The Gate of Heavenly Peace (documentary)
Encyclopedia
The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a 1995 documentary film
, produced by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton
, about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
.
, 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.”
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.”
, 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.” 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." 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."
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."
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.”
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.
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.
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.
David Ansen, Newsweek - “deep, powerful and rivetingly complex”
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.”
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."
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.”
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
, produced by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton
Carma Hinton
Carma Hinton is a documentary filmmaker and Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, United States. She was born and raised in Beijing, China, by American parents, and lived there until she was twenty-one. Chinese is...
, about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...
.
Synopsis
The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a three-hour documentary film about the 1989 protests at Tiananmen SquareTiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the center of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen Gate located to its North, separating it from the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the third largest city square in the world...
, 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.”
Among those interviewed are Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo is a Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule in China...
, Wang Dan
Wang Dan
Wang Dan , a leader of the Chinese democracy movement, was one of the most visible of the student leaders in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Wang holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. From August 2009 to February 2010, Wang taught cross-strait history at Taiwan's National...
, Wuer Kaixi, Han Dongfang
Han Dongfang
Han Dongfang has been an advocate for workers' rights in China for more than two decades during which time he has won numerous international awards including the 1993 Democracy Award from the U.S...
, Ding Zilin
Ding Zilin
Professor Ding Zilin is currently the leader of the political pressure group Tiananmen Mothers.-Biography:...
, Chai Ling
Chai Ling
Chai Ling was one of the student leaders in the Tian'anmen Square protests of 1989. Today she is Founder of All Girls Allowed, a humanitarian organization working to restore value to girls in China.-Education and protest:Chai Ling's parents were members of the Communist Party...
, Dai Qing
Dai Qing
Dai Qing, born in August 1941, is a journalist and activist for China-related issues; most significantly against the Three Gorges Dam Project. Dai is also an author who has published many influential books, articles, and journals.-Early life:Dai, also called Fu Ning , was born in Chongqing,...
, Feng Congde, and Hou Dejian
Hou Dejian
侯德健 , born October 1, 1956 in Taiwan, is a songwriter, composer, and singer.Since the 1980s, his songs have been popular in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. His songs are written mostly in Chinese, with a few in English...
.
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
Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the center of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen Gate located to its North, separating it from the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the third largest city square in the world...
and also looks at earlier political movements in China from the May Fourth Movement
May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially the Shandong Problem...
of 1919 to the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
of 1966-76 to the Tiananmen Incident
Tiananmen Incident
The Tiananmen Incident took place on April 5, 1976 at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. The incident occurred on the traditional day of mourning, the Qingming Festival, after the Nanjing Incident, and was triggered by the death of Premier Zhou Enlai earlier that year...
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.”
Production
The Gate of Heavenly Peace was produced and directed by Richard Gordon and Carma HintonCarma Hinton
Carma Hinton is a documentary filmmaker and Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, United States. She was born and raised in Beijing, China, by American parents, and lived there until she was twenty-one. Chinese is...
, 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.” 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." 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."
Controversy
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.” 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."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."
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.”
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.
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.
Awards
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 AwardEmmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
Nomination. Other awards include: Award for Excellence, American Anthropological Association
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic...
, Golden Spire, San Francisco International Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival is the oldest continuously running film festival in the Americas. Organized by the San Francisco Film Society, the International is held each spring for two weeks, presenting an average of 150 films from over 50 countries...
, and Best of Festival, New England Film & Video Festival.
Reviews
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”
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.”
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."
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.”
External links
- The Gate of Heavenly Peace Official Website
- Excerpts from the film
- Official Distributor
- The Gate of Heavenly Peace at the Internet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...