Buddhist Stories in Korean Cinema

Films with specific Buddhist content do not make up a significant percentage of Korean cinema, and among them not many can be confirmed as the products of self-conscious Buddhist religious practice. Rather than relying on the self-understanding of the filmmakers, however, I read the 'Buddhist film' within the historical lineage of a specific cultural tradition of popular oral performances, as well as its derivative tradition of popular narratives. Seen in this light, the thin trickle of films joins forces with a well-established and traditional deployment of art as religious practice. Hence, rather than isolating the films withing their modern temporal framework, I instead view them as the contemporary evolution of a process that began as far back as the eighth century.

This strategy allow us to gain a diverse perspective on Korean cinema as well. Korea's film industry has been, for most of its history, an ideological battleground define by twentieth-century history. During the ear of Japanese colonial rule (1910-45), the film industry was monitored for nationalist sentiment and utilized for pro-Japanese propaganda. After the north-south division of the country, which began with the Soviet-U.S. occupation (1945-48) and which solidified after the civil war (1950-53), the ideological standoff between the two Koreas intensified the political use of film on both sides. While North Korean cinema is a state-controlled affair, from production to distribution, the South Korean industry has been only slightly better off, being constantly subject to ideological control and censorship. The Korean Motion Picture Act (1962), for example, suppressed any portrayals of poverty and economic conflict, promoting instead narratives of prosperity tied to the Park Chung Hee regime (1961-79). Since the 1980s, the easing of political pressures has given rise to the use of film as a medium of social criticism - a freer yet equally political utilization. Concurrently, more films have been produced for the international market in the pursuit of national prestige as well as of cultural identity.

The Buddhist film makes its appearance largely since the 1980s and is well represented in the category of the international export film. Its relative novelty can lead one to interpret it as the outcome of contemporary social needs. Hence, the turn to religious themes is read by Hyangjin Lee in Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics (2000, p. 61) as a 'search for a moral vision of society,' particularly in the midst of rapid modernization. Im Kwontaek's Mandala (1981) and Come, Come, Come Upward (1989), and Bae Yonggyun's Why Has Bodi Dharma Left for the East? (1989), in fact, all exhibit a social consciousness that is the hallmark of South Korea's 'new wave' filmmakers, and they utilize a Buddhist filter in order to address contemporary concerns about class and poverty, as noted by David James in Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema (2002). The Buddhist film also reflects the vogue of traditional culture and folkways as a subject of Korean cinema, made most explicit in such films as Im Kwontaek's Sopyanje (1993) and Festival (1996). This new interest in the past bespeaks the contemporary yearning for identity and cultural pride. In addition, the nostalgia for traditional and folk culture can be read as a politics of aesthetics which 'traditional Koran culture' is marketed to the international film community as a way of gaining currency in the global cultural arena.

Bearing these contemporary dynamics in mind, our view of these films can be significantly broadened if we place them within the lineage of Buddhist religious practices. To illustrate this, I will examine 'Passage to Buddha' as exemplary of the tendency of Buddhist scriptures to be co-opted into more popular and accessible formats. Passage to Buddha is the English translation of the Korean film title, Hwaomkyong, which is the Korean name of the Avatamsaka Sutra (Chinese: Huayanjing). The film borrows its narrative from the final chapter of the sutra, which also exists independently in the Sanskritic tradition as the Gandavyuha (entry into the realm of reality). In this text, the central character - a young boy named Sudhana - sets off on a pilgrimage to attain enlightenment from 53 successive teachers. These 'enlightening beings,' who are the subject of the first half of the Gandavyuha, have two notable qualities. First, they take a multitude of human forms: mendicants, priests, scholars, scientists, doctors, merchants, ascetics, entertainers, artisans, and craftsmen (The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, 1993, p. 1169). This variety embodies the Mahayana view that all beings are bodhisattvas who have a role to play in the weal of other beings. It also underscores the concept of 'expedient means' (upaya), and the idea that different people respond to different kinds of teachers. The enlightening beings take on different forms for that reason. This is also related to their second notable quality, which is that they are 'phantom' beings who appear to people according to the latter's need: 'Having pervaded the cosmos with their emanations, they enlightened, developed, and guided sentient beings' (The Flower Ornament Scripture, p. 1168). As phantom manifestations, the enlightening beings demonstrate the Mahayana view that illusion can be a form of benevolent magic.

The human diversity and the skillful magic of the enlightening beings lend themselves to narrative description. the idea that all kinds of beings can function as spiritual guides sets up the possibility of many kinds of narrative scenarios. It offers a leave, if you will, to enter into any number of human predicaments for their inherent dramatic interest. In Passage to Buddha, the pilgrim is an 11-year-old boy names Sonje who wanders through modern-day Korea, particularly its social margins. The film opens in a crematorium where the body of Sonje's father, too poor and inconsequential to be identified, is rendered into ashes. Beginning with the loss of his father, who is never seen or named, Sonje proceeds in the rest of the film to search for his mother, who apparently abandoned him as an infant. The themes of orphanage and homelessness, as we will see, are ubiquitous Buddhist tropes. They pervade the medieval biographies of eminent monks and surface in both our films.

Sonje's search for his mother is overtly conflated with Sudhana's search for Buddhahood, as the former declares that his mother can be found in any 'good person.' The interchangeability of mother and Buddha as objects of yearning is depicted in one Oedipal dream sequence in which Sonje encounters a beautiful older woman who makes love to him. At the end of the film, Sonje has another vision, this time of his mother, who declares to him that she is the mother of all beings, including the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The ultimate convertibility of signs, or manifestations, is a pointed declaration here, very much in the spirit of the Gandavyuha's teaching that enlightening beings take any and all forms. The specific conflation of Buddha and mother, who is also depicted as a love object, makes the further point that the traditionally antipodal realms of religion and domesticity are oppositions that must be overcome. Interestingly, Sonje has difficulty accepting this lesson in his own life, when he rejects marriage to the young woman he has impregnated in order to continue his spiritual pilgrimage.

Sonje's succession teachers include a doctor, a blond beggar woman, a political prisoner, an astronomer, and a lighthouse keeper. In keeping with its namesake text, the film narrates a deliberate process in which each teacher sends Sonje on to the next, indicating the each as a particular teaching to give and that a variety of encounters are necessary to attain the full Dharma. The idea that each human encounter imparts a spiritual boon is denoted by the deep bow that Sonje renders to each character before moving on. The one personage that weaves in and out of Sonje's journey is the apostate Buddhist monk, another abiding trope of East Asian narratives. At the very beginning of his travels, Sonje encounters the monk in a restaurant, eating meat and drinking wine. The monk appears again midpoint in the film to exhort Sonje to marry the little girl - now a young woman whom Sonje initially met at the crematorium. In the final encounter, Sonje sees the monk working with the village women, gutting fish in order to earn money for wine. The meeting culminates Sonje's sense of hopelessness and confusion, triggering a suicide attempt and the ultimate turn toward understanding, as signified by the aforementioned vision of his mother.

The world-embracing monk, with his decidedly nonmonastic ways, is a familiar figure that reaches back to the popular Buddhist text the Vimalakirtinirdeua Sutra. The text is named for its principle character, Vimalakirti, a noncleric who indulges in worldly activities yet who bests the most renowned Buddhist disciples in Buddha wisdom. This second-century Mahayana text was extremely favored in East Asia for its emphasis on the value of lay life. The critique of monastic reclusion that is implicit in the wold-embracing monk is a prominent theme in Korean Buddhist films. To be sure, Passage to Buddha's overall focus on the social fringes - each of Sonje's teachers bear the pain of a personal or social lack - manifests a political consciousness that is the imprint of post-1980s Korean cinema. The concordance of religious practice and social service, however, is a theme explicitly emphasized throughout the Avatamsaka, which embraces worldly activity and skills 'guided not by the personal desires of the practitioners but by the current needs of the society that they are serving, according to what will be beneficial' (The Flower Ornament Scripture, p. 41).

In simply co-opting the title of a significant Buddhist text, Passage to Buddha declares its lineage. Beyond lifting its plot line from Sudhana's famous pilgrimage, the film plays on the theme of enlightening illusions. One method it employs is a classic use of dreams as a way of advancing the tale - as well as Sonje's spiritual knowledge. Both dream episodes entail encounters with mother figures that are emotionally and religiously loaded. In the first, Sonje's Oedipal encounter with his mother/lover abruptly and rather disturbingly ends when she falls from a cliff during a post-coital excursion. In the second, Sonje finally has a vision of a woman who calls herself his mother, as well as the mother of all beings. the dream sequences mark significant noes in the plot/journey - at the point of maximum loss and absence and at the point of maximum attainment and presence. The ability of dreams - which, after all, are illusions - to function so meaningfully in the course of Sonje's journey can be paralleled to the medium of film itself. This is pointedly suggested by a curious detail in Passage to Buddha: The boy Sonje never ages despite the passage of many years. This detail explicitly invokes the conceit of the Buddhist-derived short dream, as I have discussed elsewhere in Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in the Dream of the Nine Clouds (1996, pp. 85-107). When such dramas are told as stories or acted out as films, the efficacy of the former is extended to the latter genres as functional equivalents. These 'transformations,' which offer a distilled and potent experience of life, are better vehicles of instruction than the distracted experiences of waking reality.

Passage to Buddha is a secular telling of a story derived from Buddhist narratives and tropes. In that sense, this film continues the tradition of oral storytelling performances, which are themselves derived from religious storytelling practices - both Buddhist and shamanic. In this lineage of performance, entertainment is a logical aspect of religious practice because the ability to 'entertain' a reality made present by art is a necessary step to religious truth. Passage to Buddha is overt and didactic about linking religion and art, paralleling the religious journey of Sudhana with the film journey of Sonje, and by using the dream trope to implicitly question the distinctions between dream, reality, and film. The qualitative performance of the religious question in the medium of film enables one to transcend the distinctions between the religious, the secular, and the aesthetic as merely functional qualifications of the greater truth of presence.

[This essay was written by Francisca Cho. It was extracted and slightly edited from her chapter 'The Art of Presence: Buddhism and Korean Films,' which was originally published in Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making (2003), pp. 107-119. Aside from the short clip above, Passage to Buddha turns up on YouTube from time to time and separate English subtitles are available here.]

Traditional Music of Southern Laos

Between the time when French musicologist Jacques Brunet recorded the music of Southern Laos in the early 1970s and the re-issue of these recordings on CD in 1992, Laos (by that time having become the People's Democratic Republic of Laos) had experienced war trauma, the flight of great numbers of people, isolation, and the beginning of healing. During the Vietnam war the United States dropped unimaginable quantities of bombs throughout the south (along the so-called 'Ho Chi Minh Trail') and in much of the northeast. In some provinces, virtually every town and sizable village were destroyed. Economic and social development were also stopped or rolled back. Provinces which once had running water and electricity, at least in the main town, ceased to have either. Where tourists formerly visited (e.g., Vat Phu near Champassak), there were only abandoned restaurants and a little-used hotel. In 1991 modern tourist hotels remained under construction just as they had been when workers walked off the job in 1975. Travel within Laos by both Lao and non-Lao was strictly regulated by the government; consequently, few were able to visit formerly familiar sites such as Luang Phabang, Vat Phu, or the Bolovens Plateau. Therefore, this set of recordings has a strange air of nostalgia, especially since it had been re-issued with the same notes used in the original Phillips recording of 1973.

Unfortunately, offering criticism of Jacques Brunet's mainland southeast Asian musical recordings has all the challenge of shooting fish in a barrel. As Jarernchai Chonpairot and I pointed out in a 1979 review ('Review-Essay: The Problems of Lao Discography.' Asian Music 11/1 (1979): 132-34), there were numerous problems with regard to both selections and annotations. These have not changed; indeed, considering the time gap, they are now greater. Southern Laos, which includes much of the lowland area of Laos (the terrain in which the mainstream Lao live) runs along the Maekong River just across from Thailand. To the east, however, is the Annam Cordillera, a chain of mountains which is both home to numerous non-Lao upland groups and the former site of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A collection of music surveying this region should include several of the lowland Lao regional genres of lam (repartee) singing accompanied by khene and other instruments; it should also include music of representative upland groups. In this the collection falls short.

Of the eight selections, five represent the lam/khene tradition of the lowland Lao, two the survival of the court music tradition of the former kingdom of Champassak, and one the upland tradition. Among the first group, three are instrumental and two are vocal. All three of the Lao non-classical instrumental sections (1, 5, and 8) are played on the khene, a free-reed aerophone with fourteen or sixteen bamboo tubes arranged in raft form in a wooden windchest and sealed with a black insect product called khisut. Since khene players normally improvise within one or five (or sometimes six) modes called (in northeast Thailand) lai, it is odd to hear more than one player perform at a time, as we do in the opening selection, 'Pheng phi fa (this is evidently a fixed melody). Brunet remarks that 'The title of this piece, like many others, cannot be translated ..., [it is now only a string of] words ... handed down traditionally, the meaning of which is now forgotten.' To the contrary, pheng means 'piece' (of music) and phi fa is the animistic 'sky spirit.' In a ceremony, a medium singing to the accompaniment of a khene attracts the phi fa to inhabit her/his body and answer questions, usually as to why someone has become ill. The present performance, in which small cymbals called sing are also used, is the ceremony's accompaniment without a singer/medium.

Selection 5, played by the late master khene player, Thao Phet Sananikhone, is a medley of three pieces whose order Brunet has confused and whose titles are left unexplained. The first selection is his 'ma it thiet lo hat' (a small female dog walks along the beach), and improvisation which alternates between the two modes that both have a D2 as the 'tonic' pitch: lai noi (d fga c) and lai soi (de gab). The second piece should properly be called 'sut sa naen,' not 'sut sa men'; it uses pitches ga cde. The third piece, 'tit sut noi,' refers to closing a certain pipe, which is the drone common to both lai soi and lai noi (d), with khisut. The pitch system used here assigns pitch A to the lowest pipe, making the tuning system A, B, c, d, e, f, g/g, a, b, c', d', e', f', g', a' (See Terry E. Miller, Traditional Music of the Lao: Kaen Playing and Mawlum Singing in Northeast Thailand, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). The third khene selection (8), 'lot fay tay lang [the train runs along the track], is puzzling; while this kind of piece used to be common in northeast Thailand where there are two rail lines (terminating at Ubon and Nong Khai), to my knowledge there has never been a railroad in Laos. Unless the player had travelled to Thailand (or had come from there), it seems unlikely that he could have imitated something he had never heard. Nonetheless, the performance is effective, with the addition of a convincing whistle.

Two selections claim to represent the vocal styles of southern Laos; however, only one does, in fact, do so. Although item 2, 'Lam sithandone,' should be the local style of Pakse and Champassak, the singers perform part of a lam klon cycle from northeast Thailand; they sing lam nyao, the second of three parts, and lam toey, the final one. Furthermore, the male singer has a memory lapse during the performance. The khene player, evidently not familiar with these singers, tried to lead them in both toey pamah and toey hua non tan, sub-types of toey; unfortunately, however, the singers did not know the songs and oculd not continue. The second selection, 'Lam of Savannaket' (7), is, in fact, genuine lam khon savan from Savannakhet. It is sung by one of the greatest singers of Laos, Bunthong Insixiengmai, but without his usual female partner, Somwang, who is mentioned in his poetry (Bunthong has lived in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA, since at least 1979). The khene player does not seem to be totally comfortable with the accompaniment; he may, in fact, have come from the other side of the Maekong.

The two 'classical' examples on this compact disc are both played by amateur musicians who live in village near the former Kingdom of Champassak. this small court, one of three such entities in Laos (the others being Luang Phabang and Vientiane), once controlled most of southern Laos and part of what is now Cambodia. this fomer kingdom of Champassak was under Siamese control in the nineteen century, before the French came to dominate Laos. The pinphat selection (3) reflects influence from Siamese court music in that the composition came from Bangkok. Some Cambodian influence is seen as well, however, since the ensemble's last teacher had come from Phnom Penh around 1960.

The following observations, made by a learned Thai classical musician/teacher Panya Roongruang, formerly of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and who is currently a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at Kent State University, indicate how far this performance has deviated from its original source. According to Panya Roongruang (personal communication, 1993), while the performers seem skilled, they do not play the melody in the usual instrumental idioms (thang), which normally create heterophony or polyphonic stratification; instead, they play more or less in unison. the cymbal (sing) player has the pattern reversed, ending on a 'sing' rather than 'sap.' The musicians seem to have forgotten a good percentage of the piece; they have mixed sections and patched together a version of 'pheng kom' that is far removed from the Siamese/Thai one. The second piece, 'Pheng soysonthat' (6), is played by a wedding ensemble which, according to the notes, consists of two khene, so-duong (two-stringed cylindrical fiddle), and so-u. All play in unison and repeat the melody without variation. The drum pattern is nathap lao, but in Thai practice it would have been nathap brop kai song chan. These examples represent what certain surviving classical musicians play today, and, while their continued existence (I recorded the phinphat in 1991) testifies to their seriousness, they must technically be accepted in the context of an isolated Lao town and not compared to the great ensembles of Bangkok.

An annual buffalo sacrifice takes place at the ruined Khmer temple, Vat Phu, which is located eight kilometer south of Champassak, near the western bank of the Maekong. While this may be of importance to the lowland Lao, the music is evidently provided by the lao thung (upland Lao, formerly called kha, a pejorative label) from Salavan province in the interior. Lao thung is a collective term for people, 'who live on the slopes' (and not the highest mountains, such as the Hmong). In this case, it probably refers to either the Loven or Tauoi, both of which are Mon-Khmer groups (See Frank M. Lebar et al., Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press, 1964, pp. 143, 151). Their instruments are distinctly upland (drums and gongs), and the language of the singing is evidently upland Khmer.

In conclusion, I expect that having this album available is better than not having it at all; however, to reissue it without correcting the annotations seems a waste. The music of the little-known country of Laos remains shrouded in mystery; this is partly due to the lack of materials and partly to documents such as this which misrepresent and distort the traditions.

[This essay was written by Terry E. Miller and originally published in Ethnomusicology, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 1995, pp. 162-65. It has been slightly edited for inclusion on TV Multiversity. Further information about the recordings discussed in the this essay can be found here and here, and there are numerous videos featuring the instruments mentioned in this essay, especially the khene, currently available on YouTube.]

Nutritional Wisdom in a Korean TV Drama

Since its production in 2003, 'Dae Jang Geum' or 'Jewel in the Palace,' the 54 episode Korean TV drama, gained popularity around the world. Part of the 'Korean Wave' of TV dramas, it has been dubbed into several languages and has aired on TV in Japan and China, among other places. In 2007, millions of people in Iran watched a Farsi dubbed version on national TV. Unofficial  'fansubbing' has provided access to the series in countless languages, from Arabic to Tagalog. On the surface, the series tells the story of the first female physician who earned the special title of 'the Great' in the kingdom of Korea in the first half of the 16th century, dramatizing an era of Korean history in a way that makes it appealing to people who live in different parts of the world today. Although it focuses on how society and religious authorities were against the presence of a woman in high ranking positions, and includes the requisite love story for productions of this sort, an important aspect of the series is its emphasis on a traditional system of nutrition and medicine.

The first part of the story takes place in the royal kitchen and emphasizes cooking skills based on the health characteristics of food, along with the careful preparation and selection ingredients. This traditional medical knowledge and its relationship with food becomes clearer when Jang Geum begins to study medicine and eventually becomes the King's private doctor. Her success in medical practice is related to her background in food preparation and her artistry in combining them is demonstrated in numerous scenes, such as for example when she creates an edible form of medicinal garlic for one of her patients.

Another important aspect of the series is in the names and titles used for diseases and medicines, which are in the common language spoken and understood by everyone in Korean society (although if this carries over through the multiple translations would need to be investigated). Even though there were medical institutions and pharmacies, people of the day also learned about medicine and about finding and preparing medicinal herbs from the countryside and the mountains by themselves. Rather than separating people from medical knowledge, as the academic works in the field tend to do today by way of specialized jargon, the health system depicted in the series suggests that traditional Korean medical knowledge and nutritional wisdom was understood by ordinary people as well as by the specialized practitioners.

The series also emphasizes a method of disease diagnosis from the traditional health care system that looked first and foremost at diet and nutrition. In the climax of the series, for example, Jang Geum carefully investigates from where the special food for the ailing king had come, and through that she finds out that drinking milk from cows that drank water from a sulfuric lake introduced arsenic into the patient's body, which in turn lead to his chronic illness. On another occasion, when there was an epidemic in different parts of the kingdom, the cause was traced to a vegetable blight. These aspects of the series bring to mind such modern maladies related to food, such as mad cow disease and avian flu. The difference is, however, that with today's eating habits increasingly dominated by the giant food industries, identifying and solving health problems related to food has become politically and economically inviable, if curbing unhealthy food intake can be construed as a barrier to trade or economic growth and thus liable to litigation, as was seen the McLibel Trial.

The ordinary people depicted in 'Jewel in the Palace' understand what they eat, the herbs, spices, vegetables and other ingredients in their foods. In addition to identifying ingredients, cooking skills are also related to subsidiary issues such as the change of seasons and knowledge of local flora and fauna. Even though it is a historical drama, it depicts a traditional medicine and food culture that is still part of the East Asian life and culture today, in many cases side by side with the modern sciences, which can be considered as part of the rich culture of the past that every human being can enjoy in every era. The series and its immense popularity today gives pause for reflection on the socio-economic aspects of health and indirectly suggests that the medical and nutritional wisdom of the past remains relevant.

[This review is by Yusef Progler and was originally published in 2008 as a media report in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 41-42. It has been edited for reprinting here. The original article is available as a PDF at the JRMS website and there are dozens of clips from the series on YouTube.]

Comprehending the Vietnam War in Film

For those who like their Vietnam films in Technicolor and Dolby stereo, Karma would probably be a disappointment. But this stark, simple - and black and white - venture has other things to commend it, beginning with the fact that it is a Vietnam film made by and about the Vietnamese. Directed by Ho Quang Minh, an overseas Vietnamese based in Switzerland, Karma was in fact the first independent production undertaken in Vietnam since 1975, and, in marked contrast to official Vietnamese cinema and Hollywood alike, it focuses on what Minh described as 'the only real losers of the conflict - the South Vietnamese Republications.'

The story, told in flashback, traces the war's human toll, not in terms of battles and body counts, but through the destruction of a marriage. The husband, Binh (played by Vietnam's most popular actor, Tran Quang), a South Vietnamese soldier, is reported dead; shortly afterwards, his wife, Nga (Phuong Dung), is forced to evacuate her village and resettle in a strategic hamlet outside of Saigon. As it turns out, Binh is still alive, but when he finally makes his way back to Nga, he discovers that she, like thousands of other women in her situation, has become a bar girl in the capital. At this point he gives himself up to the military machinery, joining the Special Forces and participating in the most dangerous operations (as well as the brutal and humiliating rejection of his wife) until he virtually commits suicide by exposing himself to a bombing raid.

The antithesis of an action film, Karma, is a slow, somber evocation of a moment that went on for years. There is no suspense - the film opens with Binh's funeral - and no heroics (also no Americans). Like a tapestry of memories, it is woven with details of daily life and custom, much of which, as Minh himself points out, is bound to escape non-Vietnamese viewers. but the drama of loss, the images of decadence, and the rhythm of despair convey an unmistakable message.

Karma was filmed on location in the south, with camera equipment and materiel inherited from the Americans, and technical advice from former members of the South Vietnamese Special Forces (who also served as stuntmen). The film premiered at the Montreal Film Festival in 1986 and has been making the rounds of other festivals in Europe and Asia. It was also showcased at the Film Forum theater in New York but so far does not have an American distributor. Nor has it been screened publicly in Vietnam, because the original production agreement was limited to foreign distribution, although extensive private screenings have elicited enthusiastic response, and the film has now been cleared for release there as well. Ho Quang Minh spoke with Cineaste Associate Miriam Rosen at the Three Continents Festival in Nantes, France.

Cineaste: Although you were born in Hanoi and grew up on Saigon, you studied engineering in Switzerland and filmmaking in Paris before returning to Vietnam to make Karma. How did that come about?

Ho Quang Minh: I went home in 1981, for the first time in fourteen years, for what was supposed to be just a short visit to see my family. I have a friend there who's a cinematographer, however, and he introduced me to the Vietnamese cinema and other filmmakers, and I wound up staying for a whole year. That's how I found out it would be possible for me to make films in Vietnam as an independent filmmaker.

Cineaste: When you were filming in Vietnam, did you have the feeling of being a foreign director or an overseas Vietnamese director?

Minh: As an overseas Vietnamese, I'm also Vietnamese, but, at the same time, I have a different background. The South Vietnamese cinema - and that's where the people I was working with had their training - was totally commercial, and even if they're making serious films now, maybe too serious, what they're aiming at technically is what they were used to doing before. The actors, for example, don't want to work: they want to sit in the shade and come out when you're nearly ready to shoot. Then they don't know their lines and they don't concentrate, and, if you want to do two or three takes, they get mad. It's not like here, where you do it fifteen times, until it's right. They're also afraid of being filmed without makeup, and sometimes, even when they're playing peasant roles, they want to wear nail polish.

Cineaste: You're obviously still glad to be working there.

Minh: Every time I go back - and I've been there ten times since 1981, or what amounts to about half of my time - it's really good to work in my own language. Even if my French is sometimes better than my Vietnamese, because I know my vocabulary is richer in French, it's  something running in my blood, I think, to speak Vietnamese and to direct in Vietnamese. Its a very strong experience for me. Just like the rest of my generation, I've been marked by the Vietnam conflict and contemporary Vietnamese history so much that I don't think I could do anything else without coming to terms with my memory. There are so many things I'd like to understand, and I'd also like to convey that understanding to other people through filmmaking.

Cineaste: When you say 'other people,' do you make a distinction between Vietnamese and foreigners? Is one more of a priority than the other?

Minh: This is an important point for an artist. I think first of all you have to be authentic, but you also want your work to be seen, so you always try to reach a universal truth. But one of the most powerful ways of reaching the universal is to be authentic. That's the reason why, when you see a film like mine, you sense that it's dedicated or devoted to the Vietnamese, and I think that's true, because I tried above all to make it authentic, to show the reality of Vietnam in it specificity. I didn't want to internationalize the content, to say things in a certain way to make the film more understandable to the Americans or the French. I just made it as I felt it would have been, and, if its good enough, I thin it'll interest everyone. To be honest, I never saw Karma as an isolated film. From the beginning, I decide that I would focus the first stage of my filmmaking career on a few films about Vietnam, to unwind my memories, and I had a program. I wanted to start with this film to focus on the only real losers of the Vietnam conflict, the South Vietnamese Republicans.

Cineaste: Why was that?

Minh: I have a compassion for the weak, the losers, because they're more tragic; there are more dramas, more sacrifices involved.

Cineaste: Do you identify with them? There's a difference between compassion and identifying.

Minh: I wouldn't say that I identify, but I'm very close to them because I lived with them when I was growing up in Saigon. I had a South Vietnamese passport, so I understand them more, I understand their problems more than the North Vietnamese. That was the first priority, and the most powerful sentiment I had about the war, which is what I tried to convey in Karma. From the beginning, I intended to make a second film on the winners, the North Vietnamese. Again, I don't want to talk about heroism, I want to show what kind of sacrifices they had to make in order to endure, to be heroic. That is the point of my next film, which is in preparation now. And the third film will embrace the international point of view, either French or American. If I succeed in making the series, people will get a sense of an entire landscape of moral values and sentiments.

Cineaste: How as the screenplay written?

Minh: I worked from a short story called 'The Wounder Beast' written by Nguy Ngu. I was able to collaborate with the author, who happened to be both a good war correspondent and a good short story writer, and e gave me a lot of help in terms of direct experience of the war, which I didn't have. His story was written in 1969 or 1970, and, to give you and idea of how powerful it was in human terms, it was not only praised in the South Vietnamese press, but it was also published during the war by the Viet Cong and read over Radio Hanoi. When you remember that this was a civil war and people still reacted in that way, it really means something. I'd read a lot of short stories about the conflict, but when I read this one, I decided right away that was it. It was only ten pages long, but I realized right away that the author and I shared the same feelings, the same sentiments of waste and despair, of what to do now. These were remote feelings, not very engaged, just a kind of profound sadness, and that's what I wanted to convey in my film. That's also why the story isn't important to me as a plot but as a means of creating this atmosphere. Of course, this might make it difficult to understand for people who aren't ready to go with it - one criticism I've heard is that it's too long - but what I really wanted was for the audience to feel a bit heavy at the end. I hope at least that they stay until the end - that it's not boring - but at the end they should have a hard time getting up from the seat.

Cineaste: What kinds of considerations went into the style of the film?

Minh: If I can make a parallel with literature, I think there's a common dilemma confronting Third World writers and filmmakers. In the Western cinema, most of the traditional themes have been told and retold, just like in novels, so the difference, the plus, has to come from they way you tell the story, the style. That's the reason why newcomers are at their best when they propose a revolutionary form; sometimes it won't last, but that's the way to get noticed as a new director. If you must have good content, however bold it is, without a new form, you won't make that much of a mark. But in the Third World, there's still a lot to tell, so the content remains very important. When these works of are or literature are brought to Western audiences, they have the added advantage of exoticism: people are less choosy about the form. That's why Latin American novels have been so successful - they're very strong in content, even if they're quite traditional in form. What I'm getting at is that we, as filmmakers from the Third World, also have to think of form. It's not just a meeting of telling a story, but also how to tell it. The problem is that cinema is a Western language. From that point of view, at least, style and form are automatically Westernized. There is also a whole technology involved - it's not like the poet who is happy with a pencil and a blank page.

Cineaste: The role of the woman, and the presence of women in general, is one of the most striking aspects of Karma, and what really keeps it on a human scale. How did you decide on this approach?

Minh: When I was talking with my friends in Vietnam and they'd ask what kind of a film I wanted to make on the war, I'd tell them that I wanted to start with the South Vietnamese Republicans and I really wanted to have female characters, prostitutes and bar girls if possible, because they were really mistreated in the conflict, with all this propaganda about Vietnam as one big whorehouse. It's true that were a lot of prostitutes in Vietnam during the American war, even the Indochina war, but when you think that there were a million South Vietnamese solders and half a million American soldiers, who were really tourists there, it's understandable that you had at least a few hundred thousand prostitutes. I wanted to explain, at least on this level, to show that they were human beings.

Cineaste: Do you think audiences in the U.S. will be able to appreciate your film, especially since Vietnam War films there are getting more and more epic, with more mud, more battles, and more Americans.

Minh: That's a problem with movies in general - the action film has more chance of drawing a large audience. I don't think my film will touch a wide audience, but my hope is that it'll be there for people who are ready to see it. There are a lot of people, especially in the United States, who were really affected by the war and who will be able to get something out of my film because they wanted to understand more about what they experienced.

[This article was originally published in Cineaste, Vol. XVII, No. 2, September 1989, pp. 38-39. Ho Quang Minh's fourth film, Thoi Xa Vang, premiered at the Gothenberg Film Festival in 2005.]

Ethical Media and Social Reconstruction in China

In December 2004, I found myself in a meeting room at Guangzhou's Guangdong Film Distribution Corp., participating in a discussion about the difference between a 'communist' and a 'party member' with the producer, director, cinematographer, and distributor of the independent documentary Soul of the Nation (Guohun), which tells the stories of China's nationalist and communist revolutionary heroes by touring their tombs and memorials throughout the country. Zhao Jun, the producer, recalled that his elementary school teacher had explained that whereas a communist was a true believer in communist ideals, a party member was somebody who had joined the Communist Party as an organization. Although I was interested in researching independent media production outside the party-state and I have read quite a lot about independent documentaries that exposed the dark sides of the party's history in the Western and Diaspora Chinese media, I did not expect to meet a group who jokingly self-identified themselves as 'Bolsheviks outside the party' in 2004, making and distributing a 'red theme,' independent documentary in Guangzhou, the frontier of China's 'reform and openness' and globalized commercial popular culture.

Furthermore, the four individuals - Zhao Jun, Zhong Luming, Chen Shuisheng and Gao Ning - are neither bitter 'old leftists' nor 'angry youth.' Rather, they are very 'urban middle class' - successful media professionals in their forties and the indisputable winners of the reform era. Zhao is the manager of the Guangdong provincial film distribution bureau. Zhong is a popular DJ at a Guangzhou radio station. Chen is a director of photography at the Zhujiang Film Studio. Gao, the distributor, formerly worked as a reporter for a local party organ. None of them are party members. But they each have a strong sense of idealism, sharing a concern about social injustice and rising inequality, about the lack of democracy in China, and about what they see as the corrosive impact of a hyper-commercialized media culture on popular consciousness. Most importantly, contrary to the neo-liberal marginalizing strategy of portraying anybody who is critical of the reforms as 'wanting to return to the past,' these individuals made it clear that their work was about the future. Precisely for this reason, their targeted audience is the youth. In fact, the impetus for the documentary came from Zhong's experience as a DJ in Guangzhou radio and his realization that his popular culture and celebrity-obsessed youthful audience had little sense of Chinese history - in 1999, when he asked his audience about two important dates in Chinese modern history, they phoned in to say that they were the birth dates of a pair of pop culture stars. His idea for making a documentary about China's nationalist and revolutionary struggles resonated with his friends, and so began the five-year process of making a 'red' educational documentary about nationalism and communism from outside the system. For these individuals, the 'dialectic of the Chinese revolution,' which for Jiwei Ci (1994) has gone from 'utopianism to hedonism,' seems to have reached its opposite: from hedonism to utopianism.

The group raised two million yuan from their own pockets, their circles of friends, and Hong Kong sources and went through all kinds of ordeals and humiliations, including having to stalk a film bureau official from the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) in a washroom, in their efforts to secure a production permit. Without official status, they had to rely on persuasion to secure access to some of the closely guarded memorial sites. Some of their families and colleagues did not understand them. Custodians of revolutionary memorials in affluent areas such as Shanghai and Guangzhou reminded them even the Communist Party itself has turned away from such a subject. The crew's Guangdong origin was also frequently the source of suspicion as they traveled the country in search of China's revolutionary and heroic souls. 'Aren't you Cantonese interested only in money-making?' they were often asked. But Zhao Jun believed otherwise: 'Communist ideals aren't obsolete as long as there are injustices in society.' They not only reminded people about Guangdong's revolutionary credentials in modern China, but also explained to me that Guangdong's economic development is precisely what has made it possible for them to raise the necessary funds to pursue the project. Responding to my query about the relationship between nationalism and communism and the film's foregrounding of nationalism, Zhao Jun argued that the nationalism they celebrate is anti-imperialist, not chauvinistic. He also insisted that communist ideals have long had a Chinese grounding and are both universal and national.

The crew also found many sources of encouragement and discovered many 'resources of hope,' as Raymond Williams (1989) would say, during the process. One film bureau official, moved by their determination, ended up strategizing with them about how to best approach a higher-level SARFT official. Propaganda officials and custodians of memorials in poor and old revolutionary base areas welcomed them with open arms. In Guangdong's Pearl River delta, Gao Ning recalled with great admiration how the director of a township cultural center, who was also the township's film exhibitor, assumed the duty of looking after the bicycles of the film's student viewers, saying that, as a party member, the least he could do was to ensure that the student viewer's bikes were not stolen while they were watching the film.

When I met Gao Ning in Guangzhou, she was busy promoting the film through Guangzhou's school system. However, she realized that the most relevant audience would be party officials, and a perfect window of opportunity had opened up for her to reach them. Although they had started the project in 1999, by the time it was completed in 2004, the Hu Jintao leadership had launched the ideological education campaign to 'preserve the advanced nature of communist party members.' Consequently, this group of independent cultural producers and 'autonomous communists' were hoping to use the documentary to reeducate party members about communist ideals. As Gao explained, this was a formidable task because it meant obtaining the approval of the party's propaganda department and organizational department. She said that somebody had even given her a multimillion-yuan quote about the 'cost' (i.e. the bribery needed to grease the wheels of the party machine) of getting the documentary listed as the party's recommended study material. Of course, this was antithetical to the very ideals of the film, and Gao was not optimistic about the chances of success on that day in December.

Yet shortly after I left China in January 2005, I read a news story on the internet reporting that the film had indeed become a designated study piece for the party's education campaign, and Zhang Dejiang, the Guangdong provincial party secretary, widely condemned for his media censorship acts in China's liberal media circles, had specifically instructed provincial party leaders to watch it (Nanfang Daily, 2005). Thus, a genuinely independent cultural production ended up feeding into the party's ideological education campaign. The communist commitment of a group of urban media professionals outside the party reportedly moved more than a thousand party members in party-state organs to tears in a collective viewing of the documentary on 6 February 2005 (Nanfang Net, 2005). Although this particular dynamic of intersection between agency and structure, official and 'unofficial,' as well as the past, present and future, is perhaps not 'representative' of 'what truly happens' in China, it is hard to ignore how this story underscores the ironic twists and turns of the developmental logic of media and communication in contemporary China.

[This essay was extracted from a longer piece by Yuezhi Zhao entitled 'Rethinking Chinese Media Studies: History, Political Economy and Culture,' which was published as Chapter 11 in the book Internationalizing Media Studies edited by Daya Kishan Thussu (Routledge, 2009).]

The Nature of Tibetan Buddhist Medicine

A 2006 television documentary, ‘The Blue Buddha: Lost Secrets of Tibetan Medicine,’ introduces the Tibetan Buddhist medical tradition and the relationship between Buddhist teachings and medical knowledge, emphasizing that the founder of Buddhism considered himself as a healer, rather than as a god or a prophet, and that he presented his teachings not as doctrines but as remedies intended to heal the body and mind. These teachings form the basis of Buddhist oriented medicine today, with regional variations, and so the documentary begins by surveying its historical development in Tibet.

At an 8th century conference held in Tibet, participants from India, Nepal, Greece, Persia and China met to share their wisdom. Tibetan medicine developed as an inquisitive fusion of these traditions, filtered through the Buddhist spiritual worldview. In the 17th century, the 5th Dalai Lama oversaw the compilation of this knowledge as a series of 79 detailed paintings, which are a blend of medical knowledge and Buddhist teachings, and which serve both as an aid to learning and as an art form. Doctors who mastered this tradition at monasteries in Lhasa travelled throughout Asia spreading their wisdom. In the 20th century, Cold War politics and the Chinese occupation drove many Tibetans into exile in India. In 1961, a medical institute was established in Dharamsala, including a school and a facility to manufacture medicines.

In the Tibetan tradition, virtually anything can be used as medicine and the healing process is usually understood as a collaboration between doctor and patient. Ailments are treated according to methods involving correct diet and behavior, and making use of natural medicine and accessory therapies such as massage and acupuncture. Medicinal compounds made from plants and minerals are stored in a visual encyclopedia along with other aspects of the tradition. A diagnostic painting, for example, depicts a tree with three branches, illustrating the diagnostic technique with its emphasis on touch and pulse taking, and the practice of gaining intimate knowledge of the patient through interviews and questioning.

Along with surveying Tibetan medicine, the documentary emphasizes dialog. Tibetan medicine is forward looking, as suggested by Dorje Dawa, a doctor at the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute in Dharamsala, who says that, ‘We cannot be content just to say that Tibetan medicine is one of the most ancient systems of healing. We need to interact with modern medicine so we can authentic our results and cross reference our diagnoses and treatments to correct inaccuracies. That does not mean we should lose our identity in trying to imitate Western medicine. We need to create dialog with Western science.’ Such a dialog would have to recognize the strengths of each tradition, as Dr. Dawa continues, ‘Western medicine is good for acute ailments and for emergency cases, as when there are traumatic injuries, whereas Tibetan medicine is good for long standing conditions or chronic diseases. Its particular strength is getting at the root cause of diseases, rather than masking or just treating the symptoms.’

While Western medicine and science tend to have an uneasy, if not hostile, relationship with religion and spiritual knowledge, in the Tibetan tradition the two work hand in hand. Tibetan doctors have a detailed knowledge of plant habitat and medical uses, for anything ranging from tonics and sedatives to anti-viral compounds, and they learn to combine plants and minerals in myriad ways to treat various diseases. However, these compounds are activated by a series of ritual prayers, some taking months to complete, which energize the medical compounds to do their healing. Another important difference is that death is not seen as a failure of treatment. Instead, according to Buddhist eschatology, death is seen as an awakening from the dream of life, and so part of the role of the Tibetan doctor is to help a patient recognize that death is near and to assist in the preparation for the passage from life, rather than frantically clinging to life.

The ‘Blue Buddha’ also features a profile of Tuvan Dorzhi Radnayevich, a Buddhist monk and doctor of Tibetan medicine who works in Ulan Ude, the capital city of Buryatia, a Russian republic in southern Siberia. Known in the local community as Tuvan Lama, he is shown receiving visitors at his clinic, making house calls and providing various community services. Returning to the theme of dialog, Tuvan Lama suggests, ‘It is not that we ignore modern Western medicine. They have their own excellent aspects, such as surgical treatments and computer analysis. They can be very effective and we can make use of them. In the future I hope we can combine the good points of Western medicine and traditional Buddhist medicine.’

By inserting several calls to dialog within a general overview of Tibetan medicine, the producers seem to be suggesting that the key to dialog between the Tibetan Buddhist and modern Western traditions of medicine is an independent and rigorous training in and acceptance of the Buddhist tradition on its own terms, rather than as a supplement to the Western training. While admirable, this overlooks another crucial aspect of dialog, which is to move the dialog beyond Western medicine, and to create many dialogs among medical traditions of the world, such as the Ayurvedic system of India or the Islamic tradition.

‘The Blue Buddha – Lost Secrets of Tibetan Medicine’ is a Canada/Japan co-production directed by Aerlyn Weissman and Tetsuya Itano, produced in 2006 in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. It is currently available on Google Video.

[This review is by Yusef Progler and was originally published in the Journal of Research on Medical Sciences, vol. 13, no. 2, 2008.]

Healing Arts in an Ancient Indian Tradition

‘Ayurveda: Art of Being,’ a 2001 documentary film by Pan Nalin, opens with an elderly man collecting and washing plants by a riverside, begging pardon from the Lord for uprooting them, saying that they are necessary for medicine. That single scene encapsulates the main message of this film, echoing Hindu cosmology, that for Ayurveda ‘everything in and around us are one and single existence.’ Dr G. Gangadharan of the Medicinal Plant Conservation Centre in Kerala, India, elaborates on this principle: ‘The microcosm, the body in which we are living, or that of all the living beings, and the macrocosm around us, are all part of one unit. And the role of the physician is merely the role of a conveyer belt between these two, where he may be processing something so that the body can easily assimilate it. Other than that, there is nothing. He is doing nothing other than substituting things which are lacking in the system by things which are available externally.’

The term Ayurveda broadly refers to the ancient Hindu medical system, recorded in texts dating back three thousand years and divided into eight branches that correspond roughly to internal or general medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, ear, nose and throat, surgery, toxicology, geriatrics and rejuvenation. The earliest texts refer to what would be recognized today as brain research, noting the neurological qualities of health and disease. The ancient corpus was redacted by Charaka in around 300BCE, which provides a codified basis for the continuity of the tradition to the present.

Ayurvedic medicine proceeds from five bodily elements arranged according to three energies: 1) space and air, with the basic quality of movement, 2) fire, with the basic quality of heat, and 3) water and earth, with the basic quality of fluidity. In diagnosing a patient, the physician will take pulses for these three energies on the nerves of the thumb, index and middle fingers, and supplement this with careful examination of the fingernails, which indicate blood flow, and the eyes, which reflect disease and constitution. In addition to demonstrating diagnosis, the film features treatment sessions in which therapies ranging from massage to purging are utilized.

The intimate contact with each patient, from diagnosis through treatment, is underlined by a basic principle, as stated by Ayurvedic physician Brahmanand Swamigal, who insists that, ‘I do not treat diseases, I treat people.’ The film profiles Swamigal, observing his practice and learning something of his training. From a long lineage of fourteen generations of Ayurvedic physicians, he began studying with his father at age thirteen and continued to study throughout his 55 year career, having learned specializations from 20 gurus, or masters, who used poetry as a way to aid in learning the medical principles and formulas. Many of these gurus are now deceased, perhaps pointing to the fragility of a trans-generational master-student tradition, but which is nevertheless necessary to interpret and pass on the interwoven ancient wisdoms to the younger generations.

The moral implications of the Ayurvedic tradition are explored by Brahmanand Swamigal, who suggests that ‘if science is only followed for money, it is wasted’ and that ‘wealth earned from medical sciences is always contaminated as it comes from the suffering of others, thus it must be practiced with compassion and humility, and without greed or ego.’ To demonstrate this, the film takes viewers into a free clinic in rural India, and in a section discussion training of practioners, it is suggested that before entering into a course of medical study or apprenticeship in Ayurvedic traditions, students are screened to be certain they can conform to these basic moral principles.

Throughout the film, several cases are presented in which Ayurvedic and Western traditions are compared. In a demonstration of treatment for diabetic retinitis, for example, Dr B.G. Gokulan, a practioner of Ayurvedic opthamology, notes that the Ayurvedic tradition is more concerned with treating the cause of disease, not just the symptoms. For treating schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, Ayurvedic approaches work to awaken the mind by removing toxins from the body, while the main approach in Western medicine aims to quiet the mind by prescribing sedatives.

Practioners of Ayurvedic medicine outside India are profiled in several case studies, such as at the Holistic Health Centre in Athens, Greece, where Dr Nicolos Kostopoulos applies Ayurvedic principles and methods, including yoga and herbal treatments, to help provide relief for his patients from the stresses of the modern lifestyle. Dr Scott Gerson, a physician at the National Institute of Ayurvedic Medicine New York, discusses questions about adopting the ancient Ayurvedic traditions to modern society, where people are more interested in instant results and shortcuts. Over the twenty years of his practice, he has come to that conclusion that, ‘what we are missing in modern society is being in harmony with the rhythms of nature’ and that many of the diseases of modern society are those of over-consumption, which need a lifestyle change.

Several sections of the film demonstrate the laborious procedures for collecting and preparing the natural ingredients, from minerals and plants, into various Ayurvedic compounds, some of which involve the use of gems and other precious stones integrated with astronomical data. In the end, however, Ayurveda is not merely a system of medicines and treatments. Rather, as Dr Ashwin Barot says, ‘Ayurveda is the art of living, how to live, and Ayurveda is the art of being.’

‘Ayurveda: Art of Being’ was produced by Pandora Films in association with Monsoon Films. Further information is available on the filmmaker's website and the film can be watched in 7 parts on YouTube.]

[This review is by Yusef Progler and originally appeared in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences, vol. 13, no. 3, 2008.]