par Brigitte Duzan, 21 novembre 2012
"The Hunter and the Skeleton", the first Tibetan animated film: splendid!
by Brigitte Duzan, November 21, 2012
Recently Tibetan cinema, produced in Tibetan by Tibetans, was represented until recently by two leading figures: Pema Tseden , who is in a way the founding father, and Sonthar Gyal , who appears a little as his disciple, being his chief operator since his first films.
We must now add a third director who has just appeared in an unexpected area: animation cinema. Discovered in Paris Shadows festivalin November 2012, after having been in August in Songzhuang 9 th festival of Chinese independent cinema, then a month later at the Vancouver Film Festival, "The Hunter and the Skeleton" ( "猎人与骷髅怪") has stood out everywhere for its originality and quality, design and achievement.
A film drawing on a very old tradition
The scenario takes an old Tibetan legend: one night, a hunter meets in the mountains a skeleton, evil spirit with which he concludes a pact to escape death. The other is then attached to his steps, and the unfortunate hunter must find a way to get rid of it before arriving at the village, to prevent it sowing terror.
This legend goes back to a background of beliefs that should be analyzed, without pretending to a thorough study, but to better understand the iconography that is related to it, and which is the basis of the film.
A legend anchored in the religion bon
The skeleton
The skeleton is a specific figure of a Tibetan tradition that goes back to the timepre-Buddhist, and more precisely to the Bon religion which was banned and persecuted in Tibet in the seventh century of our era, but whose main texts are posterior, manifesting cross-influences. Religion indeed experienced a renaissance in monastic form in the eleventh century, after the second transmission of Tantric Buddhism, the two religions maintaining contacts.
The Bon religion has finally been recognized by the current Dalai Lama as representing the fifth Tibetan tradition. A number of monasteries destroyed during the Cultural Revolution have since been rebuilt, including Zharu in Sichuan, which displays a typical stylistic syncretism.
Despite the persecution of the lamas, the Bon religion remained relatively alive among the people, but especially in the areas of eastern Tibet and the south-west which, for a long time under Chinese control, were not under the direct control of the lamas. The bön popular religion, which is of an animic and shamanic type, is translated into practice by a set of cults that are rendered to harmful spirits whose actions are to be stopped by various practices based on meditation, magic, trances and exorcisms. .
The legend of the hunter and the skeleton comes, typically, from eastern Tibet. The skeletons areamong the evil spirits of the Bon religion, terrestrial spirits opposed to the heavenly spirits. Skulls and skeletons are among the symbols adorning the tiara and ceremonial clothing of priests, sacrificial cuts often being formed of a half-skull.
The figure of the skeleton is found in a Tibetan folk dance, the "skeleton dance", instituted in the eighth century by Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, founder of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism . In this case, it is a syncretic figure, become a protective spirit of mass graves and cemeteries (1), and a representation of the impermanence of things, and life.
The hunter
The hunter, meanwhile, is an equally symbolic character that we find a representation in the legend of Milarepa. While he was meditating in the forest, Milarepa saw a stag arrive which he persuaded not to fear being hunted; then appears a dog that Milarepa convinces not to kill, then the hunter who is in turn convinced of the mistake
The inspiration of the skeleton of the film
of his actions and becomes a faithful disciple, living from then on according to the holy principle that every being must be protected and saved.
Modern illustration of the legend
"The Hunter and the Skeleton" takes up the specific iconography of the two characters, and especially the skeleton , in its most traditional forms, in painting as in dance, but in a very stylized form, in the line as in the color.
The iconographic source is rather the pair of skeletons protecting the cemeteries usually represented in the thangkas: white skeletons, very fine, with often a very long mouth, split on regular teeth. The ears are often decorated with colorful fans, here evoked in a stylized way.
As for the hunter , the legend of Milarepa is recalled at the beginning of the film in a short sequence where he goes to pray a Buddha: it reminds him then that we must not kill living beings ... His face is drawn in broad strokes, reminiscent of the profiles of ancient Indian religious paintings.
The landscape
As for the landscape of the film, it comes directly from representations of landscapes in thangkas, with a simplification of the line and the application of bright colors; the landscape of the beginning of the film even reminiscent of a thangka well particular, representing Mount Kailash , which is precisely a sacred mountain in the Bon religion, as well as in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Local language and music
The young director has completed his research on visual expression with an original soundtrack that gives the film an early and authentic appearance.
He uses dialogues in dialect from the region of Ganzi, where he comes from (see below). As for the music, it consists of mountain songs of the shepherds of the region and popular music of Batang, in the same region, whose sounds come mainly from stringed instruments.
But this traditional music is recomposed, giving a modern score that remains however in very warm tones, particularly adapted to the story it accompanies.
Director
The film is signed by a young director who makes his film debut: Gentsu Gyatso , in Chinese Bai Bin ( 白 斌) .
He was born in 1978 in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of Ganzi, west of China's Sichuan Province ( 四川省 甘孜 藏族 自治州) . He began studying painting at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts from 1997 to 2001, then continued with a two-year PhD. In 2003, he went to Germany to study engraving at the School of Fine Arts in Kassel.
On his return in 2004 he became a professor at the School of the University of Fine Arts of Southwest Nationalities (Southwest University for Nationalities 西南民族大学艺术学院) , Chengdu (Sichuan), where he teaches always.
His film is both a reflection of his paintings, and that of the traditional culture and popular religion of his native region. He announces perhaps another pole of development for the Tibetan cinema being born, a pole of Kham (Sichuan), with a specific culture, next to the pole of Amdo (Qinghai) constituted by Pema Tseden and his entourage , with a role played by the Chinese universities of the two regions concerned that it would be interesting to deepen.
(1) The skeleton is in this case integrated with the legend of Padmasambhava, demonstrating the influence of the bon on Buddhism at a time when the lamas were trying to eradicate it. Atypical character, adopted son of a king who wants to leave his throne, Padmasambhava refuses and abdicates, but, while dancing on the roof of the palace, he accidentally drops the two scepters they held, and kills the son of the king and his mother; he is then banished by the wrathful king, and sent to a mass grave where, with skulls, he fought a temple for meditation ... then continued his cemetery meditation in a cemetery.
Un film puisant dans une très ancienne tradition