Shot under extreme conditions in one of the world’s most remote and beautiful locations, THE SALTMEN OF TIBET documents the ancient traditions and daily rituals of a Tibetan nomadic community and transports us into a realm untainted by the tides of foreign invasion or encroaching modernity. Step by step we follow the unforgettable, annual three-month pilgrimage to the holy salt lakes of northern Tibet. You don't go to the roof of the world, trek through the wild for three months, harvest salt from a dried lake bed and come back with an ordinary documentary. The Saltmen of Tibet, is a stunning evocation of place and culture. Koche follows a caravan of men and yaks travelling to the sacred salt lakes of northern Tibet. There, the men, descendants of an ancient nomadic people, gather precious crystals of salt, as their ancestors have done for 2,000 years. The salt will be bartered for grain and it will be used to preserve food. This journey is also a ritualistic gathering of the tears of the goddess Tara, and therefore a deeply spiritual one. Undertaken exactly as it has been for centuries, each step is a rite of passage bringing the men closer to a holy place where only a secret language is spoken. Koche doesn't interview her subjects; she simply lets them speak. When they do, it is often about things that we who live in technological cultures have long ago ceased to discuss. The film's exquisite visual beauty, with its images of vast landscapes and simple labor, gives it the quality of a poem or prayer.
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The Saltmen of Tibet. Video hosted on Google. Four men from a nomadic Tibetan tribe undertake their annual, ritualistic pilgrimage to a sacred salt lake. Salt gathered in this traditional fashion will be sold to provide the economic livelihood of the tribe for the coming year. The journey, necessary for the group's survival, also incorporates a number of rituals necessary for their culture to survive in the modern world. In Tibet's Changtang region, nomads harvest salt to buy barley. A clan prepares four of its men for an annual trek to Lake Tsento, where they rake salt from shoals into piles, then into bags, and onto their yaks to return, 90-days in all. After picking an auspicious day to depart, they feast, sing, tell stories, and race horses. Women are forbidden on this sacred trip. All is ritualized: Margen cooks, Pargen prepares burnt offerings and distributes meat, Zopon cares for the caravan of 160 yaks, Bopsa bends his strong back to arduous work. To each other they speak the secret language of saltmen; they pray and observe exemplary behavior. The goddess of the lake smiles upon them. Admittedly, few travellers ever see this place but that perhaps only makes the film more irritating. Windswept plains seem to be a constant attraction for Koch, especially if there are a few animals or people in the distance. Her eye in this sense is little different from countless nature documentaries, never approaching the aesthetic sensibilities of, say, Cooper and Schoedsack's Grass, Herzog's Fata Morgana, James Benning's Him and Me or even such a Hollywood film (although admittedly an anomalous Hollywood film) like The Thin Red Line. There's even an unwelcome (or at least not utilized) roughness to the image quality that initially seemed like a by-product of the much vaunted difficult shooting conditions, though I later found out that Saltmen was shot with digital video. Perhaps that was more efficient in such circumstances but Koch and cinematographer Corradi worked as if this produced the same effects as film, which is clearly not true.
Even the pace of editing serves this too-familiar approach. Shots are held just long enough to make their point, a beat more for art's sake and then we're on to something else. Clearly a faster pace would be "untrue" to the subject (possibly not an accurate statement but you could hear the complaints of a quickly edited film being "MTV inspired" and then dismissed) but there's also none of the sense of really observing or being captivated by a landscape that you can find in the films listed above.
In one sequence, Koch shows one of the men making a clay figure of a yak intercutting this with shots of an actual animal. I suppose this is meant as some form of comment on the artistic process or on the peoples' relation to their animals but I'm still not entirely sure. By that point, we know that these people are intimately familiar with their yaks so this is too obvious to require Koch's underlining, and if she's telling us that artists simply shape their reproductions of observed reality then we've received a key insight into the failure of Saltmen of Tibet.
Since apart from any bland artistic approach, the film tells us very little about the Saltmen. Their ancient, rugged way of life (the one we need to preserve, remember?) doesn't prevent them from wearing glasses or tennis shoes. One shot shows a train passing by and their competitors in the salt harvesting business use pickup trucks, leaving us to wonder if the Saltmen use other modern conveniences but Koch just happened to omit this or if they would like to but can't afford it or if they have some Amish-like disdain for things they would rather not understand. The Saltmen complain about low salt prices but Koch doesn't tell us why prices are low or whether the Saltmen have other income or how they manage to get food and supplies. Is harvesting salt with pickups a bad thing? From what's shown in the film, that would seem to do no damage to the lake. How limited a resource is the salt? Where does it come from? Is it only in that one lake? If they have a special salt language that women and outsiders can never hear, how was Koch able to film it? What is the food shown and how is it preserved? What kind of relations do the Saltmen have with other groups or with the government? What religion do they practice? Is the epic song we hear phenomenally dull or am I just a jaded Westerner?
The film provides glimpses of the Saltmen's life for two hours without ever really telling us much about the Saltmen. Perhaps Koch was so familiar with them that she simply forgot to include the connections or background info. In any case, only viewers with that information are likely to get much from Saltmen of Tibet.
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