" and "Old Dog".
The new wave originated in France at the turn of the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, and then spread like waves around the world. The new wave of cinema in all regions has a film tradition that needs to be surpassed, in a sense conservative, old, and classical. The French New Wave's "Exhaustion" opposed "quality films" such as Carnet's "Children of Paradise"; Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura in Japan objected to Yasujiro Ozu's subtlety and tranquility; New Hollywood's "Taxi Driver" opposes the classic Hollywood "Gone with the Wind"; The new wave of Hong Kong films represented by Tsui Hark and Hui Anhua is opposed to Shaw.
What the "new wave of Tibet" needs to transcend is the perspective of others. The films "Serfs" in the 1960s, "Horse Thief" in the 1980s, and "Red River Valley" in the 1990s are all stories told by Han directors. An example of this external vision is also the 2015 film "Kailash Rinpochi" directed by Zhang Yang, which is a romanticized imagination in the dual sense of landscape and "spiritual journey". Unlike Xinjiang, which has Tianshan Film Studios and Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Qinghai, where the film industry is weak, have not established studios. Until the centenary of the birth of Chinese cinema, "Quiet Mani Stone" announced the first Tibetan film.
Since then, under the leadership of Wan Ma Tsedan, the "new wave of Tibet" has been talked about by Chinese fans. Wanma's assistant director Lahuaga's work "Wanza's Rain Boots" was shortlisted for the new generation unit of the 68th Berlin Film Festival; Wanma's art design and cinematographer Songtaijia's film "Alajang Color" won the Jury Award of the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival; Wan Ma Tsedan's son Kumi Sei-rye's "One and Four" won the Best New Director Award at the 16th Asian Film Awards and was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the 34th Tokyo International Film Festival.
Wanma's three recent films "Tharlo", "Killed a Sheep" and "Balloon" have been shortlisted for the Horizon section of the Venice Film Festival. The Horizon unit in Venice and a kind of attention unit in Cannes are mainly oriented to beaded works or emerging directors to distinguish them from the mature "filmmakers" of the main competition unit. Wan Ma Tseden has been shortlisted for Horizon many times, which shows that the selection and judging teams of European art films are still full of expectations for him. Now, he has suddenly fallen on the horizon.
Wan Ma Tseden is a bridge
Wanma is a bridge between the two mediums of literature and film. Fiction is a free and unrestrained interpretation of ideas and images, and film is a waterfall of holographic comprehensive art. Most of his novels are short stories, longer than white drawings and refined dialogues. He translated, bilingually, and sometimes wrote the same subject matter in Tibetan and Chinese. Making a novel into a movie is a translation in another sense. It is difficult to say whether literature and film are the realization of different stages and forms of his creative desires, or whether his literature is an unfinished form of his film dream.
In the Tibetan narrative tradition, telling a realistic story is often in the form of allegories. For example, there is a famous Tibetan literary work called "The Story of Migratory Birds", which tells the story of a dispute between monkeys and birds, which was later successfully resolved through the mediation of wise men. This is actually a history of the war between ancient Tubo and Nepal, but ancient Tibetan writers did not directly describe the war, but told it in allegories. This understanding of narrative has also influenced Wanma's novels and films.
Xia Xianfu, editor of Huacheng Publishing House, is the editor in charge of the two books "Tharlo" and "Killed a Sheep", and in his impression, Wan Ma Tseidan is very Buddhist, has no shelves, is very considerate, and never asks or urges during the publication process.
Wang October, a Guangdong writer and editor-in-chief of Works magazine, has compiled and distributed Wan Ma Tsedan's novels. In 2008, Wanma put Wang October's novella "Flared Pants Floating in 1983" on the screen, which is also Wanma's only film in pure Chinese. "Wan Ma Tseidan is very stable, calm, humble, and thoughtful, very similar to his movies and novels." Wang October told Southern Weekend Reporter, "Many people in his novels and movies are also like this, like stones on the plateau." ”
Wan Ma Tseidan is a film stills adapted from the novella of the same name by writer Wang October "Flared Pants Floating in 1983". This is the only Chinese film directed by Wan Ma Tsedan. (Infographic/Figure)
Wanma is the bridge between Tibetan cinema and Chinese-language cinema in a broad sense. Although the story told by Wanma is simple, he not only makes the daily life of Tibetans visible, but also dispels the enchantment of Tibetan areas, and through his films, people know that this is not the "last pure land", but like all places in the world, there are modern, secular struggles, love and desire, crime and punishment, liars, and reckless men. The divine pen at the beginning of "Tharlo", in which the herdsman recites the sutra recital, is a vivid demonstration of the interaction between contemporary Chinese history and Tibetan local knowledge.
Wan Ma Tseden (first from right) while directing the movie "Hit and Killed a Sheep" (2018). (Infographic/Figure)
Tibetan films not only enrich Chinese films, but also need to form a beneficial ecology with the help of the capital, market and academic resources of Chinese films in the rising period. The producer of "Hit and Killed a Sheep" is internationally renowned director Wong Kar-wai, and Wan Ma Tseidan himself has produced some works by young directors, such as "Knife in Clear Water" set in Xihaigu, Ningxia. Wanma's constructive work is not limited to Tibetan areas, but has enriched the territory of Chinese cinema more broadly.
Wanma is a bridge between Chinese and Asian films. From Wanma's films, we can see a picture of Chinese cinema that goes beyond the experience of East Asian cities and villages that people are accustomed to. It was pastoral life in the western hinterland, inland Asia, with reincarnation, religious taboos, and mysticism. In terms of video style and narrative strategy, Wan Ma Tseidan learns from Indian director Rey, Iranian director Abbas and Farhadi, telling stories carefully and with small cuts, not involving grand practical issues, but only showing classic conflicts, such as growth, love, family, life and death, revenge, etc.
In Wan Ma Tsedan's three new works, sheep are an image that runs through them, and they may be called the lamb trilogy. In the story of the Little Sisters of the Prairie Heroes, the sheep are the collective property of the commune. In the Abrahamic tradition of West Asia, sheep are sacrifices, sacrifices, the most important wealth, and precious souls that need to be shepherded and worth recovering on the way. The sheep in "Tharlo" are the livelihood of a shepherd, who has saved his savings by herding sheep for people for many years, and was deceived by the shampoo girl when he first entered the red dust. The sheep in "Killed a Sheep" is the original sin of the driver Kimba, and through layers of metaphors between dream and reality, sheep and people, this symbol is woven very intricately. The sheep in "Balloon" are a symbol of desire and reproductive impulse, a stallion-like ram is a wizard-like existence, and the ewe that cannot lay cubs loses its function; But in human beings, the reproductive impulse leads to a cycle of poverty, monastic monks and nuns cut off their lust, offspring are bound to decrease, and religion brings new paradoxes.
It may also be said that Wanma is a bridge between Sino-Tibetan culture, between the secular and the sacred. In "Quiet Mani Stone", the 86th version of the TV series "Journey to the West" has become a clever intermediary between Han and Tibetan areas. The little lama wearing the mask of the Monkey King and walking alone is perhaps the most moving scene in Wanma's movie.
In the Wan Ma Tseidan film "Quiet Mani Stone" (2005), "Journey to the West" has a wonderful intersection with Tibetan culture. The picture shows a still from the film. (Infographic/Figure)
The color of death
"If I tell you about my dream, you may forget it; If I let you into my dream, it will also be your dream. In the film "Hit and Killed a Sheep," Wanma Tseden quotes this Tibetan proverb.
Whether in movies or novels, Wanma likes to explore the proposition of death. In his latest short story published in 2023, "The Fragrance of Pine Wood", a young herdsman ran to the police station to find "me" to open a death certificate, the deceased had no ID card and no household registration book, and he was drunk and hit a motorcycle on a large car, and died unexpectedly at the age of 32. It turned out that the deceased "Dorje Tai" was "my" elementary school classmate, and when learning Chinese, the teacher taught him to read his name: "How much more, outstanding Jie, too good too". "I" decided to pay for it myself, using pine wood instead of diesel, to give Dorje too a cremation.
"I" scattered Dorje's ashes together with the young herders and middle-aged herders.
It wasn't very windy outside, and we scattered our ashes on the hill of garbage outside, and some finely powdered ashes stained on our hands, our faces, our hair, and our clothes.
I think some of the ashes must have been sucked into our lungs as well.
After scattering the ashes and dusting off the ashes that remained on our hands, faces, hair, and clothes, the three of us couldn't help but cough.
He also had a novel called The Color of Death.
I was curious in my heart, thinking about what color death was, but I felt that I couldn't think that way at this time.
He added, "It's a color that you hardly see in the world, and when you see that color, you know that death has come." ”
In the film "Balloon", after the death of the old man, because Tibetan Buddhism says that from the time a person dies to the exit of his soul, he has to go through a bardo process, which takes 7749 days. So, on the way to the crematorium, Wanma expressed the Tibetan understanding of death through poetic and unrealistic images.
Wan Ma Tseidan once wanted to write a novel of 150,000 to 200,000 words, but did not want to set the theme in advance. He also planned a film project called "Eternal Day", which tells the story of a person who experiences his whole life in one day, from youth to youth, middle age, and old age, experiencing the changes of the four seasons in one day.
Soon, Wanma will have two new films released. "Snow Leopard" is starring his old partner Kimba, telling the story of how humans and animals eventually get along. A snow leopard broke into a herdsman's pen and killed nine lambs. As a result, the herders were at loggerheads. The son insisted on killing the leopard, but the father insisted on releasing the snow leopard.
In "Stranger", a man played by Huang Xuan rides a Harley motorcycle to a small Tibetan village one day. The man said that this was the home of the legendary Twenty-One Tara (Dolma), and he wanted to find a woman named Dolma. The man saw all kinds of women named Dolma, none of which was the Dolma he was looking for.
"The void phase of all laws does not give birth or perish, does not defile or purify, does not increase or decrease." What color is death? The novel, called The Color of Death, doesn't give the answer.
Southern Weekend reporter Li Heng