Carma Hinton

Carma Hinton (born 1949) is a documentary filmmaker and Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, United States. [cite web |url= http://gazette.gmu.edu/articles/7524/|title= Filmmaker Carma Hinton Appointed Robinson Professor|accessdate=2007-01-04 |format= |work= ] She was born and raised in Beijing, China, by American parents, and lived there until she was twenty-one. Chinese is her first language and culture. Together with Richard Gordon, Hinton has directed thirteen documentary films about China, including "Morning Sun", "The Gate of Heavenly Peace", "Small Happiness", "First Moon", "All Under Heaven", and "Abode of Illusion".

Hinton has a Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University and has held teaching positions at Swarthmore, Wellesley, MIT, and Northeastern. In addition, she has lectured widely on Chinese culture, history, and film at educational institutions both in the United States and around the world.

Films

Hinton has received many awards for her work in film. Among these are two George Foster Peabody Awards, the American Historical Association's John E. O'Connor Film Award, the International Critics Prize and the Best Social and Political Documentary at the Banff Television Festival, and nominations for Best Documentary Feature by the National Film Board of Canada, the ABCNEWS VideoSource and Pare Lorentz Awards by the International Documentary Association, and a National News & Documentary Emmy Award.

Her films have also received wide acclaim in both the popular press and in academic journals. "Morning Sun" -- about China's Cultural Revolution -- is "a stunning new documentary film" ("Newsweek"), "an astonishing mix of propaganda and news footage ... an illuminating look at China's dark time" ("The Boston Globe"), and "transfixing" ("The New York Times"). "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" -- about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests -- "is a deep, powerful and rivetingly complex study of Tiananmen" ("Newsweek"), "enthralling" ("The New York Times"), and "one of the great documentaries of the past 20 years" ("Boston Phoenix"). "One Village in China" provides "an empathetic introduction to a handful of people who live in a complexly textured world of large power constellations, intimate social relations and deep moral dilemmas" ("Journal of Asian Studies"). "Small Happiness" is "invaluable for both general audiences and the academic community" (Smithsonian Institution).

Her films have been shown in numerous film festivals worldwide, including New York, Berlin, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and San Francisco. They have also been screened at the Film Forum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., among others, and broadcast on television stations around the world, including PBS, the BBC, and ARTE.

Other work

Hinton has also produced websites for "Morning Sun" and "The Gate of Heavenly Peace". These sites contain thousands of pages of text in Chinese and English, along with media clips, slideshows, photographs, posters, diaries, and other images. The sites receive over twenty-thousand visitors per month, and they have been incorporated into Chinese studies courses worldwide. "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" website has been recognized by "The Washington Post", "The Boston Globe", "Wired", and Yahoo, among others, as one of the leading Internet resources on China. It has received an award from the Australian National University as one of the best web resources in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities. It is also rated as an essential educational resource by the Internet Guide for China Studies at Heidelberg University.

In 1997, Hinton assisted the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in a unique project to bring a Qing dynasty house from China's Anhui province to the U.S. The house, known as Yin Yu Tang, has been reassembled at the Peabody, where it provides an extraordinary opportunity for visitors to learn about Chinese architecture, traditional culture, and daily life.

Related persons

*William Hinton (father), author of "Fanshen".
*Joan Hinton (aunt), a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, and her husband Erwin (Sid) Engst
*Carmelita Hinton (grandmother), educator and founder of the Putney School in Vermont.
*Charles Howard Hinton (great-grandfather), mathematician and science fiction writer.
*George Boole (great-great-grandfather), mathematician and philosopher, inventor of Boolean algebra.
*Ethel Lilian Voynich (great-grand-aunt, daughter of George Boole), novelist, musician, author of "The Gadfly". Her husband, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, was an antique book-dealer and the eponym of the Voynich manuscript. Clips from a film of "The Gadfly" appear in Carma Hinton's 2003 documentary "Morning Sun"
*Carma Hinton's 1995 documentary, "The Gate of Heavenly Peace", includes interviews with Dai Qing, Ding Zilin, Han Dongfang, Wang Dan, and Wuer Kaixi.

References

External links

* [http://www.morningsun.org/ "Morning Sun"]
* [http://www.tsquare.tv/ "The Gate of Heavenly Peace"]
* [http://tsquare.tv/film/voice.html "Anatomy of a Massacre," Village Voice article on "The Gate of Heavenly Peace"]