Contested Tibetan landscapes in the films of Pema Tseden

ABSTRACT

This article closely examines the representation of landscapes in two films, The Silent Holy Stones (2005) and Old Dog (2011), both by the Tibetan director, Pema Tseden. Through mobilizing a range of formal techniques, including the use of long takes, a documentary aesthetic, and foregrounding acts of looking, these films portray Tibetan landscapes as realms of contested meanings between different subjects. I argue that these contested Tibetan landscapes in the films of Pema Tseden open up the space for the emergence of a heterogeneous Tibetan subject whose imagined worlds and lived realities cannot be captured by any singular narrative or dualism between tradition–modernity or resistance–subjection. At the same time, they suggest a form of minority ethnic self-representation that resists homogenizing and re-naturalizing a singular Tibetan voice. This essay situates Pema Tseden's films in a larger sphere of contemporary Tibetan cultural production in the PRC, and proposes connections to projects of cultural activism and cultural renaissance enacted by minoritized groups in other contemporary contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Pema Tseden
• film
• landscape
• Tibet
• minority
• cultural production

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the guest editor of this special issue, K.C. Lo, for his enthusiasm and encouragement, and the two anonymous readers for their very useful suggestions. I would also like to thank Chris Berry and the organisers of the 2014 Chinese Visual Festival, held at King's College London, for giving me a first opportunity to engage with the films of Pema Tseden as member of the Arts and Culture in Tibet Today Panel (11 May, 2014). Finally, I would like to thank the participants of the IIAS Seminar, Governance and Challenges in China's Peripheries and Ecologies (Leiden University, 28–29 May, 2015), for their comments on a very early draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Anup Grewal

Anup Grewal is an assistant professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Toronto, Scarborough, and the Tri-Campus Graduate History Department at the University of Toronto, in Toronto Canada. Her research interests include, modern Chinese cultural history, literature, film and women's and gender studies.