Seventy-two years after the Nanjing Massacre, the atrocity remains an unresolved trauma. China estimates a death toll of some 300,000, while Japan has yet to offer a formal written apology. In Chinese director Lu Chuan’s
(陸川) third feature City of Life and Death (南京！南京！), this sensitive subject is given a dramatic contour that fortunately dwells neither on excessive grief nor nationalistic indignation.
Shot in black and white, the artistically accomplished film takes a gut-wrenching look at the brutalities that took place during a six-week period starting in December 1937. Not afraid of portraying the blurring of moral boundaries on either side of the conflict, director Lu chooses to show the irrationality of war through a succession of events centering on a small number of characters, both Chinese and Japanese, examining humanity in its faults and virtues.
It is the winter of 1937. We follow a Japanese soldier and enter the devastated Chinese capital of Nanjing. The camera shifts to a Chinese resistance fighter (played by Liu Ye, 劉燁) and his men. Suddenly there is an exchange of machine gun fire and exploding grenades. We can hardly tell the Japanese soldiers from the Chinese fighters as the camera frantically switches perspective back and forth between the two sides who are shown as equals in terms of mettle and morality.
We then move deeper into the city with young Japanese soldier Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi). He and his fellow soldiers stumble upon a church where Chinese men, women and children have taken shelter. Kadokawa trembles, rushes out and screams for backup. His cries linger amid the devastated landscape.
The city is soon filled with corpses of executed Chinese soldiers and civilians. Those who manage to survive find shelter in a refuge area operated by a score of Westerners including the “good Nazi” John Rabe (John Paisley). Female teacher Jiang (Gao Yuanyuan, 高圓圓) helps to oversee the camp and is a heroic archetype willing to risk her life to save others. Rabe’s Chinese assistant Tang (Fan Wei, 范偉) plays the role of collaborator as he tries to save his family by striking a deal with the Japanese.
Meanwhile, the camera takes us on a journey through the conflicted Kadokawa’s own personal hell, as he is destroyed bit by bit by the inhumanity that surrounds him.
To visualize an atrocity rarely visited by cinema, director Lu blends gripping realism with a lyrical style that gives his imagery its haunting power. The elegant black-and-white cinematography by Cao Yu (曹郁) exudes a sense of sober detachment and spares the audience from experiencing the full effect of the violence and gore, which may have appeared intolerably monstrous if filmed in color.
However, as a dramatic reflection on a national trauma, the film is designed to imagine the unimaginable. The bulk of the film shows civilians and soldiers being herded into groups and massacred, women gang raped and children killed. The violence is portrayed in an almost matter-of-fact manner. It sickens and repels, but posits no deeper significance. Strangely enough, it is only when the director is done with the raping and killing that his cinematic poetry begins to surface, enthralling the audience with its rich complexity of composition and imagery.
With production designer Hao Yi’s (郝藝) sets of destroyed buildings and streets, Nanjing resembles an impressionistic limbo that reflects the psychological frenzy and spiritual void of its inhabitants. The Japanese soldiers look no better than their ghostly victims, tramping through the desolate landscape like phantoms.
The most unforgettable cinematic moment takes place toward the end of the film. A Japanese victory ritual is performed with rhythmic drumming and dancing by soldiers. The men perform ceremonial gestures, slowly marching down the empty, ruined streets. The sight is eerie and unworldly, much like the atrocity itself. An unthinkable horror has been rendered in cinematic form right before our eyes, yet it remains unfathomable even seven decades later.
Since their leader Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and others were jailed as part of several ongoing bribery investigations, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has risen in the polls. Additionally, despite all the many and varied allegations against Ko and most of the top people in the party, it has held together with only a tiny number of minor figures exiting. The TPP has taken some damage, but vastly less than the New Power Party (NPP) did after it was caught up in a bribery scandal in 2020. The TPP has for years registered favorability in the thirties, and a Formosa poll
Chiayi County is blessed with several worthwhile upland trails, not all of which I’ve hiked. A few weeks ago, I finally got around to tackling Tanghu Historic Trail (塘湖古道), a short but unusually steep route in Jhuci Township (竹崎). According to the Web site of the Alishan National Scenic Area (阿里山國家風景區), the path climbs from 308m above sea level to an elevation of 770m in just 1.58km, an average gradient of 29 percent. And unless you arrange for someone to bring you to the starting point and collect you at the other end, there’s no way to avoid a significant amount
Nov. 4 to Nov. 10 Apollo magazine (文星) vowed that it wouldn’t play by the rules in its first issue — a bold statement to make in 1957, when anyone could be jailed for saying the wrong thing. However, the introduction to the inaugural Nov. 5 issue also defined the magazine as a “lifestyle, literature and art” publication, and the contents were relatively tame for the first four years, writes Tao Heng-sheng (陶恒生) in “The Apollo magazine that wouldn’t play by the rules” (不按牌理出牌的文星雜誌). In 1961, the magazine changed its mission to “thought, lifestyle and art” and adopted a more critical tone with
While global attention is finally being focused on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) gray zone aggression against Philippine territory in the South China Sea, at the other end of the PRC’s infamous 9 dash line map, PRC vessels are conducting an identical campaign against Indonesia, most importantly in the Natuna Islands. The Natunas fall into a gray area: do the dashes at the end of the PRC “cow’s tongue” map include the islands? It’s not clear. Less well known is that they also fall into another gray area. Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claim and continental shelf claim are not
RSS