5.1.1 Repairing Buddhist moral fabric in The Grassland

This time, during the 2005 showing of The Silent Holy Stone, was not the first time Tserang Dondrub had shed tears when watching one of Pema Tseden’s films. As a member of Pema Tseden’s production crew and a screenwriter himself, he had been, in fact, deeply touched by Pema Tseden’s short production, The Grassland ( 2003), submitted as his graduation project at Beijing Film Academy. This 20-minute short film was highly praised by luminaries of Chinese cinema. Before the script entered the pre-production stage, Xie Fei, a renowned director and the former chair of the Department of Directing at the Academy, favorably recommended it for a grant from the Academy’s International Student Cinema Fund. Xie Fei himself directed Yeshi Drolma (2000), a love story of a Tibetan woman entangled in the overwhelming events of the mid-twentieth century, the transitional era in modern Tibetan history. His cinematic fondness for Tibet prompted his recognition of the merit of Pema Tseden’s short script from among two hundred submissions for the award, and he recalled, “I noticed it [the script] was a simple story but had intricate meanings. A non-Tibetan script writer would not be able to write it as such…” (Guo 2011).

Pema Tseden names the fictitious place of the story in The Grassland as Melong Tang (). Melong () means “mirror” or indirectly “reflection,” and tang () refers to “open pasture.” Giving this name to the location of the story in The Grassland underlines his twofold cinematic intent that, on one hand, the fictive place Melong Tang is a mirror image of the social reality and communal tensions in a nomadic community in contemporary Tibet, and on the other hand, as a mirror itself, the screen physically holds the entirety of the physical-cultural landscape of Melong Tang, that is, the total lifeworld of this fictive nomadic community. In this sense, the screen is a mirror; however it is not merely a reflection of reality, but the reality of Pema Tseden’s cinematic reflection of the current affairs of Tibet and his own life experience there. The fixed, flat, immobile screen is the ground of all happenings inclusive of Pema Tseden’s vision of contemporary Tibet; the fictive but yet realistically narrated story of searching for a missing yak as well as for restoring a young man’s conscience gone astray; and the visual connection of the motion picture itself with the inner world of the spectator.

The Grassland begins with Pema Tseden’s lens following a gliding goud (), a Himalayan Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus or Gyps himalayensis), in the depthless blue sky. These birds are also known as hsa-goud () or sky burial vultures in Tibetan. Sky burial or hsa-dor () literally means “giving offerings to birds”. The burial master is usually a lama or a layperson who is knowledgeable about both the sky burial ritual and the dismemberment of the corpse. After the corpse has been ritually prepared, the burial master calls down the flock of hsa-goud to “lift” the dead up into the sky. In Tibetan Buddhism, particularly in Nyingma visionary traditions, these birds are revered as khangdrol (), which is often translated as “sky walkers,” referring to those who are in an enlightened state but are incarnated in sentient forms (Simmer-Brown 2001, 9).

Pema Tseden’s lens traces the lone vulture until it fades into the sky, then the scene tilts down to a half-frozen creek and an expansive wintry grassland scattered with woolly figures. Rolling hills on the horizon suddenly enter the audience’s vision-scape. Accompanying the scene is a song from a female singer:

The song and shifting landscape scenes introduce village chief Tsezhou, who leads a yak ridden by Ama Tsomo, an elderly woman whose own yak has been stolen. They are on their way to visit the families of three young suspects. The camera follows the village chief and Ama Tsomo who is spinning a hand-held prayer wheel. Her recitation of om-mani-padme-hum () rises into the sky and into the landscape itself as if it is a pulse of the cinematic scene. Giving viewers a sense of the passage of time, the walk continues as time moves from mid-morning sun to evening’s twilight, and from expansive plains of grass to an immense frozen river and the skyline of mountains. In Pema Tseden’s panoramic vision, both Tsezhou and Ama Tsomo often look like two tiny dots moving on the frozen river, across wide-open plains, and on high ridges.

In conversations about his cinematographic preferences, Pema Tseden does not hesitate to state that he prefers wide-angle lenses ranging from 16mm to 18mm and 25mm. His boom operator often complains that it’s difficult to keep his boom pole from dipping into the scenes shot with 16mm or 18mm lenses that show the characters conversing in a panoramic landscape. Pema Tseden defuses the complaints by telling him with a smile, “The director’s vision has to overrule technicalities.” The essence of his cinematographic vision is to create a reality on the screen through which the audience is empathetically moved into the lived experience of the Tibetan characters. Landscape scenes in many cinematic productions are often displayed as background and as aesthetic enhancements that generate the ambience for characters and their stories. In Pema Tseden’s films, they are “active backgrounds” (Morgan 2009, 2) or best seen as an inherent part of his cinematic foreground, which sustains and saturates characters’ inner landscape and their social acts. Pema Tseden’s cinematic landscapes of Tibet are metonymic in nature, and they “do not suggest their completion; rather they indicate further and larger concepts and relevance and they encapsulate rather than suggest inclusivity” (Harper and Rayner 2010, 20). The elements of a metonymic landscape function to expand the vision and image-associations of the spectator beyond the immediate screen. In other words they animate the immediate, physical, landscape encompassed by the lens, and at the same time, highlight the enacted anima or “soul” of the landscape through a particular personified character. In Pema Tseden’s case, he clearly designates Buddhism as the anima of the Tibetan landscape.

Buddhism touches everywhere and everybody in Pema Tseden’s films, from a flying bird, to carved rocks, the wind moving prayer flags, and the dialogues of monks and lay people. It humanizes the natural landscape of Tibet, which becomes not just any landscape but a geographically, geologically, topographically, culturally- and ethnically specific landscape. Buddhism is undoubtedly the haptic medium in Pema Tseden’s film – creating, articulating, and interlacing different cinematic terrains of affect (Bruno 2002, 253) or simply giving rise to a cinematic geography of sentiments from Pema Tseden’s own life experience. While his wide-angle shots portray the expansiveness of the land, the carefully chosen material expressions of Buddhism are interspersed between the natural environment and human affairs. Before the village chief and Ama Tsomo in The Grassland reach their destination, the gliding hsa-goud in the sky, the moving footsteps on the wintry brown grass, and prayer flags flapping in the wind are accompanied by the circular motion of the prayer wheel in Ama Tsomo’s hand. In mid-journey they are greeted by a mani-stone carver ( mani-dogou) sitting on a sheep skin and chiseling a flat rock not far from a long wall built of stacked stone tablets with Buddhist mantras and sutras carved on them. The camera moves to a close up to the stone carver’s weathered hands. This close-up is not shot from a top-down angle but is on the same plane as the hands. The viewer’s eyes cannot help but move toward the hands chiseling the words of a prayer into the stone tablet lying on the wintry brown grass. Approaching the hands in such a way causes the gaze to become a type of touch with its associated sensory perceptions generated by the visible. Both the tenderly wrought panoramic sweeps and close-ups in these films give a central position to Buddhism.

Giuliana Bruno’s elucidation of the word “haptic” is relevant to Pema Tseden’s films, “It is by way of touch that we apprehend space, turning contact into communicative interface” (Bruno 2004, 1). Regarding cinema-induced haptic dynamics Bruno treats “emotion” as the moving force indicated by its Latin etymon: “emovere, an active verb composed of movere, ‘to move,’ and e, ‘out’” (Bruno 2004, 6). In this sense film is an interface, intertwinement, and bonding of motion and emotion. It is a vessel of two elemental ingredients of humanity’s somatically embodied sentience, motion, and emotion.

In Pema Tseden’s films, Buddhism, projected onto the land, creates the topographic symbols of the intersection of the Tibetan lifeworld and landscape embedded with specific paths, routes, and passages of motions and emotions. To re-illustrate, Ama Tsomo and the village chief, Tsezhou, are the lines drawn between points that might have seemed unrelated, creating routes with Buddhist meaning, connecting through embodiment as they traverse the earth. In Pema Tseden’s cinematic “mapping” process, the physical landscape and aerial sphere of Melong Tang play an antecedent role in completing the topographic map of the characters’ motions and emotions, and, concurrently, actively reciprocate with the characters’ somatic movements and emotive currents that arise from the Buddhist spirituality and morality in their inner worlds. The soaring hsa-goud (symbolizing the death-rebirth transition), the prayer flags in the wind, the old mani-stone carver in the open grassland, the singer’s voice penetrating the sky and the earth, and Ama Tsomo’s recitation of prayers are among the critical, externally moving points and inward leading passages of Pema Tseden’s cinematic landscape of Tibet. Such cinematic topography is drawn with the characters’ external paths on the natural landscape and internal passages of spirituality and conscience. Buddhism in the film is not a static doctrine confined to a monastic environment. Its agency in Melong Tang allows it to be integrated into the “geopsychic terrain” of the characters in The Grassland, the cinematically haptic space which is “the place where a tactile eye and a visual touch develop…” (Bruno 2002, 253).

When Tsezhou and Ama Tsomo finally find the families of the three young suspects, the elders of their community summon them to take an oath to claim their innocence. The oath itself is not lengthy when three of them utter it together:

However, the audience’s visual touch of this scene is not mediated only through close-ups; instead Pema Tseden’s wide angle lens integrates the temporal progression of their utterance of the oath into the space of the greater physical environment of the community. Once again, landscape is antecedent to the motion of the three young Tibetans, or to the audience’s sensing of their inner emotional state. The lens pans outward, following the emotional expressions of the three young men outward until it merges with the physical terrain of the very ground on which the oath is uttered, carrying the audience from the characters’ inner world to the outer environment. The physical terrain, in its entirety, is imbued with the human emotional currents, becoming also geopsychic terrain. Thus, the earth animated with the smoke of incense lit by the three young men, the sound of their oaths and prayers, the wind violently blowing the prayer flags and the cairn carry the meaningfulness of the emotions. What is more haptically contagious to the audience in this dynamically-mixed state of emotions and natural scenes is when Pema Tseden’s lens tilts up into the sky after the oathtaking: the intangible human voice moves upward with the incense and meets a lone hsa-goud soaring in the gusty firmament. The audience’s visual contact with the immobile, flat screen in the theater is like a tactile eye, extending itself into Pema Tseden’s cinematic landscape as if it were actually meeting the three young men, traveling up with the smoke of incense, and soaring with the hsa-goud. The three young men have cleared their names, and Tsezhou, the village chief and Ama Tsomo walk back home. Once again it is Buddhism that Pema Tseden deploys here to set everything in (e)motion.

The story is about to end but it surprises audience with another turn: the son of a respected elder stole Ama Tsomo’s yak. The film ends with the son and his father with the stolen yak on the way to seek forgiveness from Ama Tsomo. As the silhouette of their backs blend into the vast grassland, a deep voice of a lama leads the recitation of the Four Bodhisattva Vows:

5.1.2 Landscaping Buddhism in The Silent Holy Stone

Pema Tseden’s The Grassland, was, in many ways, a preparatory work for The Silent Holy Stone. The Silent Holy Stone (hereafter referred to as The Stone) is a story of a young monk’s life and his curiosity about the world beyond his monastery; however, Pema Tseden does not enact Buddhism in the Dharma hall of the monastery. Neither does he express it in elaborate ritual performances on the monastery grounds. The gravity of Buddhism is rather found in the vast, magnificent landscape between the monastery and the young monk’s home village. In this respect, The Stone inherits the same cinematic narrative as The Grassland: the active, moving landscape is the opening scene introducing the lifeworld of Tibetans which is saturated with Buddhist signs, symbols, practices, and the affective bond between humans and the earth. Homeland (specifically in this case, Tibet) is not only a place of birth, but, more critically, it is where the earth’s presence irresistibly enters and firmly dwells in the mindscape of its residents and where Buddhism is embodied in human social behaviors as well as in the built and natural environments.

The Grassland scene with Tsezhou and Ama Tsomo on the yak moving across a vast landscape is mirrored in The Stone except that the characters are changed to the young monk and his father. This time, the father pulls a horse on which his adult son sits as they walk back to their home village from the monastery. It is culturally appropriate that Tsezhou is supposed to walk with the yak on which Ama Tsomo, as an elder of their community, sits. However, in The Stone, this social order of respect for elders is fully subverted in the context of Buddhism. Now, the father leads the horse carrying his son, the monk, because what is invested in the son through his Buddhist practice grants him a higher social position than the father. In other words the social seniority of the elder is replaced by the religious and spiritual order of human relations with Buddhism resetting the usual determinants of human social positions based on age and other norms. The father comfortably leads the horse while conversing with the monk yet he still expresses his affection toward him as a father.

As they leave the monastery behind, the cinematic ambience shifts to a stunning landscape just like its counterpart in The Grassland. Based on my conversations with Pema Tseden concerning his use of landscape in his cinematic narratives, he considers that the ambience should not be understood as “background,” “surroundings” or the “atmosphere” which envelopes a community or a human event; instead, it is better seen as a synopsis of the outer environment, the inner world, and one’s bodily acts, all of which set the cinematic world in motion. In this sense the cinematic ambience generated in Pema Tseden’s films consists of the earth beneath one’s feet and seen at the horizon, the flux of clouds and light in the middle, the sky high above, and collective human subjectivities embedded in the landscape (Ingold 2011:115). The recurring scenes cast the physical landscape of Tibet as a critical, non-human actor whose voice is often expressed through humans. As the father and son are enveloped in the weather world of the landscape, e. g. the blue sky, the white clouds, brown grass, frosty earth, and biting wind, the father, with affection, asks the son, “Do you miss home?” and it is as if the father’s voice were the voice of the very landscape that envelopes them and their horse. With the positive answer from the son, the camera continues to slowly pan the far off snow covered mountains and follow the father, the son, and the horse through the landscape. Just as in The Grassland, the movements of people, livestock, and the earth are coupled with a folk song. This time, it comes from a male singer:

The temporal progression of the song moves along with Pema Tseden’s lens following the footsteps of the pair as they come upon Uncle Zoba, a mani-stone carver. Uncle Zoba, though he lives alone, is an integral part of the community. His cinematic function points to the embodiment of Buddhism in the physical landscape of Tibet. The piles of stone tablets inscribed with prayers and passages from sutras signify Pema Tseden’s perspective of the full saturation of Buddhist practices in the Tibetan landscape. It is precisely such embeddedness that creates an ambience in which weather, natural objects, and Buddhist elements enter each other’s modes of being: the motion of the wind is expressed in flapping prayer flags; piled rocks hold the pole for prayer flags; and each contact of the chisel and hammer with stone and rock infuses Buddhist practices into the physical landscape. The earth embraces Buddhism, making it an elemental force of the natural environment; thus Buddhism moves and is moved.

Natural and cultural elements in Pema Tseden’s cinematic ambience seem to be situated outside his focal point and yet are intricately interlaced together to present the landscape of Tibet as a reflexive, Buddhist, lifeworld in which prayers travel with the wind, flow with moving water, and respire with human breath. Such a cinematic setting then is not an inanimate background but is rather an omnipresent or an all-encompassing mood pervading the inner worlds of the characters and animating the outer environment. The interlaced ambient elements in Pema Tseden’s films permit the continuous movement from one state of being to another for his characters, their stories, and their dwelling places and the surrounding natural world. Everything takes place in the same enclosure – the sentient world – but with a Buddhist orientation in which the earth is shown in a transcendental light while its human counterparts cannot help but to feel nostalgic for it wherever they go.

Pema Tseden’s ambient cinematography in both The Grassland and The Stone, the two productions having been made in a short span of time, show his positive aesthetics toward his Buddhist homeland. In many ways, the consistently positive appreciation of the land in these two films coincides with the global popular image of Tibet: the omnipresence of Buddhism and awe-inspiring landscapes (Bishop 1993, 40) being key. There is, however, a volitional difference between these two similar representations of Tibet according to Pema Tseden. In the Director’s Statement of The Stone he says, “The story in the film takes place in my hometown. Mountains and rivers oftentimes enter my dream world. Truthfully narrating stories from my hometown has been my wish for many years. My mind is often full of the pulses of this wish” (Pema Tseden 2006).

From the transnational perspective, I do not see Pema Tseden’s cinematic career and productions in isolation. His native upbringing speaks for itself in terms of how he has written scripts and directed his productions based on his life experience there. However it is also noteworthy that he and his productions are situated in Beijing, a transnational location where public and private, and domestic and international resources are amassed to make possible China’s rapidly growing film industry. In his creative craftsmanship, Pema Tseden fully exposes himself to different cinematic genres and techniques such as those of Abbas Kiarostami, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, and Eric Valli, to name a few. Many members of the production teams of The Grassland and The Stone were non-Tibetans, some of whom hold critical positions as art directors, producers, and production supervisors.

Given that Pema Tseden’s productions are transnational in nature, this transnational dimension of his work in no way makes his films less Tibetan. However, his work is caught in the parallel trends of Tibetan cultural revitalization. On one hand, like many cultural critics, Pema Tseden is also committed to demystifying non-Tibetans’ misconceptions about Tibetan culture and religion, as he stated during the pre-production stage of The Stone, “Many people tell stories about my homeland through their words or images which have, in fact, become like an immovable, mysterious veil over Tibet, creating an impression of Tibet as either a utopia or a wasteland. These people often claim their works as true representations of Tibet; however they further muddle the image of my homeland…I dislike such ‘true representations’” (Pema Tseden 2006). On the other hand, his cinematic career caught the tail end of what Barnett calls “Tibetanization” in reference to the Chinese state’s encouragement of the return of Tibetan traditional cultural practices the late 20^th century in an effort to improve its public image (Barnett 2006). Like his native peers in different social and professional segments of contemporary China, Pema Tseden and the core members of his film crew are committed to celebrating traditional lifeways of Tibetans, especially its Buddhist civilization. Seeking authentic images of the Tibetan landscape and people is an embedded intent of The Grassland and The Stone. For Pema Tseden, like many of his contemporaries, revitalizing Tibetan Buddhist civilization is synonymous with re-embracing the traditional past. Thus, the positive aesthetics of both the Tibetan landscape and Buddhism become an inevitable necessity in his cinematography without any volition to romanticize Tibet but to “express the intersection of tradition and modernity, the piety of Tibetans’ simplicity toward their religion, and the kindred spirit among the people” (Pema Tseden 2006).

5.2.1 Rescuing the Buddhist “soul” of the nation in The Search

During the pre-production stage of The Search in Rigon, Qinghai Province, Pema Tseden invited my visual anthropology class of eight U.S. students to observe how The Search was being shot as a road movie, a cinematic genre often used to narrate stories on the move, such as a pilgrimage, a journey in search of a lost sacred object or a loved companion, or an exodus from a war torn homeland. The Search is about a team of filmmakers on a road trip in Amdo looking for an actor who will play Prince Drime Kunden. Prince Drime Kunden () is one of the eight national operas of Tibet. Written approximately in the thirteenth century and based on the spiritual biography of Sakyamuni Buddha, it tells the story of Drime Kunden, a compassionate Prince, who is compelled to feed the hungry, aid the weak, and eventually offer his three children, his wife, and his eyes to three Brahmins who disguise themselves as beggars to test the Prince’s compassion. As soon as his compassion is proven to be genuine, the Brahmins return his children, his wife, and his vision. The opera is widely performed in villages, towns, and by nomads in contemporary Tibet. As the Buddhist spirituality in the play is articulated through the emotions of the characters rather than through Dharma talks and empowerment rituals performed by lamas, it resonates with and draws tears from the audience with the simple narrative of suffering, altruism, compassion, and spiritual liberation. The story unfolds after the king exiles his son due to misjudgment of an incident of theft in the court. The prince and his family are exiled to redeem a wrong he did not commit. They beg in villages, sleep in the open, and take residence in caves. The route of their exile eventually leads them back home into the embrace of their family. This traditional Tibetan drama can also be understood as the search for ultimate compassion and enlightenment, not in an abstract doctrinal language, but in the motions and emotions of the audience and their greater society.

When asked about his creative intent in The Search, Pema Tseden said he preferred his audience to choose their own interpretations of the embedded meaning of the film. One afternoon, however, he asked me to translate the title of the film into English. I proposed the translation of the literal meaning of the word “search” in Tibetan. When he and Sonthar Gyal, his cinematographer, said the word “search” alone was not “specific enough,” I then insisted on his telling me what was the actual search embedded in the film crew’s search for an actor. Finally I got an answer: based on an observation of the younger generations of Tibet who are losing touch with their ancient Buddhist traditions, it is a search for the essence or the soul of Tibetan civilization in the popular, contemporary realm. The opera Prince Drime Kunden is a signifier of Tibetan popular Buddhist spirituality, which, according to Pema Tseden, is slowly eroded by the advance of modern values. It makes perfect sense that the story of the search for an actor is embedded with the director’s own search for the soul of Buddhist Tibet. In light of that, the original working title in English became “Soul Searching.”

In our film class, Pema Tseden told our American students that The Search could be a sequel to The Stone because the opera Prince Drime Kunden is one of the most critical themes in The Stone. Although the storyline of The Stone follows a young monk, Pema Tseden’s thematic emphasis on Tibetan Buddhist practices is portrayed through the lives of common people. The monks are shown going about their monastic routines; however, what connects with and emotionally touches Pema Tseden’s audience is when the monk witnesses how the opera is rehearsed and performed in the village temple as part of his community’s New Year celebration. In Pema Tseden’s narrative to our class, he was emotionally touched the most during this part of the filming of The Stone. In shooting the scene of the rehearsal, the three young actors who play the children of Prince Drime Kunden all cried naturally when they sang the verses expressing their sorrow at parting with their father and being unable to say farewell to their mother. The emotional current of the film reaches another height when the opera is performed in the village temple with a crowd of mostly elderly men and women. Prince Drime Kunden cuts out his eyes and gives them away to the Brahmin. When he sings, “…May this be the last of my offerings that dispel the darkness of ignorance. Let me become a torch”, Pema Tseden’s lens moves from the stage to the audience. It is a moving scene: old women wipe their tears when they see the Prince painfully blinded and when the Brahmin regains his vision with the Prince’s eyes. The sounds of sobbing and sniffling, and the tears rolling down the weathered cheeks of the old villagers transmit the emotion from the opera to the opera audience and then via the screen to Pema Tseden’s audience. These elderly women were recruited as extras from the village where these takes were filmed. None of them were professionally trained actors – their responses were completely natural and spontaneous.

The opera scenes in The Stone take up approximately twenty-five minutes and all occur at the midpoint of Pema Tseden’s cinematic narrative. Buddhism as a living faith among Tibetans is given center stage in the film: the center is not in the monastery but among common people. To successfully complete this long segment of The Stone, Pema Tseden spent many days and nights looking for the right opera actors and actresses in Amdo. It was one of Pema Tseden’s own “road stories” behind the making of The Search. During the pre-production phase of The Stone, he embarked on a journey to find a village-based opera troupe that would best help him project his cinematic vision of Tibetan Buddhism being revitalized among common people. His personal encounters in this search later became the creative cornerstone of his scripting and directing The Search.

Unlike the uncontested cultural position of Buddhism in The Stone, The Search fully delves deeper into the social space of contemporary Tibet showing Buddhist values being challenged in modern terms. In a night club, when the team of filmmakers interviews a man in his mid-thirties for the role of Prince Drime Kunden, he tells them that he played Drime Kunden before but stopped recently because, as he says, “I dislike the role of Drime Kunden…What do you think Drime Kunden exemplifies? Drime Kunden offered his own eyes to others. That is his choice…however, why did he have to give his wife and children to others? Where did he get the right to do that? Who gave him the right?” The ambience of this scene is saturated with the overwhelming flashes of disco lights, loud music, and the noise of clinking beer bottles and wine glasses. According to Pema Tseden the history and spirituality of Buddhism is enveloped in and challenged by the modern secular, consumer world. Throughout The Search, Buddhism rather appears on the social margins instead of in the central position shown in The Stone. Buddhism as the centerpiece of traditional Tibet finds itself in a position susceptible to being marginalized, subverted, and secularized.

Although conventional markers of Tibetan Buddhism such as monks, monasteries, and prayer flags do not take center positions in The Search, Pema Tseden’s lens does not discontinue its touch in the villages and towns where an actor is sought who will bring back the heroic, spiritual epic of Prince Drime Kunden to contemporary Tibet. It is a national treasure hunt but one in which Buddhism does not overtly enter the vision of Pema Tseden’s audience in the way it did in The Stone; instead it comes in fragments that bear little or no traditional appearance.

The cinematic genre, cinematographic techniques, and the director’s perspectives in making The Search as a road movie resemble those of Kiarostami in The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) in which an engineer attempts to document the secret funeral rituals in an Iranian Kurdish province. The engineer and his teamsters drive their jeep across the country into the Kurdish land: long, uninterrupted takes, Kiarostami’s cinematographic trademark, open up landscapes of red earth, golden wheat fields, and the engineer’s destination – the secluded village. Everything in the film moves and is moved. The jeep moves the landscape; the landscape moves the jeep; the conversations in the jeep draw the temporal lines of Kiarostami’s cinematic narratives. Like Kiarostami, Pema Tseden’s wide angle shots and long takes intimately engage the audience with the Tibetan landscape and the mindscape of the main characters – urban Tibetan filmmakers – who fill the moving jeep.

Pema Tseden’s cinematic hapticity again does not rely on the conventional use of close-ups of his characters to convey tactility. Instead his wide angles and long takes in The Search, like those in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, caress the physical landscape not only in following the footsteps of characters or tracing the paths of natural elements but also with the perspectives viewed from the moving jeep. The audience’s vision reflexively assumes the location in the moving jeep either as the driver or as one of the passengers. New terrain and the ever-shifting horizon continuously enter the audience’s vision. The naked eye is not merely a visual instrument, but is also a tactile extension of the skin (Pallasmaa 2005, 39). With the jeep’s tires rolling down the highway, Pema Tseden’s lens leads the eye of the audience to touch wherever the moving jeep goes and whatever the lens encompasses. It is a journey of touching Tibet. Pema Tseden’s cinematic vision creates a haptic journey for his audience from within the narrow space of a jeep but it offers a broad vision. Through the physical touching of and being touched by the Tibetan landscape, the audience enters the current condition of the “soul” of Tibet.

In one village after another, one town after another, Prince Drime Kunden seems to have become past tense in present Tibet. With the drama residing only in memory the older generation of opera performers have to recall their past performances as they try to get younger actors to take an interest in modernizing the tradition. The cultural transmission between the past and the present is ruptured with the Buddhist spiritual norm being almost an anomaly in modern Tibet. The search continues with the tires of the jeep rolling across the country until the team of filmmakers finds the right actor. The search is successful but the film ends with a new predicament: the lead actress breaks up with the actor, reneging on her initial agreement to play the wife of Prince Drime Kunden if the team finds the actor who was her lost boyfriend. However, for Pema Tseden, home is home regardless of how fragmented it and its traditions appear.

To many viewers of The Search, Buddhism appears displaced and scattered in different locations. The mission of the team of filmmakers is to find it, whole, though by the end the mission is obviously half completed. An important component of a road film’s dynamics, however, lie not in the end-result but in the journey, which is, itself, like a pilgrimage. If the sacred item or element is not acquired, the pilgrim has at least been empowered by the journey of his own spiritual emotions through the trails, paths, and passages of his pilgrimage. On their road trip the filmmakers in The Search find a living exemplar of Prince Drime Kunden, rich memories of older opera performers, the best actress, and the most ideal actor though they are all scattered in different villages and towns. Buddhist culture, in the film, is subject to dislocation, relocation, decay, and rebirth, and is not immune from the cycle of sentient suffering. The opera Prince Drime Kunden resides in every character in the film not in whole but in part, e. g. a piece of memory, a verse from the opera, or a contending expression toward the spiritual deeds of Prince Drime Kunden. The search team’s hope for a holistic ending is realized in an unexpected parting scene between the actor and the actress who had once bonded in their home village when they performed Prince Drime Kunden together. However, the success of the search does not lie in their finally finding the actor but in the journey of the film crew in the landscape of Tibet.

5.2.2 A modern Tibet in Old Dog

The feeling tone in the displaced image of Buddhism continues in Pema Tseden’s Old Dog, which, while intended to be a quick indie film with a lower budget and minimum number of characters, took nearly three years to complete. Everything in Old Dog, e. g. people, animals, and land, enters what Martin McLoone calls an “elemental struggle” (McLoone 2010, 135) for existential meaning. McLoone’s case study of Jim Sheridan’s The Field (1990) utilizes similar cinematic narrative styles as Pema Tseden’s Old Dog, especially in the playing out of the kinship and moral dialectics of a son and father in the dichotomous locations of the field and the road, and the town and the country. These elemental human inscriptions and their spatiality in both Irish and Tibetan landscapes are cinematically symmetrical when they are juxtaposed or interconnected, though they differ from each other in terms of values, aspirations, and existential meanings.

The story narrated in Old Dog is that of a young man named Gonpo, who sells his family mastiff without consulting with his father. As soon as his father finds out, he insists on buying it back from the dog dealer in town. The multilayered tensions in the film quickly build up between Gonpo and his father. To Gonpo town is full of opportunities for material gain; whereas to his father it is a source of suffering. The pastoral ground is home to both the son and the father; however, while the father feels rooted within it, the son feels restrained by it. The road in between their pastoral ground and the town brings one overwhelming change after another. While the road leads Gonpo, on motorcycle, to the town where he sells his family dog, it moves his father, on horseback, to retrieve the sold dog from the town dog dealer. It connects the home turf with the town throughout the film by bringing in a dog thief, a new dog dealer, the police chief, and, finally a death on the roadside. Shockingly, the elemental struggle of the old man in the film ends with his killing his beloved canine companion on the side of the road.

Although the cinematic style in Old Dog retains some of Pema Tseden’s typical depictions of the rural landscape, it moves away from a positive aesthetic style. Having received numerous awards from international film festivals in 2011, Old Dog has also initiated debate among Pema Tseden’s audience concerning Buddhist ethics in the context of changes brought by modernization and consumerism. In addition to 2011 being a year for celebrating Pema Tseden’s new productions, it also marked a new phase of his cinematic realism – a markedly documentary style incorporating factual representations of the current social conditions of Tibetans. No longer relying on the serene, idyllic scenes as the primary images of the Tibetan landscape, Pema Tseden’s realism offers instead a series of overwhelmingly depressed, desolate, disorderly, infertile, and scarred scenes to facilitate the narrative. The message of the film is clear: Tibet is desperately stressed.

Old Dog is Pema Tseden’s response to Chinese urban consumption of Tibetan culture, religion, and even dogs in this case. Tibetan mastiffs are an exotic commodity among urban China’s wealthy class. For instance Ma Junren, a former celebrity athlete and the chairperson of the National Tibetan Mastiff Club, owns a mastiff with the highest price tag: 40 million RMB or approximately US$6.3 million (Lü 2005). Breeding, exhibiting, and trading Tibetan mastiffs have become a large part of China’s consumer market. Currently among the four hundred and twenty-two officially registered Tibetan mastiff breeding sites, five are located in Tibetan regions. The rest are in non-native environments according to the National Professional Commission for Tibetan Mastiffs (NPCTM), a Chinese state organization overseen by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the State Council, and the Ministry of Public Security (NPCTM 2008). It is in this context that Pema Tseden responds to the collective stress that contemporary Tibetans are experiencing in addition to other consequences of modernization and the proliferation of consumerism in Tibetan regions.

In Old Dog, Pema Tseden’s cinematic hapticity almost coerces his audience into the feelings of chaos and psychological displacement. The audience is arrested with the “involuntary touches” of the lifeworld of the characters saturated with depressing moods and hopelessness over the loss of their familial and communal fabric and their traditional grounding in Buddhism. In town, wherever Gonpo goes with his motorcycle, we consistently feel a sense of irritation and repulsion from the muddy, potholed streets, piles of red bricks at construction sites, truck traffic passing through the town, the scrap metal in the backyard of the dog dealer, and a truckload of mastiffs on the roadside ready to be shipped out of their homeland. Pema Tseden further overwhelms his audience’s eardrums with a cacophony of sounds and noises from all directions: semi-trucks’ loud engines, air drills, broadcasting from loudspeakers, herds of yaks on the way to the slaughterhouse, and loud music blaring from shops. Pema Tseden and Dukur Tserang, his recordist and a musician, chose not to have music for the entire film. When Old Dog was screened at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in fall 2011, Dukur Tserang responded to audience’s questions about why they made that choice and why the ambient sounds are annoyingly noisy, “Our intention was to weave together a symphony of bewilderment and loss. If we added music the film would not feel the breath of the earth [referring to their homeland], such as the old man’s sighs and the old dog’s fatigued panting.” Dukur Tserang then continued to point out the emotional effect of using ambient sound instead of music, “When the protagonist [Gonpo] sees his old dog is about be locked into a cage, the sound/noise of air drills in the background shoots into his heart like a machine gun…depressing sounds of sorrow, distress, and pain are intertwined.”

A cinematic landscape, like its actual physical counterpart, would not be an emotionally and aesthetically touching scene of life if its soundscape were to be muted. In a cinematic landscape, like that of Old Dog, people and animals move, and inanimate objects are also set in motion with the movements of metereological elements, people, and animals. Sound flows with these movements and enters people’s inner world (Ingold 2011, 139). Haptic dynamics, then, also express themselves in soundscape. In this regard, the town in Old Dog is tiny but the commotions in it disrupt the greater whole: everything can be bought and sold, and everything can be torn down and built. The tiny town is a local hub of China’s global market on the ground level and everything in it seems to be in permanent transition with many buildings half-built or half-torn-down, and with trucks moving in with merchandise and construction materials and moving out with mastiffs and yaks.

Gonpo’s father returns home with his beloved old dog. Home, however, is no longer a haven. One of Gonpo’s buddies visits Gonpo’s father to propose a cash prize for the old dog. Gonpo’s father refuses. At night the old dog barks alerting the family of an approaching thief. The attempt to steal the dog fails but Gonpo’s father walks the dog to the foothill of a local sacred mountain to release it in the ruins of an old dwelling site. Herein Pema Tseden’s wide angles and long takes come in again bringing the audience in touch with the landscape of Gonpo’s home. The sky is blue, clouds slowly change shape in the wind high above, and the bleating of the family sheep in the valley can be heard. But, when Pema Tseden’s lens follows the old man crossing the landscape, the panorama touches the audience with a Shangrila divided up with barbed wire fences. The expansive landscape is cordoned into small plots of grazing ground. After the old man leaves his dog behind, a gloomy mood fills up the panoramic vision of their homeland.

The sadness of the parting of the old man with his dog does not bring peace to either of them. Found by someone, the old dog ends up again in the hands of the dog dealer in town. Gonpo then gets into a fight with the dog dealer in an attempt to have his family dog returned only to be detained by the police chief. The police chief returns the dog to Gonpo’s father and the father and son are reconciled in the police station. With the audience expecting a happy ending, Pema Tseden takes another turn: Gonpo’s buddy brings in another dog dealer proposing a higher cash prize for the dog. Declining the offer, Gonpo’s father sits with his dog behind the barbed wire fence. The camera’s long take prepares the scene for any possibility and then, after having stared at the fence post for a long time, the old man stands up, pulls the dog over to it, wraps the chain around it, and calmly but firmly strangles the dog. The old dog painfully whines and dies against the pole.

The death at the end stirs up divergent critiques and emotional responses among Pema Tseden’s audience, most of which decry the social reality of the consumer market across China as well as object to Pema Tseden’s uncharacteristic portrayal of a Buddhist response. Buddhism saves neither the life of the old dog nor his master, who as a Buddhist will suffer from his intention and action of killing the dog. Superficially, the killing is recognized as the old man’s act of saving his dog from being stolen, sold, or transported to urban China where the assumption is that he will have prolonged mistreatment and suffering. This “killing-for-saving” motif is common and often seen in war movies where a soldier takes the life of his mortally wounded fellow soldier so as to end his comrade’s suffering. Pema Tseden’s Tibetan and non-Tibetan audience seem unconvinced by this logic at the end of Old Dog.

To many non-Tibetan viewers it seems unrealistic that dog dealers would purchase an old dog or that a thief would risk the theft because of the fact that the old dog has little market value either as a pet or for breeding purposes. To quite a few Tibetan viewers Gonpo’s father is given too much power over the life of his old dog. The scene when he releases the dog into the wilderness is plausible as a common Buddhist practice but it is illogical in the customary sense. Gonpo’s father takes the collar off and unchains his dog and simply leaves him behind. Pema Tseden’s gloomy long takes in this scene do not suggest the sense of freedom integral to the traditional Buddhist releasing of life; instead it appears as an act of turning a family dog into a wild dog or of a parent abandoning his child, both of which convey a sense of emotional death or the ending a kindred bond. The old man’s letting the dog free to die by itself shows the dog’s fundamental lack of freedom. The final act of killing the dog was particularly shocking to many of my friends from nomadic areas of Amdo. They sympathize with Gonpo’s father who is disturbed, angered, and feels hopeless in the face of the overwhelmingly profit-driven behavior of people around him; however, as one audience member from a nomadic family remarked, “The life of the dog belongs to the dog and not to his master.” The father is able to reconcile with his son but not only fails to protect the family dog but is the one responsible for his death.

In one of the review sessions I also raised similar questions to Pema Tseden. His creative concern is not directed to seeking cultural, religious, spiritual, and ethical consistencies. The film is meant to mirror everything inconsistent, illogical, insensitive, dislocating, and disturbing happening in his homeland. According to him and his crew members, Old Dog is a fiction of factual representation, not representing conventionally perceived cultural and Buddhist logic embedded in Tibetan lifeworld but rather representing the social and psychological conditions in contemporary Tibetan regions. Every act of the characters is not to be taken literally but can be seen as a signifier toward something else. For instance, when the old man remarks that Gonpo’s dog dealing buddy does not look like his father, Pema Tseden’s intent is rather to express the widening generational gap among Tibetans: the older generation’s Buddhist-oriented ethos and the younger generation’s aspiration for material wealth are disjointed. Moreover, the younger generation’s desire for profit is materialized as a formidable force of negative social change resulting in stealing and selling objects and living beings that were traditionally barred from commercial exchange, such as a family dog. Therefore, the killing is not killing per se but expresses the morally suffocating social environment of Tibetans and the physically distressing transformations brought forth by modernization and consumerism.

Buddhism in this context is the crucial medium that ultimately links everything together in Old Dog, producing emotions not only in the cinematic story but also off-screen, among Pema Tseden’s audience. It does not touch the audience with soothingly enlightening messages about life and death; instead it is shown to be vulnerable in the consciousness of the characters and their familial and social environment. When Gonpo’s father wraps the chain around the fence post to put down his family dog, audience members with a Buddhist background recognize the impending death of the dog as well as the moral death of Buddhism embodied in this particular act of killing. Throughout the film, Pema Tseden’s lens does not have particular foci on Buddhist scenes, such as ritual performance or devotional acts, yet he successfully emotionally and morally moves his audience along with the moving fate of the old dog in the hands of different characters: the father, the son, the dog dealers, the faceless thief, the police chief, and the barbed wire and fence post.

In linking the scenes in the film with my own ethnographic experience in Amdo, Pema Tseden’s realistic reproductions of events, architectural changes, and generational displacement of people reveal the existential values and moral orientations from his home region. Old Dog is a distress call to Tibetans and non-Tibetans alike. He captures and integrates the real time, negative consequences of modernization into his motion picture where homeland becomes an arena of alienation, moral corruption, and struggle for both physical and cultural survival. The death of the family dog can be seen as fulfilling a sacrificial role for a fresh start of the family or as a martyrdom to pacify the mounting tensions and distresses that his master is experiencing; yet off-screen the effect is rippling through Tibetans in and outside Tibet, generating a new wave of debates and contentions on Buddhist ethics and the national integrity of Tibetans in the midst of modernization and globalization.

Buddhism, in his films, is not a moral and spiritual paragon outside the lives, the conscience, and the cultural reflexes of his characters but is an animated, immaterial component in his cinematic narratives. Herewith, the haptic effect of Buddhism could be a series of “somatic sensations” (Paterson 2007, 6), not a result of cutaneous touch or the direct skin contact but “the multiplicity and the interaction between different internally felt and outwardly oriented senses” (Paterson 2009, 768). Pema Tseden’s cinematic hapticity is diffused in each of the frames of his cinematography from corner to corner, and from beginning to end, and it is not the actual, subtle emotive skin surfaces of his characters which he intends to depict but the “skin” of Tibet’s landscape and its people’s mindscape which is undergoing multiple transformations in terms of its environmental condition, social ethos, and people’s moral and kindred ties with their land. Frame by frame Pema Tseden illustrates the changing skin of modern Tibet. The technique of his cinematic hapticity can be best described in Pallasmaa’ words, “The very essence of the lived experience is moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision” (Pallasmaa 2005, 10). In many ways, the wide angles and long takes in Pema Tseden’s films, especially in Old Dog, have an obvious preference for capturing materials and surfaces of modern Tibet with a complex language of their own. His cinematic landscape not only speaks to his audience but also enters their mindscape and emotional world nudging them to feel “ensounded,” “enlightened,” “enraptured,” and “embodied” (Ingold 2011, 135, 138) even when the subject possesses none of those characteristics or conveys their opposite. In the world of cinema the eye and the ear are the skin: they touch and are touched.