Die Salzmänner von Tibet
Directed by
The coward dare not go to the salt lake
Only the courageous prepare joyfully for the journey
I face steep rocky precipices as if they were steps
On my way I pass peaks and gorges
Nimbly I cross the steppes as if singing the sutra
Swirling snowflakes invite me to dance
And the whistling wind is my music
Song of the salt caravans
Since time immemorial, the nomadic herders of northern Tibet have lived in extreme conditions on the Himalayan plateau, exploiting the highest pastures on the planet for their yaks. Each spring, the only season that allows the journey, some nomads travel to the plateau's great salt lakes to fetch "white gold," the precious salt from one of the world's most extensive reserves. Over the course of three months, four men will make an initiatory journey, observing special taboos and paying homage to nature, the mountains and the gods. Their roles are precisely defined by tradition: Margen, the old mother, takes care of the cooking and knows the route; Parge, the old father, conducts negotiations with the tribes encountered along the way; the third is "the lord of the animals," and tends the yaks; and finally Bopsa, the novice, who must learn numerous rules and especially the secret language of the salt men, used only during this journey. A shamaness accompanies the Tibetan salt caravans in the background with her singing. In mythological language, the lakes are called "the tears of Tara", and are said to be the eyes of entities that observe from underground what is happening in the world. Salt, which is of excellent quality and considered sacred, is traded for grain and is a major source of income for Tibetan nomads. However, industrial exploitation of the salt lakes has long since begun, and trucks can carry far more cargo than an entire yak caravan can. Most nomads, however, transport salt in the traditional way, otherwise "the goddess gets angry and the salt is no longer good".
After more than eight years of preparation, travel, and research, Ulrike Koch has succeeded in documenting, with images made on digital video and transposed to 35 mm, the magical atmosphere of Tibetan landscapes and an ancient tradition threatened by modern technology that is too casual and indifferent to history.
«I believe that the thought pattern of Buddhism is a model for the future: tolerance, relationship with nature, and a sense of belonging are profound, not arising from altruistic motivations. In Die Salzmänner von Tibet I try to show this. At the heart of the film is the world's most common consumer good, a vital substance that neither humans nor animals can do without. So you see how humans relate to this reality. The everyday is sacred». (Ulrike Koch)
«How did you learn about the existence of the salt men of Tibet?
A Chinese photographer living in Tibet told me about these tribes. Then I discovered them by chance, in a village right near a major transit road.
How did you live during the filming?
We had two jeeps and a food truck. Every night we would set up our tents at a certain distance from the salt men's camp so as not to disturb people and animals. It was really very hard. Added to this was the altitude sickness, we were in fact about 4500 meters above sea level and I was alone among many men.
Were you the only woman?
During the trip, yes. Salt men are not supposed to meet any women during this ritual journey. That is why I did not even take part in the interviews, I had to rely completely on my team. And when the salt men came to us for some reason, I kept to myself. I met them only at the preparation stage. In your film, the salt men community is portrayed as an archaic society.
Modernity is almost completely absent. Do these nomads really live so far from civilization?
In Tibet, the archaic and the modern are much closer together than we are in the West. Lhasa is a modern city, but if you go even a couple of kilometers away, the standard of living is much lower. Nomads of course know the city, and they know very well that it is convenient to use trucks to haul away salt. But the sacred meaning of fetching salt with yaks and not trucks is part of an overall mythological conception that is still very much alive.
Is Die Salzmänner von Tibet a political film?
To tell the political situation in Tibet I would have had to add spoken commentary, and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to let people speak as they are used to doing. In Tibet, however, the film is considered an extremely political film. Because it deals with the issue of freedom. Nomads have their own way of life, Buddhism, their own icons and altars. And I wanted to show just that.
Did the Chinese authorities authorize the film?
Actually, no. We waited a long time for permission to shoot. Then we simply shot with a small digital camera, then smuggled the material across the border. The reaction of the Chinese authorities will be seen the next time I apply for a visa». (Interview with Ulrike Koch by Elke Buhr, in "Die Tageszeitung," Oct. 2, 1997)
In-depth analysis
About the Movie The Saltmen of Tibet
Travel Notes [CinemAmbiente 1998]
Gute Reisende sind herzlos
Good travelers are heartless
Elias Canetti
From the travelogues of Hale's Tours to reportages on great exploits and exotic lands, from the road movie to the thousands of invented and untold stories of conquered spaces and lost or rediscovered identities, the theme of travel has accompanied the entire history of cinema, in all its genres and areas of production, the very metaphor of the new medium capable of restoring the movement of the world.
The brief itinerary proposed here allows us to observe some areas of the prolific relationship between the camera and the environment constituted by the travel film. These are works and materials that concern different dimensions of travel – some probably permanently disappeared – in which constant, however, is the exercise of looking at a reality, a place, a culture, an “elsewhere” reached through physical movement. Colonial conquest, exploration, scientific discovery, family vacation, as well as ritual and soul-searching, are the main passages of this reconnaissance, which reveals first and foremost the importance of the possibility of creating images, which document but also represent a determining factor shaping travel itself.
The components of violence and cultural imposition of Western voyages of conquest in the first decades of the century are, for example, shown in the work of recovery and reworking of original materials carried out by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who with the power of images alone manage to construct a lucid discourse on the role of the camera as an expression of a will to appropriation and domination. It is the same colonialist gaze analyzed by Peter Kubelka in his African journey in the 1960s, following a group of whites engaged in a safari.
The reliance on cinema as a possibility to record the real, to bear witness to natural events and human endeavors appears evident in the works of volcanologist Haroun Tazieff, who filmed apocalyptic scenarios and spectacular eruptions, or in the conspicuous documentation left by Alberto Maria De Agostini during his wanderings in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, or again in the images of early mountaineering expeditions to the great peaks, not without political implications in some cases, such as the document on the ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1938, which becomes an example of Nazi propaganda. The exploration of the environment as a human challenge, a ground for confrontation with the force and sometimes the hostility of nature, is still visible in the first filmed documentations of Antarctic expeditions, in which the narrative and spectacular vocation of cinema peeps out even where one would presume total adherence to realistic subject matter.
What becomes immediately clear in this chapter of the history of travel is that there is no truly achieved goal and conquered space, if not properly documented, no expedition and enterprise that can renounce being filmed and thus make its own contribution to the construction of an imaginary made of heroes and great adventures, of immense spaces real and unknown. Immersed in the silence of their innocence, and in the seduction of their genesis – possible in many cases despite difficult environmental conditions and thanks to daring actions – such images enchant today as they did then. The crossing of a last sailing ship filmed by Henrich Hauser, in which neither places of departure nor points of arrival are shown, becomes the emblem of the experience in itself of movement, a hymn to the deepest sense of travel. Of which the deviations from the desired outcomes, the failures, renunciations, tragedies or simply the impossibility of creating the longed-for image (the summit as well as the return) must also be collected. But the fascination with travel to distant and extreme lands can also become an explicit advertising tool, as happened with the African and Asian cruises organized by Citroën between the 1920s and 1930s, in which human enterprise and produced image turn out to be totally inseparable.
Another type of relationship with the environment is that traceable in home movies shot during family vacations: Gustav Deutsch rereads anonymous materials from the 1950s and 1960s, offering an interesting catalog on the amateur gaze in its attempt to capture places – in this case those deputed to tourism – and preserve memories.
Travel as an encounter with “other” worlds and cultures, rapprochement and self-discovery, is the theme finally of some works in which the dialogue with the environment is constructed on the basis of the awareness that movement is not the prerogative of the person holding the camera. Ulrike Koch's documentation of the migration of nomadic Tibetan herders to the great salt lakes of the Himalayan plateau, a tribute to a sacred dimension of travel; Bill Viola's contemplation of natural landscapes and animal presences, Chris Marker's reflections from the “two extreme poles of survival” – Japan and Africa – or even the crossed gaze proposed in another work by Deutsch (who juxtaposes his images of an Austrian in Morocco with those of a Moroccan in Austria), suggest modes of travel based on dialogue, confrontation, meditation: observing the movement of nature and its inhabitants, with respect and hesitation, leads to a movement of consciousness, a production of thought, an activation of memories. The relationship with a place is no longer established through topographical and cultural appropriation, but through an appreciation of differences, the maintenance of a subjectivity and a historical understanding. Travel as discovery and adventure belongs perhaps only more to mythology and nostalgia, just as the very conditions of image production and consumption turn out to be profoundly transformed with respect to the eras evoked here. The cognitive potentialities of travel, and therefore of the images borrowed from it, are then entrusted, rather than to a movement in space guided by a ravenous gaze in search of the pure and the uncontaminated, to an ability to stand in any different place, to let this otherness speak and be absorbed, also tracing its historical motivations and welcoming the dimension of memory that that place can give off in those who try to approach it.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Creative Europe Media Program. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.