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Robert Barnett
Inner Asia 4(2002): 277-346
The Secret History of the Potala Palace, a 1989 film about Mongol-Tibetan relations in the seventeenth century, was a milestone in the still tentative development of Tibetan film, with significant Tibetan participation and close attention to Tibetan sources of history. This paper suggests possible reasons for the withdrawal of the film from circulation, and proposes ways of reading film in the context of contested versions of ethnicity.
The paper gives a brief survey of Tibetan film and discusses the implications of 'reverse readings' of propaganda materials in Tibet, and sees this film as an enactment of the practice by ethnic groups in China of appropriating state rhetoric as promises. It summarises the work of the Tibet Theatre Group, and of the Chinese writer and director who worked with them on the film, and discusses the political changes in Tibet during the production period and their effect on reception of the film's treatment of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The film's aim, to depict the virtues of nationality harmony, is complicated by its depiction of Mongol rulers as degenerate and by its celebration of the seventeenth century Regent Sangye Gyatso. In this the film was part of a wider 'indigenous discourse' in 1980s Tibet which sought to reconstruct the Regent as an exemplar in Tibetan history, contesting Chinese records of his rule.
The film is structured around state visits and their ritual procedures, in the management of which Tibetan statesmen are portrayed as skilful, transforming desire into power and capitalising on their symbolic resources. An example of this ritual competence, a visit by the Dalai Lama to Beijing, is analysed in terms of the actors' own manipulation of historical narratives, producing an ambivalent, 'evocative' counterpoint between dynamic and static markers of status. The filmmakers are shown to have stayed surprisingly close to the spirit of history, if not exactly to the record.
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