Category: Reviews

by Lydia Ruyle

Creating Buddhas, The Making and Meaning of Fabric Thangkas

a film by Isadora Gabrielle Leidenfrost

Creating Buddhas is a documentary film by Isadora Gabrielle Leidenfrost featuring an artist who makes Buddhas out of silk, Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo. Trained in Dharamsala, India for nine years, Leslie is one of the few female fabric thangka makers in the world.

Thangka, which means a rolled up image made of silk cloth, helped spread Buddhism throughout Asia. Viewing a thangka sacred image is a Buddhist spiritual practice which helps sentient beings move in the direction of enlightenment.

In the Tibetan cultural tradition, fabric thangka making is the highest form of art. Thangkas are made of precious materials; pure silk, gold threads, ornaments. There is a geometrical, artistic and spiritual canon to follow. It is a challenge to learn and practice the art form.

The beautiful film follows the process of making a Green Tara thangka from its beginnings to completion over six months later. The process is both a spiritual one and an artistic one–both the making of thangkas and the making of movies.

Continue reading “Review: “Creating Buddhas””

by Patricia Monaghan, Ph.D.

One of the most thrilling moments of the first national ASWM conference in April, 2010, was the world premiere of the documentary “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican” by California filmmaker Jules Hart.

Four years in the making, this surprising and moving film traces recent developments within the Roman Catholic Church.  Catholicism holds that priests must be ordained “in apostolic succession,” meaning that each priest is ordained by a bishop whose heritage can be traced all the way back to the original apostles of Jesus Christ—a two thousand year link to the founding fathers of the church. Continue reading “Review: “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican””

A Woman to Match A Mountain: Neal Forsling and Crimson Dawn.

Film review by Sid Reger, Ed. D.

Are myths and legends only available from ancient sources?  This charming biographical film proves that it’s possible for a modern woman to single-handedly build a myth tradition that continues to thrive in Wyoming 80 years after its creation.  Neal Forsling was herself the stuff of legend, a young woman who divorced in the 1920s and moved with her two girls to homestead on a mountaintop in the rugged land near Casper.  There she not only defied convention as a writer and artist, but in 1930, at her Summer Solstice party, she started a living myth tradition: the Witches of Crimson Dawn.

Through telling and enacting stories for the children of the mountain, Neal and her friends created an ongoing celebration of fairies, witches, and other mythic characters.  She maintained that the Crimson Witch approached her when she moved to the land, and told her to protect the beautiful mountain and pass its stories on to willing visitors. As the Bohemian group of artists in Casper grew, so did the energy for creating the stories of the witches, (benevolent spirits) elves, and woodcutters. Continue reading “Review: A Modern Mythmaker in Wyoming”