Tone Glow Presents Tiananmen 天安门 (1991): The First Public Screening of the 8-Part Documentary by Shi Jian and Chen Jue

On July 7th, watch the documentary that CCTV canceled that serves as a commemorative time capsule of Beijing in the late 1980s

After June 1989, ideological control in the media changed significantly. Previously I might have had personal creative space, but afterwards it became impossible to broadcast it on television. No matter how I modified the content, it was not going to work as long as the name [Tiananmen] remained the same… I felt that the whole of society was breathless, at a standstill. There was no space to express my thoughts. So I decided to simplify things, that is, decided to complete this documentary on my own.

—Shi Jian, October 9, 2020 from “An Interview with Shi Jian,” Chinese Independent Cinema Observer, “Issue 2: Pre-History of Chinese Independent Cinema”

Tone Glow is excited to announce the first ever public screening of Tiananmen 天安门. Originally completed in May of 1991, this eight-part documentary was supposed to premiere at the 1992 Hong Kong International Film Festival (program books from that year list it as part of the slate), but was ultimately blocked when the Chinese film delegation boycotted its inclusion. In 1997, two parts of the series were included in a MoMA retrospective programmed by the late Bérénice Reynaud, who got a hold of VHS tapes that were circulating to foreign press in Hong Kong just before the festival pulled its screening.

In its earliest incarnation, Tiananmen was a China Central Television 中国中央电视台 (CCTV) production, and had a planned airing commencement date of National Day—October 1, 1989—commemorating the 40th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, production halted in the spring of 1989, when the democracy movement, which had been fomenting throughout the 1980s, culminated in student protests at Tiananmen Square. After the violence that ensued on June 4th, CCTV subsequently decided that any series with the title “Tiananmen” would be too controversial to air, and permanently canceled it.

This decision did not sit well with the series’ then 20-year-old principle director, Shi Jian 时间, a graduate of the Beijing Broadcasting Academy 北京广播学院 who had been assigned to CCTV after his graduation and given the Tiananmen project after directing a few well-regarded short programs for the station. Shi was part of a new generation of documentarians in China: while these young filmmakers themselves may not have been abroad, nor had they first-hand exposure to documentary production outside the country, many of their professors did, and the influence this had on them shaped their approach to documentary aesthetics as they took up assignments at state companies. This was the beginning of what would become the “New Documentary Movement,” which would also birth some of the first independent films made in China, like Wu Wenguang’s 吴文光 Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers 流浪北京 (1990).

In the early ’90s, Shi recruited a co-director, Chen Jue 陈爵, and the two decided to finish Tiananmen independently, largely using money they made from their sanctioned work at CCTV. The resulting eight “parts”—“The Old City,” “Residences,” “On the Street,” “On Stage,” “Going Places,” “Guest Performers,” “On the Way,” and “Memories”—look at different demographics of China’s capital in the late 1980s. As Bérénice Reynaud said of the series, it “[weaves] a permanent dialectic between the present and the past, daily life and history.” The democracy movement largely takes place offscreen; Tiananmen’s backdrop is instead a tapestry of sociopolitical life in and around one of the most historically important sites of modern China, whose scope stretches from the remnant traditions and survivors of the pre-Revolution era to the competitive struggles sparked by the transition to a planned economy, to liberalization in the shadow of the not-too-distant Cultural Revolution, to the vibrant artist communities and the countercultural movements at their core, to an overall sense of guarded idealism about China’s 21st century trajectory.

From a filmmaking perspective, too, Tiananmen was hugely innovative for its time: Virtually no other documentaries in China before it used diegetic sound, so even the frequent reliance on verité interviews was unprecedented. The seven-hour work’s formal strategies shift depending on its social, spatial, and temporal focus—much of it draws on the tenets of direct cinema, and in particular on the influence of domestically accessible Western surveys of modern China, like Jorvis Ivens’s How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo (1972), and the BBC’s exceptional Heart of the Dragon (1984). The last part of this documentary relies on archival footage to create a miniature essay film that reframes much of what came before it. Throughout, the poetically written narration—much of which was drafted after the project’s cancelation at CCTV—gestures toward a reckoning with post-June 4th feelings, making good on the series’ repeated dictum: “We respect life, just as we respect history.” —Sam C. Mac

Tiananmen is a would-be landmark of Chinese documentary that is itself long overdue for respect and historical validation. Tone Glow would like to thank Sam C. Mac (programmer of the “Big Waves, Great Earthquakes” series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University) and Tiananmen co-director Shi Jian for providing us with the film and bringing it to our Chicago audience 35 years after the “Tiananmen Incident.” The film will be shown digitally across 8 hours at Sweet Void Cinema in Chicago (3036 W Chicago Ave). There will be an intermission.

Tickets for the screening can be purchased here. Tickets are $12 for the entire 8-part series. Below, see a trailer for Tiananmen created by Sam C. Mac.