The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (7 page)

He explained his motivation for making this film as follows:

Teaching is not meant to be verbal alone. It is very visual. Since we have the possibility of another dimension, using the great medium of motion pictures, I feel that this could be not only Milarepa’s life teaching, but Tibetan Buddhism visualized in its raw and rugged form without the intrusion of psychedelic images and other extraneous material. (Selected Writings, “Visual Dharma”)

His intention was to convey the insights of Tibetan Buddhism and the power of meditative perception, letting the images speak for themselves. He wanted the film to “create a tension without using human beings visually,” which he acknowledged “would be an incredible challenge.” The images in the film would be limited “to animals or objects or nature or thangkas.” However, Rinpoche made it clear that this would also “not be just a documentary with that ‘educational film quality.’”

He also talked about specific scenes and shots. To convey the desolation that Milarepa felt in retreat when he longed for his teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche suggested that the movie might “work with desert, something completely open, and find one human footprint or maybe the footprint of an animal, a horse, and maybe horseshit. There could be a snowstorm and at the same time sand is blowing. The cameramen as well as the director should develop an absolute relationship with sand and storm, not just try to entertain” (Selected Writings, “Visual Dharma”). The study of the five buddha families was intended to shape how the film was shot, from five different perspectives representing the different energies of each family. Rinpoche talked about how tension and audience involvement would come from changing the buddha family perspectives throughout the film.

The material from the seminar was edited and published in an article in the
Chicago Review
in 1972, from which the quotes above are taken. The article was entitled “Visual Dharma: Film Workshop on the Tibetan Buddhist View of Aesthetics and Filmmaking,” Other contributors to that issue of the
Review
included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Bly, and Charles Bukowski. An article excerpting some of the material also appeared in the
Filmmaker’s Newsletter,
a small Los Angeles publication. So there was a wider audience curious about the ideas that Rinpoche was putting forth.
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In the fall of 1973, in connection with the film project, Rinpoche set out for Stockholm with Johanna Demetrakas, Baird Bryant, and several other students. In the Editor’s Introduction to
Dharma Art,
Judith Lief reports that “he traveled to Sweden to visit the Museum Ethnographia, where a series of magnificent Milarepa thangkas had been stored for years but seldom seen the light of day.”
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Baird Bryant describes the journey to Sweden:

One morning I got the call, Rinpoche wanted me to go with him to Stockholm to film the collection of thangkas depicting the life of Milarepa. Allen Ginsberg had raised the money to finance the project through a series of poetry readings and fundraisers. Ruth Astor was making the arrangements.

When I saw the price of the tickets, I started making enquiries and I found that, taking a charter flight, both Johanna and I could go for the same price. Ruth said OK, and we were both on our way. We flew to Amsterdam and took the train to Stockholm. We had to change trains in Copenhagen, which meant unloading all our film equipment, cases, tripod, etc. onto the platform. We were hungry, so Johanna took some money and left the station to find something to eat. While she was gone, a train pulled into the quais from which we were to leave. I decided to load all the gear onto the car so it would all be done and waiting in the car when Johanna returned. After ten minutes or so, the train pulled out of the station with only me on board. [Realizing I was alone and on the wrong train, I ran through the cars looking for a conductor or whomever. Finding no one, and seeing we were going into the switchyards there was nothing to do but wait until we stopped, at which time I ran to the engine and explained my plight. They saw the urgency, threw the switch onto a parallel track and rolled back into the station. It was time for the train to Stockholm to leave, and I was filled with panic: Johanna had little money, I had her passport, and, just as I loaded all the gear onto the right car, the train pulled out, headed for Stockholm. I didn’t know if Jo was on the train or had waited in the station for me to show up. Then, here she came through the connecting door. We just collapsed from relief. When we were united with Rinpoche and I told him the story, he said to me, “You were testing your limits. Congratulations on passing the test.”
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Johanna Demetrakas picks up the story here:

The shoot took place at a natural history and anthropology museum in the middle of a park in the middle of Stockholm. The park was large, like Central Park. The Swedish Film Institute was on the other side of the park. We were also housed at the museum, which had rooms, showers, and a kitchen-dining room for visiting scholars. The Swedes were wonderfully hospitable, took good care of us, and left us alone in our work. It was very comfortable and secure in the museum, and elegant.

We worked from late morning, probably around ten, to late night, around nine or ten or sometimes later at night. . . . I was always starving when we finally broke from work to have our late dinner. I would attack the food ravenously, then become aware of Rinpoche’s graceful and civilized
slow
eating. A little wake-up moment among the many during this intense experience. . . .

The work: A museum curator would bring the thangkas in. There were seventeen of them, rather large, maybe 3 or 4 feet tall by perhaps 2½ feet wide. We would unroll a thangka and carefully hang it on an easel kind of setup. Rinpoche would look it over and tell us the main figure. He’d describe the setting, the symbols, and the characters. He told us how the painters mixed their colors from minerals, which gave the paintings a dark and somewhat cold metallic quality. Also the use of gold leaf, how precious and meaningful when used, not for materialistic purposes. On one of the thangkas there was a delightful little man (not Milarepa) with his back to us and his pants down. . . . he was showing the effects of years of sitting meditation. Rinpoche also talked about the beautiful, stylistic clouds and how they looked like that in Tibet. Also about the formal approach to thangka painting, all the proportions predetermined, the egolessness of the painter.

Rinpoche and Baird worked an hour or two, sometimes more, on each thangka. I would look in the eyepiece often to see how his framing worked. Then we would roll the thangka back up.

I think this experience of learning about Milarepa through Rinpoche was the first glimpse I got of the true supernatural or mystical powers of teachers such as Milarepa and [Trungpa] Rinpoche. When he described Milarepa sitting in the freezing cold with nothing but that flimsy cotton shirt flapping around him in the wind, it was very real. Or when he discussed Milarepa’s aunt’s family, the betrayal and the hatred that poisoned Mila, it was deeply disturbing. And of course his understanding of Milarepa’s poetic voice was so intimate and subtle you felt like you were there, actually hearing Mila recite his songs. . . .

Of course, it was, as always, an intense experience to be with him for that week, working day and night. I think he must have been happy to be there with the thangkas, because he seemed to be relaxed and content all the time.
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Baird Bryant describes the work at the museum in Sweden, with emphasis on what it was like to work so intimately with Trungpa Rinpoche:

So there we were lodged in the guest rooms at the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm with a special room put aside for us to work in. When we were getting set up with the lights, a place to hang the thangkas and so forth, the director of the museum came to see. Somehow he had the notion, perhaps from Ruth, that we were going to shoot with animation cameras. He wanted to see how we were going to animate the thangkas . . . i.e., make them move. He seemed quite disappointed when we informed him that we were using regular film cameras, and making the thangkas move was out of the question . . .

[At the Milarepa Film Seminar] my main concern was how could the magic of Milarepa be shown in film, aside from a kind of Superman cartoon where Mila would fly to the top of the mountain, leaving the Bön magician, riding his shaman’s drum, far behind. Or how would you show Milarepa walking through solid stone? Well, when Rinpoche, Johanna, Bill Hunter, and I arrived . . . at the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm and started unrolling the thangkas depicting the life of Milarepa, it became patently clear how it could be done. Unrolling the first thangka was like opening a portal into another world. It was magnificent, some 2 by 4 feet, in perfect shining condition, glittering with gold . . . completely magical. As we looked at more of them, each had a large central figure of Mila, one of them green from eating nettles, getting older with each one, surrounded by little figures telling the story of his adventures: conjuring a giant scorpion to pull down the house of the evil uncle, killing the party-goers inside. Building nine houses and tearing down eight, and so on and on. It was all there. The entire life of the great poet-saint of the Kagyü lineage. . . .

On the first setup, I realized that my big 25 to 250 zoom was not holding focus, it had not traveled well, and the tripod was not the best for the fine work. Johanna and I and Bill Hunter walked across the commons to the Swedish Film Institute to see about another tripod and to see if there was a technician who could columnate the lens. Bill’s wooden leg had not been kind to him during the walk, so his movements were curtailed from then on. We could not and never did solve the lens problem. I decided we had to go forward or lose the whole shoot. Before I went to work, I explored the ways of compensating and working with the lens the way it was. Before the first shot, Rinpoche, under his breath, recited a mantra to enlist the aid of the deities.

Rinpoche would study the thangka, then direct the shots one after another. “Start wide here, then zoom and pan slowly onto this figure. Pan across this line of characters showing that each one of the twelve is the same.” “Who are they?” I asked. “They are all Milarepa,” he replied. “He divided himself into twelve.” Naively, I said, “Could you show me how to do that? . . . I would do that!” Rinpoche looked at me askance but said nothing. And so it went for the six days we were there. . . .

As protection, after the film shoot, we used the 4- by 5-inch view camera that the museum had and shot a complete set of Ektachromes. The idea being that back in Boulder, if more shots were needed, they could be done from the high-quality 4 by 5’s . . . a treasure in themselves still to be found in the Vajradhatu Archives.
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Tragically, because of the problem with the lens described above, when the filmmakers returned to the United States and developed the film, they found that “the lens caused the film to go a little out of focus, some of the time,”
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but not all the time. However, “for eventual big-screen 16mm projection, this could not be fixed.”
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The project was put on permanent hold, as Baird Bryant reports:

At Naropa, during the first summer session where I was teaching Film Expression, I made inquiries about the Milarepa film and got different answers: It was at Barry Corbett’s house, it was under Ken Green’s bed, etc. Then I asked Rinpoche. He said, “I’m sorry to say, the Milarepa film is in the Bardo.” So, there it was, somehow lost.
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After Rinpoche’s death, the footage made its way into the Shambhala Archives. In the last few years, there has been some interest, but as yet no action, to review the footage to see what can be done with the latest technologies available. Johanna Demetrakas notes that, in preparing her comments on the Milarepa Film Project for this introduction, “Baird and I talked about the possibility of fixing or working with the Milarepa footage. . . . With video, and the finishing tools available today, we could probably produce a good copy.”
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It would be impossible now to complete the Milarepa film exactly as Trungpa Rinpoche envisioned it, since he wanted to use the footage of the thangkas in conjunction with landscapes and “nature shots” filmed in different styles to reflect different themes in Milarepa’s life and different buddha families. This part of the project was never completed. There might, however, be enough information in the talks from the Milarepa Film Seminar for a filmmaker to make a film based on Rinpoche’s intentions. This would be extremely interesting, since there was no other artistic endeavor that Rinpoche proposed quite like the Milarepa film. The closest one can come, perhaps, is Chögyam Trungpa’s own photographs, which often seem to play with different perspectives and foci that may well be based on the buddha families. It’s only now, so many years after his death, that the Shambhala Archives is starting to reproduce some fine prints of Rinpoche’s photographs, in conjunction with Michael Wood, a photographer-student of Rinpoche’s who helped to start the Miksang school of photography based on many of the principles of dharma art.
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