Τιαννανμέν

Sam C. Mac4.0

Quick announcement: A summit in Beijing today with the filmmakers of Tiananmen solidified plans to make this landmark film freely and responsibly available to all later this year. I’m so pleased! More details soon.

Sam C. Mac4.0

I will be streaming the full, unreleased, 8-episode series of Tiananmen at 10:00PM EST tonight, as both a small birthday gift to myself, and more importantly, to commemorate 1989. You can watch the stream here: www.youtube.com/live/cdCfXsCl2N0I was born the night of June 3, 1988. Exactly one year later, on the same night, troops were deployed in Tiananmen Square, resulting in a massacre of student protestors. Tomorrow marks the 35th anniversary of that event.Meanwhile, throughout 1988 and 1989, two TV documentarians -- but mainly a Beijing Broadcasting Academy alum by the name of Shi Jian (his name literally translates to "Time") -- worked tirelessly on an innovative, CCTV-produced documentary series simply titled Tiananmen. The series wasn't developed with the democracy movement in mind, but rather it intended to look at arguably the most important historical site of modern China through the lens of history and the present moment. By consequence of those ambitions, its backdrop became the sociopolitical life of Beijing in the late 1980s: From the remnant traditions and survivors of the pre-Revolution era, to the competitive struggles sparked by the economic reform, to liberalization in the shadow of the not-too-distant Cultural Revolution, to the vibrant artist communities and the dogged idealism they tend to project for the future of the country.After the massacre, CCTV canceled production on Tiananmen, along with another one of its "event" series (The Chinese, which served as the main incubator for Wu Wenguang's seminal debut documentary, Bumming in Beijing), over the concern that even using "Tiananmen" as a title would be far too sensitive. Nonetheless, the series’ two co-directors, Shi Jian and Chen Jue, continued to film material, now working independently of their state-affiliation, and even rewrote the script for the narration in such a way as to subtly reflect on the trauma of 1989.Tiananmen was completed in 1991. It has never screened in full.When I interviewed Shi Jian earlier this year, he seemed to feel this was in part due to the time commitment required (its 8 episodes clock in at just over 7 hours total, and the series very much benefits from viewing it in its entirety). Indeed, I haven't had a lot of luck yet trying to program it.Inspired by western-produced documentary efforts chronicling China, like Joris Ivens' How Yukong Moved the Mountains, Antonioni's Chung Kuo, and the BBC's exceptional Heart of the Dragon (all of which Shi Jian and the other students in his cohort viewed eagerly at the Beijing Broadcasting Academy), Tiananmen is a would-be landmark of Chinese documentary that incorporates many of the formal and aesthetic strategies from those earlier masters of cinema, but is further underscored by a comprehensive understanding of not only Chinese history but the realities faced across social strata in the wake of reform and opening up.It's a document of a time that should never be forgotten, nor suppressed.

Sam C. Mac4.0

Because people seem to like my little “Research Story” posts, here’s a new and very, very unexpected development: I spoke to a somewhat famous filmmaker just yesterday who happens to have the master tapes for Tiananmen, and I even confirmed with the director of Tiananmen that this is the person whom he gave his master tapes to in the mid-1990s. So now comes the difficult job of convincing this filmmaker to search their apparently very disorderly archive and physically locate these eight tapes. One more even crazier twist of fate: the archive with the Tiananmen master tapes just happens to be located in the same city as me.Stay tuned for more exciting updates…