Abstract
Adapted from Hamlet, Sherwood Hu’s 2006 film Prince of the Himalayas offers a Tibetan version of the Bard’s story. Structured in an epical setting, the movie’s capturing of the Tibetan landscape and supernatural life invokes a modernist illusion. This essay examines how the film explores Shakespearean and Tibetan elements in reconstructing cultural memories. Expanding Fredric Jameson’s theorizing of magical realism, I argue that the movie’s reconstruction of pre-Buddhist Tibetan culture reveals a modernist impulse in a humanist valorization of forgiveness and love and in a quasi-Oedipal moment that defies a Freudian notion of modern subjectivity. This modernist impulse revealed in the filmmaking process can be an alternative approach to mainstream postmodern cinema.
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