Published by: World Tibet Network News Wednesday - October 8, 1997
The Times - London
October 8, 1997
FROM GILES WHITTELL
IN LOS ANGELES BRAD PITT will return to America's cinema screens tonight in a Tibetan mountaineering epic. But the true narrative has prompted awkward revelations about his character's Nazi past and embroiled Hollywood producers in rows with China.
Seven Years In Tibet, filmed in the Argentine Andes, depicts a daring escape by Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian prisoner of war, during the Second World War to the Himalayan kingdom. He befriends the Dalai Lama and served as his tutor until 1952.
To the consternation of Sony Pictures, the film studio, Herr Harrer, now 84, admitted in May to having voluntarily joined Hitler's Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers) in 1933. Five years later he enlisted as a sports sergeant in the SS and was once photographed being congratulated by Hitler for an Alpine climbing feat.
The confession led to urgent damage-limitation efforts by Jean-Jacques Annaud, the film's French director. "This is the story of a bastard who undergoes a drastic transformation into an incredible human being," he said. "What he did was accept the trend of his day ... a social decision, not a political one."
But Jewish and Chinese leaders have refused to let the issue die. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Weisenthal Centre in Los Angeles, said millions of fans of Brad Pitt would see the film and it would give neo-Nazis an opportunity "to try to whitewash crimes of the Nazi era".
The People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, was gleeful by comparison. Noting that the film was based on Herr Harrer's autobiography, it said: "The Tibet craze set off by Hollywood is being used by a Nazi to advertise himself." Seven Years In Tibet is being released barely three weeks before President Jiang Zemin of China makes his first state visit to the United States. It is the first of three films this season either to idolise the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, or demonise China, which invaded Tibet in 1949.
Kundun, a film biography of the Dalai Lama being made by Martin Scorsese for Disney, has jeopardised the company's plans to expand into China. Work on a Disney theme park in Shanghai has been frozen.
Next month, MGM plans to release Red Corner, a contemporary thriller about Beijing's Intermediate Court, dreaded for handing down death sentences which human rights activists say are often carried out within a week. Its star is Richard Gere, a practising Buddhist and close friend of the Dalai Lama who is credited with starting Hollywood's love affair with the idea of a free Tibet.
Anticipating Chinese censure, MGM's president of worldwide marketing has been at pains to argue that Red Corner is not "a political movie ... it's about a man caught in a legal system".
But Gere's plans belie this view. He has persuaded the studio to advance release to coincide with President Jiang's Washington arrival.
China has retaliated by producing films of its own on Tibet, including a $1.7 million (=A31 million) feature about an aggressive 19th-century British mission to Tibet and a documentary portraying the Dalai Lama as a collaborator with Beijing. Last year Chinese authorities barred Hollywood notables including Pitt, Annaud, Scorsese and Harrison Ford from Tibet.
Chinese attempts to rewrite Hollywood's version of Tibetan history are likely to fail. The tragic story of the 1949 invasion has proved irresistible to film-makers.