Nanking

I saw the film at Sundance as part of a packed house for a third or fourth screening. I've seen the story of Nanking depicted before but never with the confidence I had that this was how it really was. It was like watching three Shindlers save the Chinese, and Spielberg's Shoa, all rolled into one perfect film. A panel of actors speak the lines from letters and diaries of European/American witnesses and Chinese and Japanese survivors tell their stories themselves on film. It's not just a narrator interpreting the events - it's the voices of the people who were there. The story line is well honed accompanied by stills, 16 mm smuggled out by one of the foreigners, and the actors provide voice for the foreigners. It is an incredibly moving and informative film. I sat next to two couples, two Japanese American men married to Chinese American women. One wife had seen the film the night before, and our night she brought everyone else back with her. I spoke with one of the husbands and he said that out of scale of 5 he gave it a 7. For the rest of the week I ran into others who saw the film and everyone said that they thought it was the best documentary they had ever seen in their lives. I totally agree.

This is a disturbing and fascinating film. It inter-cuts original newsreel film and film made by witnesses to the atrocity, face-to-camera reminiscence by some of the Chinese eyewitnesses, interviews (apparently made some years ago) with surviving Japanese soldiers who were involved in one part of the massacre, and a small cast of mostly American actors reading excerpts from diary entries, letters and other documents written by some of the 15 Europeans who tried so valiantly to maintain the "safe zone" in the old town of Nanking during the massacre.

As a history teacher, I have taught a little 20th century East Asian history. I knew of the Nanking massacre. I have read some of the documents used in the film and seen some of the still pictures. I hadn't seen any of the film before, though. It's very shocking stuff. That said, the most powerful and emotional moments of the film for me were the interviews. Especially the accounts of the old people, children at the time, who saw their family members killed or experienced rape.

Some of the comments I've read on the message boards here question whether this is a legitimate documentary. The Europeans (and some of the Chinese and one Japanese) are portrayed by actors. They do their job very well, but there is always a problem with dramatisation. How much can we trust the actors' interpretation of their lines? And how far has the editing gone? Then also, why choose just these people to represent the European community? Where were the Danish and British voices? Also, although they had tried to put themselves into character as prim missionary, grey businessman, reticent doctor, at least three of the actors were familiar faces to me, and in the beginning I found my thoughts wandering off the topic as I tried to identify them. (Mariel Hemingway, Jürgen Prochnow and Woody Harrelson.) Contrary to some of the voices on this message board, I don't think Nanking is anti-Japanese propaganda, or simply out to shock. I think the film makers are sincere when they say (through the words of their European witnesses) that the film does not set out to vilify the Japanese as a people. (Though I note that the Chinese witnesses uniformly refer to "Japanese devils" – at least in the subtitling.) But isn't it often the case that a film made to condemn the atrocities of war is always likely to be interpreted differently depending on the prejudices the audience brings with them? If you already think the Japanese are devils, this film will confirm you in your belief. If you distrust Americans, you will find more fuel for your prejudice here. If you think all war is hell, you'll go away convinced that this film is a great contribution to the cause of pacifism.

I tend towards the latter. And I think I could use this film in class to teach history.

In 1937, the Japanese army invades China in a cruel war and after the fall of Shanghai, the soldiers head to the capital Nanking. A group of Western foreigners led by John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, Bob Wilson and George Fitch create the Safety Zone, a sanctuary that was not bombed by the Japanese airplanes, to protect thousands of refugees. While the Japanese soldiers reach the town on 13 December 1937, raping, slaughtering and pillaging the civilian, the heroic group of Westerns defends the lives of about 250,000 Chinese sacrificing their own freedom, and succeeds to tell the world the crimes of war committed by the Japanese army in Nanking.

The harrowing, heartbreaking and awesome "Nanking" retells the story of the genocide in Nanking in 1937 promoted by the Japanese army. In the late 90's I saw the also impressive and disturbing "Nanjing 1937" (a.k.a. "Don't Cry, Nanking") and I confess that was the first time I heard anything about this massacre. In the movie "Shake Hands with the Devil", the Canadian General Romeo Dellaire has a fantastic line when he says that "genocide is when there are cargo train, concentration camps, gas chambers". In Hollywood, usually genocide is associated to the Jews in World War II and there are dozens of excellent movies about this dark period of the contemporary history. "Nanking" uses letters and other documents written mainly by the group of Westerns that created the Safety Zone in touching and emotional lectures of great actors and actresses; disturbing and heartbreaking testimonies of survivors; a great number of footages, in a magnificent work of research; and the wonderful music score of Kronos Quartet. I immediately associated how traumatic might have been the lives of these survivors after witnessing such cruel crimes of war. Further, in Nanking there were Westerns observers that told the world part of what happened in the city; imagine in Shanghai and in the minor towns in the countryside on the way of the Japanese troops without foreign witnesses how violent these soldiers might have been with the population. These group of expatriated shows the difference that an individual can make. I was really disturbed and sad after watching this fantastic movie. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

Note: On 24 May 2013 I saw this documentary again.

"Nanking" is a film that derives a devastating power from its staid remembrance of humanity's capacity for suffering, its capacity for evil and its capacity for good. It catalogues one of the most horrifying events in the history of the continent. As an overture for the Second World War, the Rape of Nanking was hell on earth. Nanking, the then bustling capital of China, was savagely brutalised by the invading Japanese military force in the summer of 1937. First, the air raids began tearing through the city's economy, destroying the lives of its citizens, leaving them helpless to the inevitable slaughter by the approaching troops. As the city's expatriates and those with money scurried to flee, a foreign contingent made up of the clergy, teachers and professionals stayed behind to protect and aid the destitute.

Directors Bill Guttentag and Bill Sturman pay tribute to those 22 men and women whose courage and kindness enabled them to establish a provisional safety zone that provided refuge for over 200,000 civilians, despite being outnumbered by a belligerent army angered at having the "eyes of the world" on them. Somewhere between being a cogent docudrama of heroism and a harrowingly powerful documentary of an unfathomable catastrophe, the vivid characterisations of these Americans and Europeans are crafted through the film's well-envisioned and excellently staged readings by its weathered performers that include: Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, Stephen Dorff and most notably Jurgen Prochnow. The letters and anecdotes of the expatriate saviours that provide the point-by-point narration carries with it a cutting, painful urgency and is delivered with compelling ideas of responsibility and personal anguish by the thespians and various composite characters.

Much of the film's haunting intensity comes from its use stock footage to recall the horrors of the past. The seamlessly inducted black and white archival footage of wartime atrocities capture the sorrow and ad hoc sentiments of people long gone, even as their cries and pain linger and reverberate throughout history. It adds to its sentience by summoning the voices and memories of Chinese survivors, their tears and pained expressions leading the way to the film's most enduring interviews. When one interviewee recalls how his mother breastfed his infant brother even as she was dying from being bayoneted through the chest, this anecdote ominously carries with it the burden of indescribable truth and inexplicable iniquity and a discovery of unknown depths of madness. Then the interviews with the surviving Japanese soldiers show remorselessness and the descriptions of the matter-of-fact executions and acts of depravity convey a sense that living through the war has changed these men irreparably. The footage and interviews show how the perspectives seen through the eyes of humanity are reconfigured during times of war when sin becomes justified and decency is abandoned.

The shared human consciousness between the foreigners and ravaged citizenry is indelibly considered in Prochnow's recital of the German businessman and Nazi sympathiser John Rabe's journal entry, a detail from memory made fecund by time: "Shouldn't one make an attempt to help them? There's a question of morality here, and so far I haven't been able to sidestep it." This pronouncement is a scathing indictment of the denials, and of the deliberate obscuration of truths so oppressive that it is met with ethical and universal repercussions. The preclusions of accountability are present even today, as other parts of the world are mired in invasions, Rabe's conundrum is still a relevant inquiry that is responded with an uncomfortable silence.

I imagine it's hard enough to make a compelling documentary with those depicted being alive. That said, when those whose diaries are the basis for said documentary have long since passed on it must be a minor miracle if the project works in even a small way. Oh, yes add in that few people cared at the time the actual events occurred, either by ignorance or indifference, and that very same lack of interest still exists today...So, why bother? Perhaps, because it has been said that a society who fails to recognize its mistakes is doomed to repeat them. If you believe in this simple premise then how can we not properly acknowledge what the Japanese did, while the world watched, even this many years later. Every generation needs to learn from our collective history and I believe this movie is an important tool in that lesson.

More to the point of Nanking. It is not in any way meant to be any kind of definitive documentary of all events that were related to the Japanese destruction of Nanking and therefore should not be examined as such. It tells the story of the few, the foreigners, in a very narrow time period who were responsible for the preservation of at least a quarter of a million Chinese refugees who would have most certainly been massacred. It does this by a uniquely artistic device of using some living survivors interspersed with actors portraying those who are dead yet are able to tell their stories using wording right from their diaries. By understanding that the words are the actual words of these deceased people who saved lives against the fiercest evil more than validates this approach for this viewer.

I want to recommend this movie to those interested in the atrocities of war as it relates to history and who we are and should be. All civilized humanity should fight for justice and never sit idly by as evil goes about it's business unchecked. When we sit back and do nothing evil flourishes as history proved all to well in the next seven or eight years as more Japanese and Nazi atrocities mounted. This movie reminds us of that and as such is not a "hate letter" to any sect, but shows the human capacity for both evil and good. It's our mandate to make sure good wins and I find this documentary effectively states this. Important and timely, highly recommended.