Hacker Cinema
The Tank Man
2006 · Film · documentary · 86 min
Directed by Antony Thomas
On June 5, 1989, one day after Chinese troops expelled thousands of demonstrators from Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a solitary, unarmed protester stood his ground before a column of tanks advancing down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Captured by Western photographers watching nearby, this extraordinary confrontation became an icon of the fight for freedom around the world. FRONTLINE investigates the mystery of the tank man — his identity, his fate, and his significance for the Chinese leadership.
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3 comments on Hacker News
> are you mainly into text
Not at all. :) Well, I'm interested in text, just not just text, but consider myself a visual person.
I should have elaborated, but I am in general just not a fan of photos capturing moments. Whether staged or not, I feel photos are generally just not interesting and don't capture what's "real", so to speak. They capture this one frame of time that really isn't experienced by us in the way it's presented, and so I personally have a hard time finding it interesting or relatable. I highly prefer motion pictures (videos, films, etc.). A particular example that comes to mind is the tank man in the famous Tiananmen Square photo. The video is so much more powerful and meaningful to me. (However in this case, maybe my point is diluted because that photo is indeed a rather powerful one.)
There's a Portlandia skit that also captures a part of what I mean, where Fred and a girlfriend go on this European vacation that was miserable, nothing happened, and they ended up breaking up, but their pictures on Instagram (or something) looked amazing and seemed to capture the time of their life.
Another example are photographs of James Turrell's work. While photographs are indeed interesting, they simply do not capture what it's like to experience his works in person. I do like manipulated photographs though, such as the "drone painting" by Reuben Wu (https://www.instagram.com/itsreuben/).
I think photography kind of stands in this uninteresting arena (for me!) between other static art (e.g., paintings, computer-generated art, etc.) and motion art. Also, it seems everyone and their dog is a photographer now, so that can be a bit of a turn off as well, for better or worse on my part.
Then again, I probably contradict myself on this stance from time to time.
Maybe you're not well aware enough. Tank man has been around for as long as I can remember. It's has been the title of a PBS documentary from 2006:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/etc/transcript.html
Exactly. Thank you for saying so.
The Chinese army surrounded the block, sent flares up into the sky, and then mowed down the entire crowd with machine guns ... a deliberate massacre.
A few members of the US army, in a tense situation with rocks flying at them, lost it and fired a few shots that shouldn't have been fired. It was over almost immediately when the soldiers realized what they had done. It was terrible, but it was also a mistake, and not an orchestrated, deliberate mass-execution. I don't want to make light of the event; it's just nowhere near the same.
And as you said, every single American student is taught about the Kent State event, and the American military is carefully trained to avoid a repeat. The Chinese government, on the other hand, lets everyone know they'd gladly do it again by working so hard to cover up any knowledge of the event.
So while the one response involves shame and consequences for those involved, the other uses the event to accomplish even more intimidation against free speech.
It's telling that the Tank Man photo is only famous among the 84% of the world outside China. Within, if you ask a young person what it's a picture of and what event it represents, they'll be genuinely confused.
We should also give praise to the heroic measures American journalists of that era used to ensure we had the infamous photo & video footage of the event. They caught it from their hotel rooms, and Chinese officials broke down their doors immediately afterward to confiscate the footage. Let's just say the journalists hid the film really well.