WHAT is it about the idea of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism that has come to so fascinate Westerners? Why fix on this harsh land whose religion and people are in so many ways the antithesis of all that the Promethean West represents?
As Westerners searching out spiritual leavening for lives of skepticism and noisy desperation have come to know the region, they have discovered something actual about it that is undeniably alluring — a trait to which a stunning new film, "Himalaya," by the French director Eric Valli, bears witness. Shot in Dolpo, an ethnic Tibetan region in northwest Nepal, "Himalaya" (it opens in New York on Friday) is only the most recent of a whole vogue of films that focus on Tibet. Documentaries like "Compassion in Exile," "The Saltmen of Tibet," "Tibet's Stolen Child" and "Red Flag Over Tibet" (for which I was the correspondent) and feature films like Martin Scorsese's "Kundun," Paul Wagner's "Windhorse" and Jean Jacques Annaud's "Seven Years in Tibet" (for which Mr. Valli worked as a second unit director in the Himalayas) all bespeak the deep fascination the West has with Tibet as it once was or, at least, as we would like to imagine it to have been.
When Mr. Valli was a child in France, his father, an artist, gave him a book entitled "Dans Les Marches Tibétaines" ("On Tibetan Treks"), by Jacques Bacot, and Mr. Valli became irrevocably smitten with the region. This dream only intensified as he grew older and found himself feeling, as he put it, ever more "contrary to the civilized world." So, leaving his life as a nascent cabinetmaker in Dijon, Mr. Valli started wandering "to see how people around the world were different, but were also the same."
"Thirsty for life and looking for God," he told one interviewer, he trekked across Syria and Afghanistan at age 18. Afterward, he says, "I couldn't go back into my little shoe box." So, in 1981, he set off for Nepal and the Himalayas. There, along the Tibetan border, he stumbled onto the remote Dolpo region made famous by Peter Matthiessen's 1978 book, "The Snow Leopard."
"I had no map, but I remember crossing the first pass, looking over into this isolated land and thinking, `Oh my goodness!' " he said recently in a telephone conversation from Los Angeles. "I had discovered a place I didn't know existed," he recalled, "a totally living part of Tibet where the people still practiced traditional Tibetan Buddhist culture. For me, it became a kind of drug."
Mr. Valli himself, now 49 years old, was so won over by the Himalayas that he bought a house in Katmandu, where his three children now go to school, and has lived in Nepal since 1983. Since then he has spent a total of almost three years in Dolpo, which he rhapsodically describes as a "hidden country, guarding the inviolate heart of Tibet." He freelanced as a photographer for magazines like National Geographic and Smithsonian and, like so many other Westerners, became ever more enamored of the region's people and culture. Making his film, he said, "was like realizing my childhood dream at last."
"Himalaya" is a joint French-Nepali-Swiss-British production in a Tibetan dialect (subtitled in English) that recounts the tale, based closely on reality, of a remote village's annual yak caravan over 16,000-foot-high passes to the lowlands, where salt mined in the mountains is traded for barley. It is a story of generational conflict in which religious traditions are challenged by impetuous youth among the most majestic mountains in the world. Not surprisingly, the struggle resolves on the side of tradition, with more than a genuflection to the importance of religion, even superstition, in sustaining human life in this harsh area.
Documenting this all-but-vanished high-altitude life of yak herders bound together by religious devotion and fierce loyalty to their ancient way of life, the film was shot over a grueling nine months, using mostly nonprofessional actors. Supplies had to be transported in by yaks and porters. Beautifully photographed by Eric Guichard as a homage to a haunting land, the film, under its original title, "Caravan," was nominated last year for an Academy Award for best foreign film.
In watching recent films about Tibet, it is easy to forget that the land of our dreams has all but ceased to exist. Only the smallest shards of a once vibrant traditional culture remain in remote places like Dolpo. But it is a measure of our need for the solace such refuges provide that even with only these few remnants we still manage to weave together a whole virtualized Tibet out of them to help overcome the shortcomings of our own spiritual lives.
"When we look at Tibet, we do sometimes put on rose-tinted glasses and see just peace and love," Mr. Valli said. "There can be great naïveté in the way Westerners look at Tibetans, become Buddhist and fall in love with Tibet, even though it doesn't have much effect on our lives or make us produce or consume less."
As if wishing to keep from being viewed as an uncritical camp follower, Mr. Valli said: "We should not forget that before the 1950's one could not cross Tibet without a caravan of guns, and that even now Tibetans can be ruthless crooks. But there is still something about these guys that I love." His voice softened. "Call it faith, religious belief, superstition — whatever it is, it has enabled them not only to live in this very harsh place but to remain human."
When I asked Mr. Valli what he likes most about Dolpo, he answers unhesitatingly: "You cannot wear a mask there for long. You cannot fake it. You pretend less and lie less. If you're not open to your neighbor and able to count on him, you cannot survive. This makes relationships much simpler and deeper. What I learned from the Dolpo people is courage, tolerance, dignity and perseverance. This is what the film is about."
In "Himalaya," the Dolpo-pa, or people from Dolpo, play themselves. "We had no stars, no special effects — except one fiberglass yak that falls off a cliff into a lake — and no studio work," Mr. Valli said proudly. Casting real people does lend the film authenticity, but there are also liabilities in mixing genres in a way that leaves viewers unsure whether they are watching an ethnographic documentary or a feature.
So why not go to Tibet and the sacred city of Lhasa itself?
"Because, Tibet is no longer Tibet," Mr. Valli replied dismissively. "Today it's under the Chinese, and I don't think they understand the essence of Tibetan culture at all. Caravans have been replaced by trucks, and you always feel the pressure of China, which is too busy following the worst parts of the West. All that has left a big scar. Because Nepal has been much better than China in preserving Tibetan tradition, Dolpo is the last intact region of Tibetan culture."
Like most other films about Tibetans, "Himalaya" is steeped with admiration for the perceived truth of their traditional way of life. At its heart, there is a powerful nostalgia, but what is distinctive about the film, and the West's fascination with Tibetan culture, is that the West has become engaged in a rather un- Proustian search for someone else's lost times. It is almost as if it is reacting against the very virtues of progress and technological prowess that Westerners otherwise venerate in entrepreneurs, dot-coms, and Nobel scientists. Not quite knowing how to get our own hyperactive lives and societies into balance, we have become tempted to turn to the most extreme, opposite alternatives for antidotes.
"We are messing up ourselves and the whole planet," Mr. Valli said, "and so are filled with a nostalgia for a more direct and simpler life with a more harmonious relation between man and nature. In Dolpo they believe in the power of nature and have a knowledge of the sacred. They are giants in their own way."
Like so many Tibet aficionados, Mr. Valli includes a bit of evangelism in his film. Despite his cautionary words, he — and many other Westerners like him — are nonetheless inclined to see traditional Tibetans and their religious culture as a cure for the malaise of Western civilization.
"In the big cities of the world, our lives have become easy but hollow," Mr. Valli said. "We've lost our identity and sense of nature. The Tibetans have much to teach us."
"Maybe this film didn't change the lives of the Dolpos, but it changed our lives," he continued. "It was very hard to shoot, but it was a fantastic human adventure. Now, I look at all the billboards on Sunset Boulevard and I wonder: `What's it all about? Don't we understand that what they represent won't make us happy?' "<
Orville Schell is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is ``Virtual Tibet'' (Holt/Metropolitan).