Learning How to Breathe
by Fernando Chaves Espinach
Much in cinema is about learning how to breathe. Every film demands a specific rhythm for breathing, as the length and pace of its shots slowly stitch together an atmosphere for its viewer. When I watched Paths of the Soul, Zhang Yang’s 2015 pilgrimage through Tibet, the daily panting stopped after a few minutes and a slow, careful inhaling began to set in. As the pilgrims kowtowed for over 2,000 kilometers on their way to Lhasa, I let their patience guide me.
In the film, the band of pilgrims perform their duty with relentless strength. Wearing yak-hide aprons and with wooden planks tied to their hands, they walk, kowtow, dive to the ground and rise again endlessly, their sight firmly set on the sacred destination but attentive to the road and the countless lives that drift around it. Their bodies change and even suffer as the seasons pass (the journey may take a year): women give birth; the elders die, the children learn their place in the world.
Played by non-actors, these characters undertake this punishing pilgrimage in order to wash away their sins and heal their bodies. Their ritual in reverence to Buddha bears the promise of chain-breaking, wound-healing and contentment, but there is, of course, no selfishness in the task: “A pilgrimage is to pray for others,” says the elder. They push through the snowy hills and the flooded roads of a land indifferent to their pious prostration, but they do it together. They become a family through their shared, voluntary burden, in order to liberate themselves from the burden they did not choose—illness, vice, fear of dying.
As a religious act, it struck me then as entirely foreign to me. I have never been interested in any religion, but certain aspects of spirituality keep pulling me close. Perhaps my Catholic upbringing will not let me go so easily, or perhaps this feeling announces some bend in the road many years from now. In any case, whatever closeness to spiritual life I’ve ever felt, it has been through a film. I did not seek out Paths of the Soul because of that—and I cannot even say that I grasped what it was doing to me until long after watching it. Some things take time.
Time is certainly what Zhang Yang explores in the film, a cyclical, featureless time in which individuality is not erased but merged into others, dispersed into a shared space that regulates living, eating, giving birth, praying, and dying. The pilgrims’ motivations may be myriad, but the actions they perform unify them as a collective body traversing the harsh landscapes they have made their home for centuries. As I witnessed this fictional family dissolve into the real one (the production itself strikes me as heroic), I began feeling as if the ritual were performed for a collectivity that, thousands of miles away, inevitably included me.
The history of the pilgrimage and the texture of its traditions are, of course, specific to a culture, inimitable and perhaps even incomprehensible. Yet the outpouring of compassion and caring for each other that the journey necessarily entails speaks of an interconnectedness with a world without boundaries, contemplated from the tallest mountains on Earth and united under the all-encompassing benevolence the pilgrims summon. Walking is kindness. Walking is love. Walking endlessly is an affirmation of life—and it even includes death.
As for what comes in the future, once again, I can only imagine it through the elusive answers that films can provide. In Life After Life (Zhang Hanyi, 2016), a boy runs after a hare; when he returns, his mother’s spirit has taken over his body, returning to the world of the living in order to replant a tree that grows by their former home, soon to be demolished. The father-husband accepts this mission passively and travels with a body that is both here and there, present and absent, a life that the man can recognize but with a nature he cannot grasp.
“Noli me tangere,” says Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she sees him after the Resurrection. “Touch me not” because I am not yet ascended, he says, emphasizing an in-betweenness that nonetheless firmly separates the realm of the living from the realm of the dead. But in Life After Life, one leaks into the other: as the boy becomes a vehicle for his mother’s ghost, he and she change the materiality of the world they once shared, they aim to allow a living non-human being to flourish elsewhere. Touch me, feel this flesh, declares the boy’s existence, and witness proof that there is more to know beyond the limited world in which the flesh exists.
Such a fold in the fabric of the material is visible only through the fantasy of film, of course. Whether there is a beyond or not, we cannot know; we only know it through imagining it, whether through puerile fantasies or through whatever theological meanderings our words and images undertake. The deliberate slowness of Paths of the Soul emphasizes discipline, self-sacrifice, and faith; in Life After Life, the contemplative gaze weaves a sense of mystery and surprise (which can even play for humor). They both demand a readjusting of the spectator’s rhythm to theirs. They both ask that you breathe with them, not against them.
I first watched Paths of the Soul and Life After Life back to back at a time when no concern about an afterlife had any place in my mind nor had I much patience for breathing. I rushed, I devoured, I consumed. But over the years, as I quietened down, I have come to feel more intensely drawn toward their unusual, vibrating energy, if not through a sense of the spiritual, then through the vividness of the bodily experience. The thought of self-control in Paths of the Soul seeps into me as I walk through crowded London, aggressively oppositional to nomadic living yet not quite home-like either, whereas the feeling that ghosts breathe within living bodies, as in Life After Life, destabilizes whatever sense of finitude I have.
These fantasies, of course, can only be made visible through cinema. But if a film can remind one to breathe differently, is that not a spiritual act? When the elder dies toward the end of Paths of the Soul, having completed the pilgrimage, his companions celebrate that his karma is now forever bound to the Holy Mountain. They resume their journey back home and, like tiny specks in the snow, disappear into emptiness. Like the mother that borrows her child’s body, certain images prey on the living, breathing body.
London, 11 July 2019
Fernando Chaves Espinach (1990) is a journalist, writer, and programmer from Costa Rica. Culture and entertainment editor at La Nación (Costa Rica), 2013–2018. Programmer at the Costa Rica International Film Festival 2015–2017. Student at Birkbeck, University of London.