American Cinematographer - January 1996 - 65

Even
before
ThetheGate
ofYork
Heavenly
Peace
closed
New
Film
Festival, the documentary was re¬

ceiving national attention, set off
when the Chinese
asked the Film

government

Society of Lincoln

Center, the Festival's organizers, to
withdraw the

picture. The govern¬
request on the
documentary's subject matter, the
1989 demonstration in Beijing's
Tiananmen Square, which they
ment based their

claimed

was an

insult to China.

Festival officials refused to with¬
draw the film and the Chinese gov¬
ernment retaliated by refusing to
allow

Zhang Yimou, whose film
Shanghai Triad opened the event, to
attend the premiere. So Heavenly
Peace opened to an audience eager

Unifying A Visual Truth
Documentarians Carma Hinton and

Richard Gordon enlist

postproduction
specialist David Leitner to help revise the
history of the Tiananmen Square protests
via a multitude of image sources.
by Brooke Comer

to see the film that would be con¬
sidered contraband in China.
Carma Hinton and Rich¬

ard Gordon, the husband-and-wife
team who co-directed Heavenly

Peace, brought diverse talents to
the task. Both are American, but
Hinton

spent the first 21 years of

her life in China. Mandarin

was

her

first

language, and she shares a
identity with her native
country. Gordon, a former still
photographer turned documentary
cameraman, has shot several previ¬
ous films with Hinton, including
Abode of Illusion, about Chang Daicultural

chien,

one

of China's most famous
happened to be a

artists (who also

forger); One Village in China, a
three-part series examining life in
Long Bow, a rural community
southwest of Beijing; First Moon,
about New Year celebrations in the
Chinese

countryside; and Stilt

Chinese

youth

Dancers, about the celebrative art of

brazenly

stilt

confronted
entrenched

dancing.
The Heavenly Peace project

authority
during the

evolved while Hinton and Gordon

watched the Tiananmen Square
demonstration in 1989 and were
frustrated by the simplistic way the

Tiananmen

Square
protests of
1989.

portrayed on TV.
"There seemed to be only two
sides," says Gordon. "It appeared
to be old versus young, good ver¬
sus evil, and many Americans
seemed to feel that 'people power'
events

was

were

Depicted
simplistically
by the media,
the ill-fated
conflict

far

about to transform China into

complex than
even

democratic state. The

reality was
far more disturbing and complex."

a

the

Heavenly
Peace

But he admits that "we didn't

know what we were
when we started."

was

more

documentar¬

getting into

ians

ever

suspected.

January 1996

American

Cinematographer

63



American Cinematographer - January 1996

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