Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)


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Reconciling Ethnicity, Subalternity and Chinese Eco-aesthetics: Human and Animal Subjects in Lu Chuan's Kekexili: Mountain Patrol / Chia-ju Chang

 

Abstract: An ecological discourse has not yet arisen in the mainstream of Chinese film studies. Lu Chuan's Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2004) is the first transnational feature film in China about the endangered Tibetan Antelope. This "eco-thriller" is based on a true event and is about a group of Tibetan volunteers trying to capture the leader of a poaching group who is responsible for mass-slaughtering and skinning the endangered Tibetan Antelope. The film engages a complicated politics of transnational capitalism, ethnicity, animal rights and aesthetics. In this paper, I first survey the history of animal poaching in the Kekexili area and the international shahtoosh trade. The film on the political subject of animal rights can be read as a potential challenge to Chinese communist authority and promotion of animal rights consciousness, and therefore deserves to be applauded. However, its transnational financing obscures an astute dimension of "First World" exploitation of "Third World" labor and animals. Secondly, I use this film as a case study to examine two strands of human-nature relationship in Chinese culture and history. One derives from the Daoist/Buddhist intellectual traditions, which advocate a harmonious human-nature relationship and biocentrism, and the other comes from the subaltern class, where daily life survival involves inevitable exploitation of nature/animal. While the later "subaltern" strand is found in the "documentary" style that addresses collated animal/human victimization, the former is evoked in the aesthetic representation of the background. I propose not to read them as mutually exclusive but co-existent in a non-Western ecological discourse.

 

In the three years between 1960 and 1963 approximately 25 million people in China died of hunger. As for beggars...I listened to a report by the 'advanced' Party secretary of a Chinese village. One of his main 'advanced' experiences was to organize his villagers into a beggar's brigade to go begging through the neighbouring countryside.

Fang Lizhi

 

Most large animals in eastern China were displaced long ago...Now the rhinoceroses and tapirs are extinct in China and the elephants and gibbons survive only in scraps of rain forest that remain in Yunnan...The giant saltwater crocodile is gone from China's estuaries. Mongolian or Przewalski's wild horses and saiga antelopes disappeared from the grasslands of western China during this century.

George Schaller

 

We not only persuade ourselves that we can take the human measure of inhuman time, we go further, and scribe the bounds of exploitation. This much is ours to use, we say, and that, and that. Listen: are the stones laughing yet?

T. H. Watkins

 

<1> Chinese cinema studies and ecocriticism are relatively new disciplines; a cross-fertilization between these two fields has yet to be explored. While the former is embedded in a leftist, humanistic tradition, the latter mostly confines itself to literary studies, despite a call within the United States for a multicultural and international expansion. The call for expansion also includes theoretical aspects from postcolonial and feminist thinking. In this paper, I use Kekexili [Mandarin] , or Mountain Patrol (2004, Kekexili hereafter), a film directed by Lu Chuan from the People's Republic of China, as a case study of "Chinese eco-cinema" that manages to bring together several discourses, such as postcolonial subaltern studies, animal rights and aesthetics.

<2> Kekexili is the first Chinese film that deals with endangered animals and local animal protection groups in China. The long-overdue subject matter subverts the anthropocentric shooting and viewing position for both Chinese and non-Chinese viewers. It should also be read as a daring and transgressive gesture that backhandedly challenges the law of the Father, which is represented by the Chinese Communist Party. However, putting the film in the context of the politics of transnational cinema, I found that Kekexili is guilty of failing to relate transnational capitalism to exploitation of non-Western human subaltern and animals. Here the term "transnational Chinese cinema" refers to "the globalization of the production, marketing, and consumption of Chinese film in the age of transnational capitalism in the 1990s" (Lu 1997: 3). I first survey the history of animal poaching in the Kekexili area and the international shahtoosh trade. I argue that the film's transnational financing obscures an urgent dimension of First World exploitation of labor and animals in the developing country like China.

<3> In spite of this failure, I see Kekexili as an attempt to work out divergent ecological positions cinematically. I will elaborate on two ecological discourses - the postcolonial subaltern discourse versus The premodern Buddhist and Daoist biocentric discourse - running throughout the film [1]. These two discourses are reflected respectively in the use of the semi-documentary narrative style and the employment of backdrop shots. I propose to analyze these two discourses, which help shape a unique postcolonial Chinese eco-cinema.  

 

Lu Chuan's Kekexili: a Subaltern's History and the Politics of Transnational Cinema

<4> Humans and wild animals in the remote Chinese hinterland are not beneficiaries but victims of modernization, and now of globalization. Kekexili is not the first time in which the depleted Tibetan Antelope residing in the Tibetan-Qinghai plateau are used as a subject matter of a film. The subject matter has already appeared in a couple of documentaries in China such as Balance (Pingheng, dir. Hui Peng, produced by Sichuan Television, 2001) and I and Tibetan Antelopes: A Glacier Runs through Here (Wo he zanglingyang - binghe zai zheli liuguo, dir. Yujun Liu, 2001) . However, Lu Chuan's Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2004) is the first feature film that dramatizes the endangered species and their guardians. Further, it has received numerous awards including the Best Film and Best Cinematography at the 2004 Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan; the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2004; the Don Quixote Award (special mention) at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival; the Grand Jury Prize (World Cinema - Dramatic) at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, etc.

<5> Kekexili, or Hoh Xil in the Tibetan language, means "the beautiful green mountain" or "the beautiful maiden." By describing the land as a "beautiful maiden," the term evokes an idyllic, feminine and maternal image of the land. At the same time, it also serves as an irony in that it is an androcentric story about the exploitation of local resources: the local people's labor/crime and mass-slaughter of animals. Based on a true event about a Qinghai-based patrol group, "Wild Yak Brigade," the film tells the story of a group of Tibetan volunteers trying to capture the leader of a poaching group which is responsible for killing and skinning the endangered Tibetan Antelope. Eventually the leader of the patrol group is shot dead and as a result in 1995, the Chinese government finally converted the area referred to as the Kekexili into a National Animal Conservation Zone. Though the issue is not addressed by the film, the story alludes to the small fraction of a clandestine yet the notorious international illegal trade in animal fur. In order to gain a full picture of what this film involves in terms of the politics of transnational Chinese cinema in conjunction with the issue of exploitation of Third World resources, it is necessary to provide some background information about a history of the Tibetan Antelope in Kekexili and the production of the film.

<6> Kekexili is a no-man's land - a high plateau of 45,000 square kilometers bordering the Tibet Autonomous Region , the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Qinghai province in China. The average elevation of the plateau is 4,600 meters. Though a no-man's land, it is home to many rare species including the Tibetan antelope, the yak, the wild donkey, etc. Based on the reports of the Qinghai Kekexili Nature Reserve concerning the history of Tibetan Antelopes, the Tibetan Antelope (Pantholops hodgsoni) , or chiru (a Tibetan term for it) originated from Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Close contact between the nomadic tribes and the antelope began around 1969 and 1979. Illegal poaching began in the 1980s for the high-priced wool for making shahtoosh, a Persian word meaning "king of wool." The animals have to be killed and skinned in order to obtain the inner coat that is considered the "finest, warmest and lightest wool in the world" for making shahtoosh.This business has drastically led to the dwindling of the number of Tibetan Antelopes from one million to 75,000 and approximately 20,000 antelopes continue to be killed every year. In 1979, the Tibetan Antelope was listed as an endangered animal in Appendix I of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna) in order to ban any all commercial international trade. According to the on-line Endangered Species Handbook, CITES Parties passed a resolution on the "Conservation of and Control of Trade in Tibetan Antelope" in 2000 and thereafter it has been protected by Indian and Chinese law. However, this has not stopped the poaching business. For example, the major trading state of Kashmir in India has still "allowed trade in shahtoosh, in defiance of a ban included in the national Indian Wildlife Protection Act" (Endangered Species Handbook). This trade in Kashmir - India is unofficial and clandestine as in China.

<7> While the Handbook puts blame on the local violence against the Chiru, the local version of the story is not dealt with here. Nevertheless it points toward a cause directly from the so-called "First World" in supporting the hunting business and trading. There is an example in which it talks about a high demand for shahtoosh from "First World" countries. "A Delhi salesman offered to supply 200 to 300 shahtoosh shawls every three months, claiming that his best customers were Germans, French, Italians and Japanese" (online Endangered Species Handbook, the Chapter on Trade) [2]. Another example reveals a version of the global capitalist strategy of obscuring the acquisition of exotic goods:

The New York luxury department store, Bergdorf Goodman, advertised shahtoosh in 1995 as a: "royal and rare" fabric, making incorrect statements about the wool having been obtained from the Mountain Ibex goat of Tibet which "sheds its down undercoat by scratching itself against low trees and bushes" from where it is gathered by local shepherds (online Endangered Species Handbook) [3].

<8> Kekexili provides a Chinese version of the story of exploitation of the Tibetan Antelope. Instead of dealing with the international aspect of the trade, it reveals the dire living condition of the animals, the minority's effort in protecting the animals without government support, and the local poachers' lifestyles. It is important to point out the dynamic of the audience in this transnational film. While the film dramatizes local subalterns' "poach or starve" dilemma to win the sympathy of native viewers, who can identify with these characters, it is at the same time conscious of its non-Chinese audience. It creates a distance for the non-Chinese audience to feel that the event they are witnessing is local and is out there. The fighting against the poacher is a local business and not globally linked.

<9> A condemnation of the global capitalist market that is responsible for the death of the animals is skillfully masked. At the beginning of the film, the narrator tells us in Mandarin that the reason why the Tibetan antelope are killed is the demand from American and European markets. What we see in the Chinese sub-title is exactly what is narrated. However, the English subtitle that is given below the Chinese obscures the specific mentioning of America and Europe and only translates it as "foreign countries." This "omission" or "slippage" exposes a transnational politics where the production of the film takes into consideration its transnational capitalist patron and its targeted non-Chinese viewers, especially the American and European upper (middle) classes or bourgeois consumers of shahtoosh.

<10> It is not surprising to discover that the film is co-produced by Columbia Pictures. Asked in an interview about whether Columbia Pictures intervened in the process of filmmaking, Lu Chuan answered , "there was a lot of communication between us. Our relationship with them involved not only financial investment, but the entire process - positioning, casting, story direction" [4]. What we see here, in terms of the recent global sponsorship of Chinese cinema production, is a shift of censorship from a communist officialdom to a transnational corporation. However, despite the film's welcome reception internationally as well as its surprising domestic success, Kekexili fails to address the true cause about the violence toward the animals and therefore it is politically ineffective.

 

Post-Maoist Chinese Ecological Discourse

<11> The founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu, once asked, " what is important after all? Everyone must eat - that is important" [5]. Being able to feed every single mouth in the rural area has been a major and inescapable problem for centuries that has haunted the People's Republic of China and previous dynasties. The concept of the "rural" in the undeveloped hinterlands away from the modernized coastal cities is not a romanticized "e-scaping" ground for the rich urbanites to escape from the "daily violence of the contemporary global village," as it is in affluent American society (Murphy 2000: 13). Rather, it is a dire locale filled with regional inhabitants who are on a par with the subaltern subjects in developing countries like India. In this light, ecological issues such as environmental degradation or animal rights issues have never been the most urgent matter in modern Chinese history, at least not at the official-ideological level. On the contrary, issues like these might easily risk an accusation of subverting a Chinese communist agenda that privileges humanity over nature/animal in the project of modernization.

<12> Henceforth, one might argue that, first of all, the rise of environmental consciousness , including a concern for animal rights , belongs to a privileged class; it has to do with the increase in wealth of the middle class and their response to modernity (Weller 2006: 6). Secondly, from an anthropocentric postcolonial standpoint, to take a pro-nature or pro-animal stance becomes suspect through its similarity to Deep Ecology, or what Huggan (2004) calls a "late-capitalist form of 'ecological imperialism'" that not only ignores cultural specificities but also prioritizes environment and animal rights issues over human problems in developing countries. Following this line of thought, one might easily ask: how can we turn our gaze to non-human animals like the Deep Ecologist who advocate an equality of all "sentient beings" when in China "some 30 million of its people live in absolute poverty, defined as not having enough money for food or clothes. Another 60 million make less than 28 cents a day?" [6]

<13> Such an ecological discourse (e.g., the "ecological versus anthropocentric" debate) in Chinese cultural productions like cinema has not yet been debated in the mainstream of Chinese Studies, at least in the American and European academe. Here the term "ecological" refers to a Lévi-Straussian, post-Cartesian decentering of an anthropocentric hierarchy, a plea for an egalitarian, non-teleological bio-diversity and a non-human-centered aesthetics (Conley 1979: 42). However, it is incorrect to say that there is no equivalent to ecological discourse in Chinese culture, particularly in Buddhism, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism [7]. In fact, ecological discourse - a concern for humanity's place within the world, or a relationship between humans and nature - is a centuries-old topic in Chinese philosophical and aesthetic thinking. It is reflected in the ancient cosmic view that divides the world into two or three parts: "tian ren" (Mandarin, meaning heaven and humankind) or "tian di ren" (heaven, earth and humankind). Although tian literally refers to "heaven or sky," is often considered as a premodern equivalent of the English word God, the non-animated nature, while di pertains to all things coming from earth. For the purpose of this paper, I narrow di down to only refer to non-human animals. Neo-Confucian , Daoist and Chinese Buddhist scholars believe that all things are governed by a unifying natural principle that underlies all modalities of life, which is the spontaneously self-generating life process, namely the vital force, or qi. Everything under the sun, therefore, participates in this continuous, dynamic cosmic process [8].

<14> Bio-centric Daoist, Buddhist and Neo-Confucianist thinking, can be seen as the equivalent of Western ecological thought. These philosophies did not vanish as history changed its course to a modernized, western route since the beginning of the twentieth century. The anthropologist Robert Weller contends that the "earlier ways of thinking about humanity and the environment in China did not wash away when Western ideas about nature became entrenched in the early twentieth century. Instead they remain in a lively and evolving dialogue with the global concepts" (Weller 2006: 8). While Weller mainly refers to the environmental movements in both China and Taiwan, I would add that these early attitudes inevitably sift through in some of the Chinese film directors' works, even more so as society becomes more and more alienated from its cultural roots.

<15> However, while the harmonious version of nature prevails over the Chinese elites, the quotes at the beginning of the paper shatter this illusion. Particularly, the first two quotes shows an antithesis of an idealized, transcendent vision derived from a privileged class, which often risks being associated with an elitist, capitalist and masculinist West. The depicted horrific reality about famine and the extinction of animals from the first two quotes reveals an enormous force of manmade "history" that trespasses the natural law of harmony. It also unveils a conflicting interest between human and other species. In other words, to tap into animal or eco-rights within Chinese cultural productions like cinema would seem politically complicitous with misanthropic groups in the West, which ignores a Chinese reality. In China, which has one quarter of the world's population, animal or environmental issues need to be addressed within the Chinese context of "human rights" issues, so to speak, addressing age-old poverty and hunger, particularly in rural areas.

<16> Furthermore, to exercise an anti-humanist Deep Ecologist interpretation of a PRC film is like committing a sacrilegious act since the film as a medium, like other arts, has always carried a humanistic mission, and is historically geared to "educate through entertainment" (jiao yü yü le) or to "serve" - the people - be it feudalist peasants, proletariats or global consumers - not animals. Shifting the platform away from an anthropocentric one transgresses the very foundation of a residual Chinese communist revolutionary ideology that zeroes in on class oppression and struggle. All of this is to say that to thrust an ecological dimension onto conspicuously anthropocentric characteristics of PRC cinema might appear to impose a capitalist, white perspective, erasing the urgency of human (e.g., minorities' and women's) agency and interfering with the debates over the (de)construction of selfhood and nationhood, and the local-global on the international silver screen - all of which constitute the current discourse of PRC cinema.

<17> In spite of all possible counter-arguments, I argue that the ecological elements are nonetheless worthy of venturing such an "inhuman" or seemingly "colonial/imperialist" act for the following reasons. First, it is fallacious to say that to exercise a non-anthropocentric perspective is to ignore humanist concerns; a non-human centered reading of cinema, or any cultural production, does not necessarily exclude human elements, but looks at how human and non-human issues are constructed and interconnected; as Ted Steinberg argues, a concept of human agency "credits ecological and biological factors without reducing them to rigid determining elements operating on a one-way causal highway [9].

<18> Secondly, if we take into account that not only humans but also animals and the environment are victims of the terrors of historical class oppression, it would prove fruitful to scrutinize the ways in which the historical destiny of women, ethnic minorities and nature are depicted. This includes the animated and non-animated human Other such as animals, plants, rivers, mountains - things that are often treated as a mere background for human drama in cinema - are interwoven into a collective cause of oppression and exploitation.

<19> Translating the previously mentioned discourse into a PRC context, particularly regarding the remote region of the hinterlands, the victimization of human lives and endangered animals results not only from local causes, such as an ignorance of environmental consequences accompanying modernization: e.g. over-grazing or deforestation that results in the desertification of land, soil erosion and sandstorm blasts, which have cost China billions of dollars to restore the land [10]. It also has a direct global capitalist cause that involves turning the local hungry workers into cheap labor and murderers, and animals into accessorial commodities for the rich. Therefore, the core problems of environmental degradation - not just in those "Third World" countries but also places like New Orleans in the United States - and the extinction of animals go in tandem with the poor living conditions of the local low-income inhabitants. The welfare of animals and other natural resources in rural areas is most pressing. Both poor people and animals in the rural areas are directly impacted by the world economy, politics and even weather patterns, and their survival directly affects one another. At the bottom of the hierarchy of exploitation, a silent animal, which appropriately typifies Spivak's mute subaltern best bears witness, and therefore can serve as an agent of a powerful critique of both local, industrial patriarchy and transnational corporations. [11]

 

A Subversive of Ethnographic Subaltern Subjects: Ethnicity, Class and Animal

<20> Upon watching the film, one cannot help but notice its inter-ethnic dimension. With regard to subaltern subjects in relation to ethnicity, the film subverts an ethnic hierarchy which grants superiority to the Han, the largest ethnic group in China. A conventionally anthropological reading of the film naturally subsumes it under the so-called ethnographic film or "minority film" since it touches upon the modern Amdo and Kham Tibetans' struggle for survival and their distinct rituals and customs such as the sky burial ritual, song-singing and dancing, and their way of cutting meat. Such an approach would reduce the ethnic Tibetans to the status of a subaltern.

<21> Yingjin Zhang, in examining early minority films, writes that these early works "conform to the 'ethnographic' paradigm in that they usually end up legitimizing the power and knowledge of the ethnographer (always a figure of the Han majority) rather than the alien (minority) culture investigated in the remote 'jungle fields'" (Zhang 1997: 82). However, Zhang argues that recent ethnographic films possess a potentially subversive power:

[recent ethnographic film] tactful[ly] builds up of a profound complexity and ambivalence, by means of which it not only interrogates - at a national level - the "grand myths" perpetuated in the previous films (e.g., the glorified revolutionary wars, the celebrated ethnic solidarity, and the exaggerated achievements of the socialist construction) but also problematizes - at a local or localized level - its own position as knowing subject, an oftentimes individualized subject burdened with the task of reassessing the culture of the nation and of rewriting its history (1997:82).

<22> Kekexili can be seen as an ambivalent project that simultaneously embraces and subverts the master plot of nationalism and modernization. Ambivalence is found in the character of Duo Yü and the question of who the true subaltern subject is in the film. First, the director employs a Han narrator, Duo Yü, a field reporter from Beijing who possesses multiple roles: as a viewing agent, Duo Yü provides the audience with a window into a marginalized minority culture and animal suffering. This is done by virtue of the perspective shots that allow the audience to identify with his viewpoints. Duo Yü's omnipresent camera is a metonym for the eye of Duo Yü, which also represents both Leo Marx's "machine-in-the-garden" intrusion and surveillance coming from a political center.

<23> As a knowing agent, he serves as an alter ego for the director, who attempts to mediate between different positions: the Han herder/poacher, the patrolmen and the animals. Finally, as a political agent, Duo Yü eventually completes the mission that the Tibetan patrol group fails to achieve - to stop the poaching of the animals. This is accomplished by way of a powerful modern weapon - journalism. After the death of Ri Tai, the leader of the patrol, Duo Yü returns to Beijing and writes an article to report on this tragedy, which attracts national attention. As a result, the Chinese government agrees to turn Kekexili into a National Animal Conservation Zone.

<24> The second point relates to the issue of subaltern subjects. At the beginning of the film, Duo Yü is swamped by a group of curious Tibetan children who innocently make faces in front of his camera. Through Duo Yü's eyes, we also witness the sky ritual, secular Tibetan life at a bar and the personal life of patrolmen. Here one might ask: are these Tibetan people - children, patrolmen, their wives and daughters, and monks, etc. - representative of the subaltern in the so-called "ethnographic" film, or, are they a disguise for another group of people who are the true victims of modernization and globalization?

<25> I am tempted to think that it would be a mistake to take Kekexili as a film about Tibetan life with the Tibetans as the main subaltern subjects. Rather, the true subaltern group in the film is represented by the local hungry Han herders-poachers whom the Tibetans track down. According to the elder poacher, Ma Zhanlin (the name can be translated as "a horse occupying a forest" as a telling metaphor for human encroachment of the non-human habitat), poaching is a direct result of environmental degradation, which causes desertification, famine and draught and drives the starving local workers into the business of poaching. All of his sons are involved in the poaching business; one of them used to be a veterinarian. The local herder's remark is a direct attack on current environmental conditions that affect the life of rural peasants and nomadic herders. Here the people and animals are symbiotically and causally linked. This reflects a reality about the contemporary lives of farmers and herders: "More than one-quarter of China is now desert. In the northwest, the pace of desertification more than doubled from 1,560 square kilometers (approximately 600 square miles) annually in the latter half of the 1990s, producing a continuous stream of migrating farmers and herders" (Economy 2004: 66).

 

Documentary vs. Mise en scène

<26> I'd now like to delve into the issue of representation and the role of aesthetics. The first question to be asked is this: suppose there are ecological and humanistic agendas in this film, then how does this film succeed in addressing issues of human/animal subalternity and environmental degradation? I take it that Kekexili adopts two rhetorical devices: the documentary in narration, and the aesthetic in cinematography. First, as a "documentary feature film," it renders a sense of realism that cannot be treated as mere entertainment to consume. In commenting on the strategic use of documentary as a style in Chinese cinema, Ban Wang argues for its necessity: "As the Chinese visual field is increasingly dominated by fantastic representations promulgated by the transnational industry and Hollywood's dream factory, documentary arises as a wakeup jolt to the self-indulgence in dreamy self-denial and visual whitewashing" (Wang 2005: 7). The neo-realistic, documentary tone gives the audience a sense of credibility. This is further substantiated by the reporter's journalistic narration and other factual literary texts, newspaper articles, and photographs displayed by the field reporter/narrator to win the audience's trust and sympathy. Furthermore, in order to render a sense of authenticity, Lu Chuan employs non-professional actors and uses characters from Wild Yak Brigade. For example, Gengsong Yongzuo, who plays Ri Tai's daughter, is the daughter of the patrol leader Gisang Sonam Dorje (Suonan Dajie) in reality. By using the victim's beloved daughter, the act of filming transforms itself into a meaningful, commemorative event.

<27> However, while viewing the film, one cannot help but be seduced by the background - the sublime view of the Snow Mountain and the power of the desert. It directs our gaze away from the foreground, the horrific subject matter. It also pulls us out of the documentary mode of representation as well as the linear progression of plot. Kekexili beautifully vacillates in between what Patrick Murphy would call the "timeliness" environmental, historic or documentary present and "the timelessness of epiphanic experience," or the Taoist or Chan Buddhist aestheticism. Since the film embraces the dialectics of Dionysian "timelessness" and Apollonian "timeliness," we need to ask: What does seemingly premodern Daoist and Zen Buddhist aesthetics signify here, if not an erasure of a so-called Third World agenda? What does it suggest, if not another "orientalization" project for mere commercial consideration in the global market? What is the "deep message" here, if any, that requires such a transcendent aesthetic gesture that is at the same time at odds with the documentary mode? What is negotiated or mediated here, if anything?

<28> The aestheticization of a film - a shift from content-based political discourse to form-based - can already be seen in the Fifth Generation directors' experiments as in the works of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and the like. It has been considered a marketable strategy in re-inventing a myth about China. While so much has been said about aestheticization that deviates from a sense of political urgency for the sake of market consumption in a globalized context, I want to propose another possible reading of the aestheticism in Lu Chuan's Kekexili. I argue that the mise en scène in the film challenges an anthropocentric assumption and explores the transpersonal dimension of the universe. For Lu Chuan, two kinds of sublimes are in dialog: while the documentary is linear, anthropocentric and tragic; the non-documentary elements are spatial, ecological and tranquil.

<29> If we see Lu Chuan's eco-aesthetic vision as an attempt to balance the predominant human drama, then another way of seeing the film becomes possible. The alternative is that of a Daoist and Buddhist one. From a non-human-centered standpoint, the astounding sublime beauty of Snow Mountain ceases to be a mere backdrop for human tragedy: the film ceases to be only about the ethnic Tibetan minority, the rite of passage of the male Han reporters, or about the struggle of the subaltern poachers. It is also a film about the uninhabited area of Qingzang Heights - the Tibetan Antelopes, the mountain, the desert plain, the quicksand, the rarefied air that almost takes the life of a patrol member, the blue sky, the starry night, the Chuma'er river and the silence, namely, the non-human and the earth itself.

<30> The shift from a human foreground to a non-human background privileges nature's language (e.g., the sound of the blizzard, buzzards' cawing, antelope's running-for-life panting, death and even the "sound of no sound") over that of human speech. The shift also helps us understand the scene of one patrolman's death, which is invested with a greater message. A member of the patrol group, Liu Dong, after recharging food supplies and returning to the mountain area to rescue other patrol members, is sucked into quicksand. His death has been foreshadowed in his name, Liu Dong, which is a homonym for "flowing into a hole." It is also foreshadowed in his girlfriend's heart-rending farewell remark.

<31> This scene challenges the human conception of death, which is often taken as a closure. The scene is shot with a silent, uninterrupted long take. After being completely submerged in the sand, the camera removes its close-up shot of Liu Dong's face and zooms out twice to render a lingering pan shot of the same location in which all human trace has been swept away gradually by gusts of wind. The pan shot suggests that nature negates all the human narratives with the language of silence. This scene is executed without any dramatic external diegetic music to sentimentalize this event. On the silverscreen, the "imagery" of silence appears in the most "dramatic" moment from a human point of view. Even the Daoist philosopher, Zhuangzi, marks the journey of his wife's death with music as a celebration of returning to nature. Different from Zhuangzi's celebratory gesture, the void of sound in Kekexili divests the film of the traditional dramatization, be it celebratory or bemoaning. Vision becomes centralized. The sight of death or more accurately, dying, baffles the audience in that it defies the narrative mode of representation and therefore, turns spatial, or put it in a Chan or Zen way, "turning blank."

<32> Silence, or in its visual form "empty space," has been the essential constituent for eco-aesthetics. The trope of the Buddhist and Daoist sense of empty space is ubiquitously found in Kekexili. The scene of the patrol group entering the mountain evokes the traditional "mountain and water" paintings where human subjects are insignificantly positioned. As said before, this is the repressed aesthetic impulse - a trans-generational one as well as an ecological one - embedded in the Chan Buddhist and Daoist tradition. However, if we interpret the film as a mere Daoist allegory that sermonizes the harmonious relationship between humanity and nature, we are missing out on a naturalistic tone in which humanity is at the mercy of mother earth on the untamed frontier. It subverts the vision of the literati's in earlier generations. To sum up, issues concerning nature or animals as objects of human exploitation and ecological or animal conservation are rarely a focus of Chinese films due to a unique historical, modernization path that can be aptly encapsulated by ecofeminists Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva's borrowing of Rostow's term - the "'catching-up development' path" - that propagates a model of "the good life" by "following the same path of industrialization, technological progress and capital accumulation taken by Europe and the USA and Japan the same goal can be reached." (Mies and Shiva 1993: 55) The myth of "catching-up development" is predicated on a false understanding of history as evolutionary and linear, which is also anthropocentric, and complicitous with a dualistic conception between human/culture and non-human/nature. To debunk that myth we need to invite an ecological perspective to scrutinize the world and text. In this paper, I have used Kekexili to show the ways in which diverse viewpoints, anthropocentric and ecological, converge. While negotiating these two polarized positions, I was reminded of a famous Chan gong'an (Zen koan) about a girl splitting into two, symbolically. One part of her elopes with her lover and lives happily thereafter while the other stays with her parents, but is bound to her sick bed. Which one is the girl's true identity? Or, back to the last quote I placed at the beginning of this paper: how can we even care about stones mocking the shortsightedness of humanity while there are still hungry people to feed and dying animals to save?

 

Author's Note

I would like to express my thanks to the editors of Reconstruction, Prof. Ban Wang and the anonymous readers for their suggestions and comments.

 

References

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Chris, Cynthia. Watching Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Callicott, Baird, and Roger T. Ames, eds. Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought. London: Routledge, 1979.

Economy, Elizabeth C. The River Runs Black. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Hallinan, Conn. " China: A Troubled Dragon." Foreign Policy in Focus. May 11, 2006. <http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3264>.

Hochman Jhan. Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory. Moscow (Idaho): University of Idaho Press, 1998.

Huggan, Graham. "'Greening ' Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives. "Modern Fiction Studies50.3 (2004): pp. 701-733.

"Illegal Shahtoosh Trade." World Tibet Network News. May 16, 1994. <http://www.tibet.ca/en/wtnarchive/1994/5/16_2.html>.

Kinsley, David. Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994.

Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1993.

Murphy, Patrick D. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Planet Ark: "Sandstorm-swept China to Spend Billions on Trees." May 15, 2002. <http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15960/story.htm>.

Schaller, George B. The Last Panda. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Steinberg, Ted. "Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History." The American Historical Review. An on-line Forum Essay. Vol. 107, No. 3, June 2002. <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.3/ah0302000798.html>.

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Weller, Robert P. Discovering Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Zhang, Yingjin. "From 'Minority Film' to 'Minority Discourse': Questions of Nationhood and Ethnicity in Chinese Cinema." Cinema Journal 36:3 (Spring 1997): pp. 73-90.

 

Filmography

Balance (Pingheng, documentary). Dir. Peng, Hui, produced by Sichuan Television, 2001.

I and Tibetan Antelopes: Glacier Runs through Here (Wo he zanglingyang - binghe zai zheli liuguo, documentary), Yujun Liu, 2001.

Kekexili, or Mountain Patrol. Chuan Lu. 2004.

Yellow Earth (Huangtudi). Kaige Chen, 1984.

 

Notes

[1] There are different schools of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. The one referred to in the paper is Chan Buddhism, commonly known as Zen in the West. Chan is primarily a product of Indo-Buddhism and indigenous, philosophical Daoism. Chan Buddhism, Daoism and its "Western offspring" Deep Ecology share similar aesthetic sensibilities. However, while, for the Daoists, the focus on humanity is reduced is to a minimum, Chan Buddhism, or Mahayana Buddhism at large, aims to return the focus to humanity, or the suffering of sentient beings. This is called the Bodhisattva's Path that is the embodiment of compassion and non-dualistic thinking. [^]

[2] See the chapter on "Trade: Tibetan Antelope" in Endangered Species Handbook by the Animal Welfare Institute (2005) <http://www.endangeredspecieshandbook.org/trade_tibetan.php> [^]

[3] ibid. [^]

[4] Lu Chuan talks about the co-production with Columbia Pictures in one interview: <http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=23490> (Asia Pacific Arts/ UCLA Asia Institute, April 17, 2005) [^]

[5] See Jasper Becker's Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, 9. [^]

[6] See Conn Hallinan's online article: "China: A Troubled Dragon." Foreign Policy in Focus . May 11, 2006. <http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3264> [^]

[7] For more information, please see "Chinese Religions: Ecological Themes" and "Buddhism: Ecological Themes" from Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective. David Kinsley. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. [^]

[8] See Weiming Tu's "The Continuity of Being: Chinese Visions of Nature" from Confucianism and Ecology. Tucker, Mary Evelyn and John Berthrong, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. [^]

[9] See Ted Steinberg's online article, "Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History." The American Historical Review 107: 3, June 2002. <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.3/ah0302000798.html>. [^]

[10] See Planet Ark: "Sandstorm-swept China to Spend Billions on Trees," May 15, 2002. <http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15960/story.htm> [^]

[11] For Spivak's statement on the voiceless subaltern women, see Spivak (1988: 271-308). [^]

 

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