Young Carma stayed with her and grew up the Chinese way.”When I was really small, I had a Chinese nanny and I spoke only Chinese. Her mother’s family she describes as “left, liberal, establishment”. Her father, William Hinton, was an American agriculturalist who went to China on a contract with UNRRA (the now defunct United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) in 1947. There, in a village called Longbow, he witnessed the beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party’s land reform.The Communists did not establish control over the whole of China until 1949, but they experimented with their social policies in the liberated areas.

The Hintons stayed on beyond William Hinton’s UNRRA contract, anxious to contribute to the success of the revolution. Hinton was deeply impressed and his book, Fanshen, was to become one of the classics of the Chinese revolution. That she was born in China was the result of her parents’ desire for social change. It remains lightly – and strangely – accented.
Until she went to the United States, she was, as nearly as it’s possible for someone who was technically a foreigner to be, a product of the People’s Republic of China. But her English was learned, first patchily and reluctantly in Beijing, then, with dogged application, in the United States where she went to study in her late teens.

Standing up to power and changing society is something of a theme for Carma Hinton, a theme matured in two generations of her family and tempered by her own personal history. “People listen to my accent and try to guess where I’m from,” she says “They never get it. The closest anyone has got is Turkey.” The accent is, in fact, Chinese, but it’s unguessable because in outward appearance the well-groomed Ms Hinton is a poised, middle-class American. In the first few moments of her remarkable documentary on Tiananmen, Carma Hinton’s narration says, “When individuals stand up to power, they bring the lessons that power has taught them and the harm it’s done them.” It’s a thought that sets the interpretative framework for the next 90 minutes, a scrupulous, sometimes lyrical and deeply moving examination of the tragedy of the Beijing spring and the attitudes – on both sides – that brought the tragedy about. Strictly speaking, a work written last year might be equally “timeless”, equally resistant to temporal decomposition, but it would never be described as such because it would be a false bill of goods. “Timeless” actually means “timeful”, and you only achieve that by waiting patiently..

Jane Austen, the woman, wasn’t timeless but her comedy has proved itself so; perhaps we should buy a ticket in the hope of getting in on the secret. But what would it be for a work to be genuinely timeless, to pass through the years without any abrading friction whatever, so that it registered on an audience in 1996 exactly as it had a hundred or even 500 years earlier? Is such a work even conceivable?”Timeless” doesn’t worry about such issues because it has simpler business in hand, encouraging cinema-goers with a coded guarantee of antiquity. They are simply using “timeless” as a euphemism for classic, a sort of chronological superlative – the word is a shorthand for saying something like “so good that the passage of time has had no effect on it”, as well as offering a mild reassurance that you’ll still enjoy it But even here the phrase raises some questions. For a species that can never quite forget its own mortality, the idea that something is exempt from the fatal tick of the clock has an obvious appeal. And while a film based on the life of George Washington might be brave enough to include outdated racial opinions, or scholarly enough to relish the accuracy of a frock coat, it would almost certainly draw the line at exposing the President’s wooden false-teeth.

In a similar vein, as Adam Mars-Jones pointed out on our Film pages last week, every director of an Austen adaptation has to decide whether servants are a pleasing accessory to the dream or an embarrassment we don’t quite know how to cope with.The copywriters, I would guess, don’t have such matters in mind. We watch in large part because we desire to be out of our own time, and anachronism – which might be the best demonstration of a work’s genuine timelessness – is perceived as a breach of contract (those who talk about the “timeless” qualities of Shakespeare are quite often the same people who moan grumpily about modern dress productions).
Naturally, the attention we pay is highly selective – the implicit presence of modern dentistry and modern detergents would only be troubling to the most determined refugee from the 20th century. When you read Emma, the past has no opportunity to impress you as an escape from the present – because unless specifically mentioned, the paraphernalia of period is effectively invisible. When you watch Emma, however, everything must be present and correct, and the negligible elements of any scene – the shape of the tea-cups or the cut of a bodice, jostle for your approval. Obviously, “timelessness” is deemed to be a tempting commodity for cinema- goers, which is slightly paradoxical when you consider that time, above all, is what a period film offers you. In one sense, these films aren’t timeless at all – they are time-crammed, bulging with history, or what passes for it in Hollywood (long dresses and nobody saying “yeah”). Wouldn’t it be more logical to trumpet these virtues – “Jane Austen’s wonderfully dated story”, say, or “as old-fashioned as they come”, particularly because such films (quite unlike the novels on which they are based) necessarily exploit a nostalgia for vanished manners and modes of life.