| The Gate of Heavenly Peace | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Richard Gordon Carma Hinton |
| Written by | Geremie Barmé John Crowley |
| Narrated by | Deborah Amos |
| Starring | Dai Qing Ding Zilin Han Dongfang Wang Dan Wuer Kaixi |
| Music by | Mark Pevsner |
| Release date(s) | 1995 |
| Running time | 180 min |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English Mandarin |
The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Chinese: 天安门; pinyin: Tiānānmén) is a 1995 documentary film, produced by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
Contents |
The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a three-hour documentary film about the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, which culminated in the violent government crackdown on June 4. The film uses archival footage and contemporary interviews with a wide range of Chinese citizens, including workers, students, intellectuals, and government officials, to revisit the events of “Beijing Spring.” From the beginning of the protests in mid-April to the night of June 3-4, the film provides a “meticulous day-by-day chronicle of the six-week period… This unglamorous but absorbing film interweaves videotaped scenes of the demonstrations and conversations with leaders and participants with an explanatory narration into an account that is as clear-headed as it is thorough and well-organized.”[1]
Among those interviewed are Liu Xiaobo, Wang Dan, Wuer Kaixi, Han Dongfang, Ding Zilin, Chai Ling, Dai Qing, Feng Congde, and Hou Dejian.
In addition, The Gate of Heavenly Peace examines the deeper history behind the demonstrations, providing historical and cultural context for the famous images that the Western media flashed around the world. The film explores the symbolic importance of Tiananmen Square and also looks at earlier political movements in China from the May Fourth Movement of 1919 to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 to the Tiananmen Incident of 1976. In so doing, the film considers the ways in which the political habits and attitudes that came to inform public life in China over the past century also shaped the events of 1989.
Pauline Chen writes: “The Gate of Heavenly Peace illuminates how images of these movements, filtered and refracted through propaganda, emotion, and imperfect memory, provided inspiration and models for the participants, both students and government, in the 1989 events. The students thought they were emulating the May 4 leaders, forgetting that those students returned to school and worked for more gradual social change after successfully drawing attention to China's political and social problems. To some Communist Party members, however, the 1989 mass student demonstrations may have chillingly recalled the chaos and terror of the Cultural Revolution. Both the Cultural Revolution and the 1976 Tiananmen Incident attest to how extremists have used popular uprisings as excuses to get rid of their moderate rivals; the 'reactionary' Deng Xiaoping, who favored greater economic freedom, was blamed by Mao for the 1976 Tiananmen Incident and forced from his position. Unfortunately, today's hard-liners have also learned the lesson from these events. The moderate reformers Zhao Ziyang and Yan Mingfu, China's best hope for democratic reform, were ousted from power following the June 4 crisis.”[2]
The Gate of Heavenly Peace was produced and directed by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, who have collaboratively made numerous films about China. Their production company, the Long Bow Group, is a small non-profit company based in the Boston area. According to Gordon, "One of the reasons we wanted to make [The Gate of Heavenly Peace] was to give more depth to [the 1989] movement and not just show the final, violent conclusion, which is where people tend to focus.”[3] Despite the hundreds of hours of Western media coverage, Hinton felt that "everything was reduced to slogans and hand clapping. I wanted to hear more Chinese voices, because I knew they would show a range of opinion. We felt a film that did that could help open up people's minds about these events. It's not all black and white." [3] In addition to Hinton and Gordon, China scholars such as Geremie Barmé, Gail Hershatter, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom helped to provide context and perspective. Over three hundred hours of archival footage were collected, and the film took over five years to complete. Says Hinton, "It was not an easy decision to get into something like this. I knew that any documentary - to say nothing of something of this scale, between the funding and the research and the actual making of the film - would probably take years of our lives. Once we decided to make the film, it did take nearly six years."[4]
This film has raised serious concern from those who had involved intensively in the movement which it has been accused by describing some of the student leader for being radical. For example, the filmmakers suggest that “the hard-liners within the government marginalized moderates among the protesters (including students, workers and intellectuals), while the actions of radical protesters undermined moderates in the government. Moderate voices were gradually cowed and then silenced by extremism and emotionalism on both sides.”[5] In following the fate of these “moderate voices,” the film raises questions about some of the decisions that were made by a few of the student leaders. This has however disagreed by the survivors of the massacre incident, such as Chai Ling. As she wrote, "Certain individuals, for the sake of gaining approval of the [Chinese] authorities, have racked their brains for ways and means to come up with policies for them. And there is another person with a pro-Communist history [Hinton] who has been hawking [her] documentary film for crude commercial gain by taking things out of context and trying to show up something new, unreasonably turning history on its head and calling black white."[6]
A group of the survivors of the massacre and the organizers, participants, researchers and supporters of the movement have also written an open letter to the filmmaker to correct the false reporting and editing in the film. They mentioned, "In your documentary, some selectively quoted statements and omissions of a few important historical facts created a false record of the history, particularly in relation to our fellow student leader Chai Ling. If you consider your production a documentary of the facts without any personal motives to intentionally discredit Chai Ling and the student organizers of the movement, we, many of whom were actually in Tiananmen Square, urge you to post this letter on your web site so that the public can consider both of our perspectives and judge for themselves." [7]
Chinese Government Opposition to the Film
After The Gate of Heavenly Peace was completed in the fall of 1995, it premiered that October at the New York Film Festival. This time, controversy would be generated not by the exiled dissident community, but by the Chinese government. According to Newsweek (Oct. 9, 1995), the Chinese Consulate in New York was “not happy” to hear that The Gate of Heavenly Peace would be part of the festival. Consular officials said that “the film was an insult to China, and unless it was removed from the festival, they would be forced to withdraw [Zhang Yimou’s new film] Shanghai Triad.”[8]
Other film festivals were also subjected to similar pressures; for example, in an official letter to the director of Filmfest DC, the Press Counsel of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington D.C. wrote, “As is well known, a very small number of people engaged themselves in anti-government violence in Beijing in June 1989 but failed. The film the Gate of Heavenly Peace sings praise of these people in total disregard of the facts. If this film is shown during the festival, it will mislead the audience and hurt the feelings of the 1.2 billion Chinese people. … Therefore, it is necessary and appropriate to withdraw this film from the festival.” The director of Filmfest DC did not comply.[9]
Other festival directors were less resolute in the face of pressure to withdraw the film, as discussed in "Technical Problems...à la Chinoisie" in DOX Documentary Film Magazine.[10]
The Gate of Heavenly Peace received a George Foster Peabody Award, both the International Critics Prize and Best Social and Political Documentary at the Banff World Television Festival, and a National News & Documentary Emmy Award Nomination. Other awards include: Award for Excellence, American Anthropological Association, Golden Spire, San Francisco International Film Festival, and Best of Festival, New England Film & Video Festival.
The Gate of Heavenly Peace has been widely and positively reviewed in the press. Some examples are below; more excerpts are available on the Gate site at http://www.tsquare.tv/film/reviewex.html.
David Ansen, Newsweek - “deep, powerful and rivetingly complex” [8]
Charles Taylor, Boston Phoenix – “The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Richard Gordon and Carma Hilton's magnificent and devastating three-hour documentary on the 1989 Chinese democracy movement, which culminated with the tragedy at Tiananmen Square, has the richness, clarity, and complexity that only the best documentaries afford… It is certainly one of the great documentaries of the past 20 years.”[11]
Michael Blowen, "TV Week" magazine, The Boston Globe - "In The Gate of Heavenly Peace (the literal translation of the name Tiananmen), the causes, effects and fallout from the six-week protest that led up to the Chinese government's crackdown on dissidents are detailed with intelligence, grace and toughness. Filmmakers Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon have transformed news into history, and history into art."[12]
Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader – “An immensely valuable three-hour documentary… This film is likely to revise the very terms of your understanding of the pivotal events it considers.”[13]