Enlightenment Guaranteed – Some Remarks on Doris Dörrie, Japan and Zen

Abstract

The German film director Doris Dörrie (born in 1955) concerned herself much not only with Japan but also with Zen Buddhism. This enabled her to transcend mere representations of national and cultural entities (such as “Germany” and “Japan”), their differences and relations or non-relations, and instead to imagine a trans-national and trans-cultural sphere based on human troubledness and Zen practice’s answer to that. Our paper firstly gives insight into Dörrie’s reception in Japan and finds support there to deal secondly with her tragicomic essay film Enlightenment Guaranteed (released in 2000) in regard to some correlations between Zen Buddhism and film.