Intersecting Narratives beyond Governmental and Religious Institutions: Daily Tibetan Discourse in Pema Tseden’s The Silent Holy Stones, Tharlo and Balloon

Abstract

This thesis explores the intersection of national narratives and Buddhist storytelling in the works of Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, focusing on his films The Silent Holy Stones (2005), Tharlo (2009), and Balloon (2016). I argue that The Silent Holy Stones employs multiple Journey-to-the-West structures to complicate the intersection of storytelling of national government and Tibetan Buddhism in Amdo Tibet in the early 1990s, and the film itself offers a localized storytelling strategy that goes beyond the two institutional narratives. Tharlo focuses on the transformation of the political object regulated by the PRC government in the Tibetan region from Maoist era to post-Mao. I investigate the Shenfen Zheng (ID card) journey of Tharlo to see how his identity search is filmed in Pema Tseden’s cinematic narratives. Balloon tells a woman’s struggle under the birth control policy in the mid-1990s, as a result of the battle between the governmental and religious institutions on the reproductive power. The three films exhibit various groups of Tibetan people in different historic phases, with a shared empathy on Tibetan individuals and culture that represents enough complexity of a new Tibetan storytelling.