The Story
At the moment in
June, 1989, when the attention of the world was focused on Beijing's
Tiananmen Square, a small human drama was taking place. Li Lu, one of
the student leaders, was joined by his girlfriend, who traveled 1,000
miles by train to attend the gathering demonstration. The students,
surrounded by troops and tanks of the People's Army, did not know if
they would live another day. Li Lu asked his girlfriend to marry him,
and she agreed.
Documentary footage taken in the square shows them arm in arm, happy,
surrounded by cheering students. Knowing their time together might be
short, they enter a tent that is erected on the spot. "I had never been
with a woman," Li Lu remembers. "We had just begun to undress, but never
got a chance to perform our duty." They were interrupted by growing
tension in the square. Before long the troops began to move, and the
lovers were separated. "I never saw her again," Li Lu says.
Now a graduate with three degrees from Columbia University, he tells
this story during an interview in New York with Michael Apted, director
of "Moving the Mountain." Li Lu is one of several leaders who tell their
stories in the film; some are in New York, some are scattered overseas
(Paris, Hong Kong) and one is still in hiding in Beijing.
The larger story of Tiananmen Square has been told many times,
symbolized by a remarkable live shot of a single student facing down the
approach of a tank. What this film documents are some of the smaller
stories that went into it. Apted talks to several of the key leaders,
who still express disbelief that the People's Army would fire on Chinese
citizens, and who blame themselves (sometimes with tears) for not being
"adequate" to protect the lives of their followers.
No one knows for sure how many people were killed in the Tiananmen
massacre. "When they said (on government broadcasts) the troops had not
fired, that is how we knew they had fired," says one of the leaders of
the movement for Chinese democracy. "When they said no one had been
killed, that is how we knew many people had been killed - not one or
two, but many, because otherwise they would not have mentioned it."
Apted is a remarkable figure among directors for his lifelong practice
of moving between fiction films and documentaries.
In "Moving the Mountain," where original video source material is thin,
he augments the narration of Li Lu and the others with fictional
flashbacks to their memories. In the case of Li Lu, what he shows is a
life typical of those who grew up during the neo-puritanical time of the
Cultural Revolution.
Li Lu was taken from his parents while still a baby because his father,
a Russian-trained engineer, and his mother, the daughter of landowners,
were deemed in need of ideological correction at work camps. He was
reared by a series of foster parents, none of whom wanted him, and then
in an orphanage where he was mocked because of his class.
He remembers clearly the turning point: While standing in a corner for
punishment, he looks down to see a lizard creeping across his bare foot.
He believes that when this happens, the foot will soon fall off. When he
still has his foot the next morning, he believes he can survive
anything, and indeed he does survive, growing up to read everything he
can get his hands on, and finally traveling by train to Beijing to take
part in the demonstrations and hunger strikes that led to the showdown
at Tiananmen.
"Moving the Mountain" is not as gripping as it perhaps could have been,
because Apted does not have access to footage from the square he no
doubt would have liked to include (such footage probably has not
survived). What he does have is extraordinary, however, and at a time
when China's human rights policies are again in the air, and the
annexation of Hong Kong grows closer, "Moving the Mountain" is an
extraordinary glimpse behind the scenes of a country lurching with
difficulty toward democracy.
-Roger
Ebert
|
|
ASSIGNMENT
|
|
|
|
|
