home!
Actually, I got home two days ago. But on the 24th I was too exhausted to compose complete sentences, and yesterday I spent being lazy until I went to see a movie. After the movie, I was too much in shock to do anything of substance (where substance="more brain-intensive than making cocoa and chatting online").
The movie is called City of Life and Death in English, and 南京！南京！ (Nanking! Nanking!) in the original Chinese. Those of you with some historical knowledge can probably guess what the movie was about. If not, well, here's some wikipedia for you.
I was worried going into the film, because the Nanjing Massacre is still considered controversial. Unlike Germany, which has generally dealt with its war crimes by apologizing again and again and admitting everything, Japan denies everything it might be able to get away with and tries to avoid any apologies at all. This makes Japan fairly unpopular with a lot of Chinese people. But while I tend to have a lot of sympathy for anti-Japan anger in China, I don't actually want to watch a movie about how Japanese people are inhumane monsters. At the same time, this movie has a Japanese main character, and was supposed to humanize the Japanese soldiers. Which could be interesting, but I wondered if it meant that the movie would adopt the Japanese stance of "Oh, the Nanjing Incident wasn't all that bad."
In the end, the movie turned out to be neither of these. The Japanese soldiers are incredibly human, as are the Chinese soldiers, the comfort women, the collaborator, and the westerners who stayed behind to help. Even the Nazi is a sympathetic character (and a real person). Meanwhile, the movie doesn't let the Japanese off lightly. It doesn't flinch away from the mass murder and rape that went on, and showing the Japanese characters at rest or celebrating doesn't make you feel any less appalled by what they're doing in other scenes, and the condemnation of the Japanese army as an institution is very, very clear.
The movie is being filmed in black and white, which I thought worked well. In an odd way, it makes the violence more affecting. If it were filmed in color, the colors of blood and fire and rotting corpses would quickly overwhelm and desensitize you to the violence. Instead, for me at least, it never really gets easier. And in the scenes where there is no active assault, your eyes are drawn first to the movement of people marching, cycling, running, talking, and only afterwards do you notice the severed heads and dead bodies lying around. So the human interaction is always at the forefront, but the massacre is rarely far away.
Because of the black and white, and because there's a Nazi trying to save people, the movie gets compared to Schindler's List. I actually think this is a better movie, for several reasons:
-Schindler's List is unnecessarily long, while City of Life and Death is much shorter, thanks in part to starting right as the Japanese are invading. I found the first chunk of Schindler's List to actually be somewhat boring.
-Schindler's List is about, well, Schindler, while City focuses more on the people whose lives are in danger. John Rabe was a fascinating person, but I personally am more interested in watching the lives of people who were not protected by their race and status.
-While City is beautifully shot, it is not nearly so self-consciously artsy as Schindler's List. I found things like the spot color in Schindler to be more distracting than affecting, and when watching a movie about war atrocities, that sort of distraction takes away from the emotional impact of the movie.
To summarize, excellent movie, but I don't know whether I'll ever watch it again. I had tears running down my eyes through most of it, and at the end I had to just silently sit there to stop from just falling apart. If you're emotionally capable of watching a movie about WW2 atrocities, than you should see this movie. If you're not, well, I understand.
The movie is called City of Life and Death in English, and 南京！南京！ (Nanking! Nanking!) in the original Chinese. Those of you with some historical knowledge can probably guess what the movie was about. If not, well, here's some wikipedia for you.
I was worried going into the film, because the Nanjing Massacre is still considered controversial. Unlike Germany, which has generally dealt with its war crimes by apologizing again and again and admitting everything, Japan denies everything it might be able to get away with and tries to avoid any apologies at all. This makes Japan fairly unpopular with a lot of Chinese people. But while I tend to have a lot of sympathy for anti-Japan anger in China, I don't actually want to watch a movie about how Japanese people are inhumane monsters. At the same time, this movie has a Japanese main character, and was supposed to humanize the Japanese soldiers. Which could be interesting, but I wondered if it meant that the movie would adopt the Japanese stance of "Oh, the Nanjing Incident wasn't all that bad."
In the end, the movie turned out to be neither of these. The Japanese soldiers are incredibly human, as are the Chinese soldiers, the comfort women, the collaborator, and the westerners who stayed behind to help. Even the Nazi is a sympathetic character (and a real person). Meanwhile, the movie doesn't let the Japanese off lightly. It doesn't flinch away from the mass murder and rape that went on, and showing the Japanese characters at rest or celebrating doesn't make you feel any less appalled by what they're doing in other scenes, and the condemnation of the Japanese army as an institution is very, very clear.
The movie is being filmed in black and white, which I thought worked well. In an odd way, it makes the violence more affecting. If it were filmed in color, the colors of blood and fire and rotting corpses would quickly overwhelm and desensitize you to the violence. Instead, for me at least, it never really gets easier. And in the scenes where there is no active assault, your eyes are drawn first to the movement of people marching, cycling, running, talking, and only afterwards do you notice the severed heads and dead bodies lying around. So the human interaction is always at the forefront, but the massacre is rarely far away.
Because of the black and white, and because there's a Nazi trying to save people, the movie gets compared to Schindler's List. I actually think this is a better movie, for several reasons:
-Schindler's List is unnecessarily long, while City of Life and Death is much shorter, thanks in part to starting right as the Japanese are invading. I found the first chunk of Schindler's List to actually be somewhat boring.
-Schindler's List is about, well, Schindler, while City focuses more on the people whose lives are in danger. John Rabe was a fascinating person, but I personally am more interested in watching the lives of people who were not protected by their race and status.
-While City is beautifully shot, it is not nearly so self-consciously artsy as Schindler's List. I found things like the spot color in Schindler to be more distracting than affecting, and when watching a movie about war atrocities, that sort of distraction takes away from the emotional impact of the movie.
To summarize, excellent movie, but I don't know whether I'll ever watch it again. I had tears running down my eyes through most of it, and at the end I had to just silently sit there to stop from just falling apart. If you're emotionally capable of watching a movie about WW2 atrocities, than you should see this movie. If you're not, well, I understand.