Kritik am Buch „The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama ... - Neues von Shi De

Heinrich Harrer” the Spiegel enthused without once mentioning Harrer’s SS past (Spiegel, 16/1998, p.
110).
Whilst filming, Brad Pitt experienced something like a mystic shiver: “And then they shot this scene
where they are saying: 'Give the Dalai Lama the power!' Everybody goes into this chant, and it was
like something was going down and God was shining through the clouds. It was heavy” (Newsweek,
May 19, 1997, p. 25).
The Italo-American Scorsese was with irresistable, ambiguous humor accepted as a monk by His
Holiness. After the filmmaker had visited him in Dharamsala at the end of an exhausting journey, the
Kundun bantered that, “Martin seemed at once far calmer. No longer like a hectic New Yorker, but
like a Tibetan monk” (Playboy [German edition], March 1998, p. 40).
Scorsese himself is completely convinced that his film, Kundun, has a magic effect on its audience.
“Kundun is reminiscent of a filmic prayer — as if you wanted to show what is invisible to the eye:
spirituality. Can this succeed in the cinema?”, asks the in spiritual matters otherwise extremely
skeptical, even cynical German weekly magazine, Spiegel. “Absolutely”, answered Scorsese, “If you
put movements, rhythms, music, faces together in a particular way, then something like a spiritual
current can arise from the totality of images” (Spiegel 12/1998, p. 261) This director has made a ritual
film, which in his opinion can silently influence people’s awareness (as Tibetan Buddhism would
have it): “These rituals which I show in Kundun, for example, I don’t need to explain. They are
something wonderful and universal” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 14-15, 1998, p. 19).
However, in the USA the film was well received by neither the general public nor the critics. “The
devastating reaction of the American mainstream press made me sick”, the director said at the
presentation of his missionary work in Munich. (Münchner Abendzeitung, March 19). In total contrast
to their American colleagues, numerous German film critics let themselves be completely uncritically
drawn into the “spiritual current” of the Kundun. The Bild newspaper, for example, raved: “He
recounts his tale almost wordlessly, in magic images. And slowly. So slowly that one soon surrenders
to the pull of the images, forgets the passing of time and savors every moment” (Bild, March 19,
1998, p. 6). The Münchener Abendzeitung had this to say: “Scorsese’s film is hypnotic and
lucid” (Münchner Abendzeitung, March 19). Even the “sober” German news magazine, Spiegel, had
no reservations about letting itself be enchanted and spoke enthusiastically of the “impressive images”
with which Scorsese created “the portrait of an exceptional person and a mystic dreamland [of]
Shangri La — demanding, strongly emotional cinema” (Spiegel, 16/1998, p. 110). German political
and artistic celebrities were out in force at the lavish premiere of the film in Munich.
Scorsese’s film, the screenplay of which was edited by the Dalai Lama himself, is a work of exile
Tibetan propaganda which falsifies or distorts recent Tibetan history in numerous scenes. There is no
word of the CIA’s assistance in the flight of the Kundun; that his father was poisoned by political
factions, that the former regent Reting Rinpoche was brutally strangled in the Potala, that at the time
at least 200 monks from the Drepung monastery who wanted to free Reting Rinpoche from prison
were killed by the machineguns of the Tibetan army — all these incidents either remained
unmentioned or were falsely depicted. Mao Zedong appears as a decadent giant with the aura of a
noble-born casino owner. Even in his own autobiography the Kundun writes that he much admired
Mao, but in the film he encounters the “Great Chairman” with the constant, almost mistrustful
attentiveness of a young, albeit still somewhat inexperienced, spiritual master.