Tiananmen(天安门)

Banned in China and produced by the ‘Structure, Wave, Youth, Cinema Experimental Group,’ an informal collective of young filmmakers founded in 1989 and devoted to the production of documentaries. (The SWYC includes this series directors, Shi Jian and Chen Jue, as well as Wang Guangli, cinematographers Wang Hongyou and Zhao Baohong, and others like Meng Weidong and Wang Fei.) Based on interviews with more than a hundred people conducted between 1988 and 1991 (with a six-month gap after June 1989), the series documents various aspects of life surrounding the Square: survivors of the imperial era, street performers, grandmothers cooking for their families, small entrepreneurs, young women in modeling schools, foreigners, and so forth. It starts with a close-up of a giant portrait of Mao being painted and hung over the Square, and proceeds as a collage of archival footage and documentary material weaving a permanent dialectic between the present and the past, daily life and history.