While working on promotional materials for Feng Xiaogang's Aftershock 唐山大地震 movie this summer, I encountered and interviewed a series of movie-goers who had exited the cinema on the film's opening night with red-rimmed eyes yet oddly optimistic faces. Having chosen not to watch the movie that evening due to my preference to not be seen crying in public, I listened intently to the comments and attempted to imagine what could have caused these audience members to become so emotional.
Many of those that I talked to compared Aftershock to Lu Chuan's 2009 film, A City of Life and Death 南京！南京！. Aha, I thought, this was, incidentally, a movie that I had seen. I recalled this movie review that I had written for Lu's film last year, so I dug it up, revamped it a little bit, and reposted it, so that all this may be fresh in my memory when I do see Aftershock, preferably curled up in my bed and off a dvd on my laptop computer.
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If a 'good movie' is one where the director has successfully accomplished what he/she has set out to do, in the limited time that the director has to do it in, then audiences must be aware and accepting of the director's intentions and philosophy behind each film before making a judgement on its relative worth. But for movies whose themes are so steeped in historical controversy, it may be difficult to reconcile the need to recognise the creator's artistic intentions as being 'good'.
Lu Chuan’s 2009 movie, City of Life and Death (or Nanjing! Nanjing! by its Chinese translation) attacks a time of historical controversy with a view and a mission that has never been attempted before. The director wants to depict the Japanese soldiers as people, not as insane monsters, because seeing them as people can take away any excuses that could be made on their behalf to behave so brutally. Our society is inclined to pity and excuse those who are not in their right state of mind for any crimes they commit—in legal systems across the world, for example, a convicted ‘insane’ person’s sentence is never as harsh as one who is in his/her ‘right frame of mind’. We can justifiably agree that in most historical sources created by the Chinese and the Allies from the Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, from 1937—1945, play up the sub-human, demonic qualities of the Japanese soldiers and even the Japanese race in general, a gross generalisation about a nation that has been spared of Japan’s German and Nazi allies.
We can somewhat assess that never has the Japanese military been given a fair chance of actually being represented as human beings, as opposed to the common demonisations of ‘monkey-men’ or ‘devils’ trained to massacre. Maybe it’s time to try out something different, thinks Lu, because soldiers are just humans trained in the art of war, and here, given a licence and a blueprint to kill.
And Lu carries out his task well. From one angle, the soldiers play soccer and joke with each other in their spare time, however, the very same humans are also responsible for the massacres that the camera unflinchingly shows us. The cold-blooded, logical and steady-handed killings that the Japanese soldiers instigate throughout the film are just that much more brutal because of their methodological and very much sane actions. Even in the scenes with the soldiers’ encounters with comfort women, it’s not the lust-crazed, monstrous appetites that drive the soldiers to demand Chinese women to be given up for sexual services—they are marched to the soldiers calmly, set up in tents with curtains to separate the ‘cubicles’, and those alive are returned three weeks later.
It’s all business. In fact, all except for one emotionally-scarred Sergeant, the Japanese are content to freely transform and alternate between being free-spirited, happy young men, to cold-blooded killing machines. Through an interesting character foil, the Nazi businessman John Rabe is compassionate to the point where he sheds tears at his inability to do more for the Chinese refugees, twisting our views again on another popular WWII enemy.
So why, then, has there still been so much controversy surrounding the depiction of Japanese soldiers in this film? The criticism that Lu Chuan faces from some of the movie’s Chinese viewers is that he has been too nice to the Japanese, and doesn’t do the massacre justice. Is it the sympathetic portrayal of the Sergeant Kadokawa, who sets free two captured Chinese soldiers before committing suicide at the end of the film? He, like the Chinese refugees, is trapped between the city walls of Nanjing and the unrelenting Japanese military, and can only conceive of one way out.
It could be this one soldier, who denies us a clear-cut view of the typical Japanese militaryman that has been ingrained into this generation’s consciousness for as long as we can remember. Or, maybe there’s something else that’s underlying here that seems to overlook the overwhelming brutality that the portrayal of Japanese soldiers depict, completely engulfing Kadokawa’s lonesome outlier. The Nanjing Massacre is no doubt a sensitive topic in the history of both China and Japan, and because of this has escaped a formal and comprehensive historical re-evaluation in terms of what it means
This lies, in part, at the ‘national’ nature of the conflict. It is no longer one army’s misdoing to another’s civilians, a war crime defined as in any international justice system, the enduring conflict has instead escalated into one nation’s crime against another, passed on from one generation onto the other. Over a billion people feel emotionally connected and involved in this conflict. Some are content with keeping the issue of Nanjing at bay and at polar ends of an unforgiving spectrum, where demands of apologies and forgiveness from the Japanese nation are made and fundamental questions of numbers and historical inaccuracies cannot be solved.
Keeping the proverbial skeleton inside the national closet and not allowing for the underlying conflicts to be ‘solved’ can help to prevent anything more potent or horrific to happen again, but it also limits the lens from which we can view others, and especially the other. It is hard, especially for those Chinese who have been personally or directly affected by the violence in Nanjing, to instantly shake off images and opinions of the Japanese that have been the discourse for decades, but by Lu Chuan’s reasoning, let’s calm down a little and try not to demonise the enemy. They were but human beings, even of a different nation, and the key to dealing with the past lies in thinking of them as such.
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