Wanma Tseden: The Triple Narrative of Tibetan Cinema
Recently, director Wanma Tseden's eighth Tibetan film "Snow Leopard" produced before his death entered the theater release, the film has won awards all over the world since its debut, winning the best film in the main competition unit of the Tokyo International Film Festival, the best director of the "Golden Coconut Award" at the Hainan Island International Film Festival, and the best screenplay and best cinematography at the Asian Film Awards. "Snow Leopard" is director Wanma Tseden's first attempt at high-industrial CG technology to construct the visual image of the snow leopard, but he also said, "This is a real realistic film, not a dazzling fantasy movie." ”
Starting from "Snow Leopard", the author of this article believes that "Wanma Tseden tells the story of Tibet, but it is especially suitable for more people outside Tibet; it is no longer only a Tibetan writing full of ancient civilization, but it also rewrites many Tibetan classics into an ahistorical and universal wisdom."
Text / Liu Xiaoxi
In 1991, Wanma Tseden began to publish literary works. So far, he has published Tibetan novels "Temptation", "City Life" and "Gang", Chinese novels "The Dream of a Wandering Singer", "Mani Stone, Knock Quietly", "Talo", "Hit a Sheep", "Ugin's Teeth", etc., in 2015 and 2018, based on his two literary works, Wanma wrote and directed the film works "Talo" and "Killed a Sheep", and won the "Golden Horse Award for Best Adapted Screenplay" and "Venice Film Festival Horizon Unit Best Screenplay Award" respectively. In the summer of 2019, his novel "Balloon" won the 7th "Flower City Literary Award for Short and Medium Story", and the film "Balloon" made from this novel was also selected for the "Horizon" competition unit, one of the two official competition units of the Venice Film Festival, which is the third time that it has won the favor of the Venice Film Festival after "Talo" and "Killed a Sheep". Today's film "Snow Leopard" is also inspired by the short story "Snow Leopard, or the Last Poem" by Tibetan writer Jiang Yang Cairang.
Before Wanma Tsedan, many scholars continued to controversy about "minority films", and it was not until the emergence of a series of works by Wanma Tseden that "minority films" seemed to usher in the opportunity to generate authoritative concepts. As a veritable author and director, it seems that from his coherent Tibetan writing, it is not difficult for us to extract those avant-garde narrative techniques that can be called "Tibet 2.0".
Animal narratives
In literary theory, it is customary to refer to literary works with animals as the main narrative subject, related to animals, or involving animal descriptions as "animal narratives", and the animal images in "animal narratives" can be used as both "instrumental existence" and "temporal life existence". Tibetan mastiffs, antelopes, and wild asses, including the snow leopard this time, have appeared in Wanma Tseden's films more than once, and consciously assume the two main functions of "animal narrative".
▲ Stills from the movie "Killed a Sheep".
In the movie "Killed a Sheep", the driver Jinba hit and killed a sheep on the delivery road and met a killer, and the meaning of the sheep to the Tibetans is extraordinary, so Jinba wants to overdo it for the sheep, and in the process complete the redemption of himself and others. Wanma Tseden said in an interview: "This film is actually designed like this - from the beginning of hitting a sheep, to the end of the driver's tire burst, he fell asleep relying on this tire, in fact, it is also a reincarnation." It was filmed in the same place, as if it started at a starting point and then started over and over again. Through "Killing a Sheep", I hope that the audience will be able to understand more about the emotions and situation of Tibetans as living individuals, rather than just a broad understanding of an ethnic group. In the movie "Old Dog", the fate of the Tibetan mastiff was twists and turns, and he was finally strangled to death by the old man himself. The reason is that the old man's son has been married for many years but has no children, this matter has been pressed in the old man's heart, the old man kept urging his son and his wife to see a doctor, but in the end he learned that his son could not inherit the lineage, so he came up with the inner motive of strangling the old dog to death. The sheep and Tibetan mastiff in these two movies are obviously closer to a kind of "temporal life existence".
The "animal narrative" of the movie "Snow Leopard" is more illustrative, especially in the narrative of the snow leopard lama releasing the snow leopard before becoming a monk, Wanma Tseden looks the camera level into the eyes of the snow leopard being beaten, and restores the perspective of the snow leopard, shooting upside down, integrating the "animal narrative" in which animals as "instrumental existence" and "temporal life existence".
In winter, a snow leopard broke into a herder's sheepfold and killed nine "calves" like lambs. Therefore, the herdsmen's father and son quarreled: the eldest son, Jinba, insisted on killing the snow leopard, but the father preferred to release the leopard, and the younger son, the "Snow Leopard Lama", learned of the incident and led a group of TV reporters to cover and report, and led the township government and the police to intervene and mediate. In this whole story, the snow leopard is a beast that bites the sheep to death in the eyes of herdsmen, it is an elf in the eyes of the lama, it is a news that creates topics in the eyes of reporters, and it is an animal protected by the state in the eyes of the police. At the same time, the camera focuses on the spiritual heart of the snow leopard, which shows the snow leopard not only has the cruelty of carnivorous and bloodthirsty, but also understands the gentleness and complexity of repaying gratitude and protecting calves, and its main purpose is to symbolically allegorize the more complex human beings who are also mammals, and in this level, the snow leopard is more like a "temporal life existence".
"Enchanting"
Having juxtaposed literature and film many times and won many awards, he seems to have a mysterious power to connect literature and film, and he is super good at blending the long-shot documentary of film language and the call and imagination of written language, and this mysterious area is led by a creative technique called magical realism.
▲ Stills from the movie "Balloon".
In the movie "Killed a Sheep", in a dream, the hero did not hesitate to kill the Kham man's father-killing enemy, but he woke up, took off his sunglasses, the sun was shining, everything was as before, and he happily set foot on the way home. Throughout the film, everything wanders between real life and imaginary dreams, and objective facts constantly collide with subjective conjectures, which makes the film give a touch of formal charm to the Tibetan content narrative that is inseparable from belief and mythology in the treatment of magical reality. The movie "Balloon" has a total of six surreal passages before and after the film. In "Snow Leopard", the two surreal passages of the snow leopard being released and the return of the snow leopard lama in the mountains are based on Jiang Yang Cairang's short story "Snow Leopard, or the Last Poem", which is also the first time that Wanma Tseden has used high-industrial CG technology to complete the filming on a large scale, and the effect is a magical and poetic connection between the world and the spirituality of all things.
In addition to "enchantment", the profundity of Wanma Tsedan's movies is more reflected in his ability to "enchant" and "disenchant" at the same time. "Disenchantment" refers to the demystification and the elimination of some transcendent magic from the world, which is the result of the gradual rationalization of the world. In Weber's view, the "disenchantment of the world" means that modern society is gradually turning to a more rational development, in other words, the process of disenchantment is essentially a process from sacralization to secularization, which is reflected in the film of Wanma Tseden that the mystery and particularity of Tibet are being replaced with a capital "other".
▲ Stills from the movie "Quiet Mani Stone".
In the past, most of the films involving Tibet were very sacred, as if they were pure land that ignored the world and did not eat the fireworks of the world, but in "The Quiet Mani Stone", there are not only monasteries, which are deeply dependent on traditional culture and the spiritual realm of devotion and inheritance of faith, but also the secular life of villages, which are constantly accepting new things under the rapid development of science and technology. After modernization entered the village, the elder brother of the little lama began to do business, the old man carved with the mani stone received little attention, there was a video hall outside the Tibetan opera courtyard, the video hall played Hong Kong and Taiwan films, and some people sold snacks called "Tang monk meat". Wanma Tseden confronts the collision of tradition and modernity through the lens of the camera, and shows the impact of modernity encountered by national beliefs in the process of modernization to the vast number of others in Tibet and beyond.
A similar narrative takes place in "In Search of Jimi Genden" and "Talo". Tibetan opera is not popular, modern dance is constantly attracting attention, Yang Cuo's short hair and karaoke dance, Talo's pigtails and the lonely radio on the grassland. If the self-"disenchantment" of these films is tragic and poignant, the next two films place their foothold on the "superiority" of modernity through the metaphors of "enchantment" and "disenchantment" using "mother tongue" and "Chinese" (or foreign language) as metaphors.
At the beginning of "Hit a Sheep", a truck is driving on the highway, Kimba inserts a tape, and the Tibetan version of "My Sun" rises, in the dream, this world-famous song is sung in Italian, and after waking up, the driver Kimba chooses the road of redemption. Snow Leopard On the one hand, Jinba was so angry that he wanted to slaughter the snow leopard that had eaten his nine sheep that he had eaten was watching the British BBC Snow Leopard documentary; while the Snow Leopard Lama was reciting scriptures and studying photography techniques, the imaginary snow leopard that had been redeemed by himself rescued himself in the snowy mountains and forests, which was actually a true portrayal of the snow leopard's daily life hidden by the camera lens hidden by the rocks in reality; and the stubborn defense of the police who represented the legal systemThe Mandarin-speaking police constantly asked the deputy township chief, who is both a Tibetan and a civil servant, to act as an "interpreter", and tried to reverse the traditional thinking of herders with modern and rational principles of life. Here, on the one hand, tradition has suffered the impact of modern civilization, but at the same time, it is also embraced by the great love of modern civilization, and the close-up is a subtitle at the end of the film, indicating that the Jinba family has been compensated by the government, which undoubtedly shows that Wanma Tseden is trying his best to convey to us that a tacit understanding is being reached between the legal system and human feelings, and that reconciliation between tradition and modernity is slowly being realized.
Therefore, unlike Weber's belief that we no longer need gods to explain the ultimate meaning of life, Vanma Tseden's worldview is not about choosing between faith and reason, and he has no intention of simply and crudely revealing the dilemma between spirituality and existence.
"Buddhist" narrative
As a Tibetan director, Tibetan Buddhism had an indelible influence on him during his upbringing. The Mani stone in "The Quiet Mani Stone" is carved with the six-character mantra of "Om Mani Bang Mi Mi" on it, which is translated from Tibetan as "Mani Stone", not so much that the Mani stone is a stone engraved with a mantra, but that it is a carrier of faith, and those who believe in Tibetan Buddhism believe that the six-character mantra is sacred and has divine power, and they engrave the mantra on the stone, giving the stone supernatural power, so that the stone has spirituality, and this stone can help them and guide them to escape the suffering of going to hell after death; In this story, Zhimei Gengden is the representative of Zhimei Gengden, which expresses the spirit of kindness, gentleness, and self-sacrifice, which is the most basic spirit promoted by traditional Tibetan culture. These all convey the concept of life and death of the characters in Wanma Tseden's films, and the spiritual direction of Tibetan symbols is not only an untouchable distance that an infinite number of "others" yearn for, but also a spiritual daily life closely related to "others". Therefore, the spatial environment, character image, language and culture, and symbol setting have become another narrative principle of Wanma Tseden's Tibetan films—Buddhist narrative.
It is no longer a Tibetan writing that is not only full of ancient civilizations, but also a rewriting of many Tibetan classics into a kind of non-historical and universal wisdom. The cultural psychology of "Buddhism" films is based on a kind of poetic justice, and pays attention to the disadvantaged groups from the perspective of trying to pay attention to "people", which is especially suitable for people in the modern world in crisis, especially Wanma Tseden often uses animal narratives and charm narratives to meet the soul search of contemporary people in spirituality and body, reality and fantasy, so when people see the breadth and loftiness of Tibet, The silence of the Tibetans led to imagination and embellishment, and to refer to themselves, which quickly evolved into a new way of life and communication.
However, the positive significance of the Buddhist narrative of Wanma Tseden lies in the fact that he truly adheres to the ultimate concern of the Buddhist narrative, that is, to let the "other" pay attention to himself and at the same time to pay attention to the situation and position of those who live a completely different life through "imagination", and through the reality of the Tibetan people and the imagination of others, he jointly defends the fragile forces in the real society, for example, in "Snow Leopard", we have already seen that society is trying to construct a mechanism that takes into account the aspirations of the world and the ideals of civilization.
New Media Editor: Zheng Zhouming
Pictured: Stills from the movie
i: iwenxuebao
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