Visualizing the Tiananmen Student MovementMoving the Mountain.Michael Apted , Trudie StylerThe Gate of Heavenly Peace.Carma Hinton , Richard Gordon

Abstract

Six years after the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square gripped global attention the world seems to have largely forgotten the momentous event. Thus we should welcome the release of two films which jolt us from our 'post-modern' inertia and bring back memories as vivid as they are painful. The two films are quite different in content and form as if they dealt with two different events, which only goes to show that even in the documentary mode the same material can be made to serve very different purposes. Moving the Mountain, directed by the veteran English director, Michael Apted, has all the ingredients of a feature film, telling a 'dramatic' story centred around the protagonist Li Lu, one of the student leaders. The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a lengthy documentary containing extensive commentary by a number of participants in the movement in addition to the film's own voice-over narrative. In documentary films, a story is typically told by either a single 'monological' narrator explaining what is happening (or in the government-made version of the incident, an authoritarian and heavily judgmental voice) or, by contrast, a 'dialogicaP set of several voices, each presumably speaking from a different perspective. As a literary scholar I believe this is one of the decisive factors that sets the two films apart from each other.