Cynicism and Our Visions of Revolutionary Poses, a Gap Through Which Bullets Could Really Fly for a Little While

Featured Reviews 517 cynicism and our visions of revolutionary poses, a gap through which bullets could really fly for a little while. Xiaoming Luo Shanghai University E-mail: [email protected] Nanjing’s Fantasy, Lu Chuan’s Flaws—Reassessing City of Life and Death7 DOI 10.3868/s010-002-013-0031-9 At the end of April 2009, City of Life and Death—a movie four years in the making—arrived in cinemas around the country. When the film opened, director Lu Chuan repeatedly emphasized to the media that he wanted City of Life and Death to depict the “Chinese resistance” during the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. On hearing this emotional statement by Lu Chuan, hovering in the unique atmosphere engendered by the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it was hard for audiences, media and film critics to escape the idea that this film was a successor to our nationalist, patriotic and revolutionary realist cinematic traditions—hard, that is, until they entered the cinema. Through black-and-white cinematography and the perspective of a stern outsider, City of Life and Death reconstructs a vague and dubious “Nanjing Fantasy.” It cleverly employs a nationalist mood, patriotic script, and realist images, while remaining almost entirely irrelevant to what these doctrines actually signify. In the film, we see Chinese soldiers awaiting their deaths, fruitlessly shouting slogans such as “China cannot die!”; we see a traitor disregarding national interests, but for some reason taking on the burden of saving national history; we see a religious teacher who is faultless, loyal, and would rather die than surrender—but who nevertheless submits several hundred innocent women to be comfort women. Even stranger, some highly “unusual” portrayals of Japanese soldiers appear on our own screens: soldiers who are uncertain about the war despite having initiated it, soldiers who participate in a citywide massacre but then paint over the victims’ suffering with their own wounds. Perhaps it is because of this that so many audience members suddenly realize in the middle of the screening: This director has deceived me! To fall asleep or to be woken with a start in a cinema is perhaps one of our most unpleasant modern experiences. While the whole audience is under the 7 Translated by Sarah Stanton. 518 Featured Reviews impression that City of Life and Death will use themes we are familiar with to offer up an ideological lullaby, director Lu Chuan unexpectedly employs humanist methodologies, as well as his own ideas on human nature, to beat the “Japanese drum” for the people—a performance which, in the celebrations as the Japanese army occupies the city at the end of the film, becomes a forceful, fearful, uncontrollably fantastic victory song. In this sense, City of Life and Death is unable to engender the same sympathetic response as other revolutionary films we might recall, such as From Victory to Victory (1952), Railroad Guerillas (1956), Heroic Sons and Daughters (1964), Sparkling Red Star (1974) and even the Decisive Engagement series (1990, 1991, 1992). On the contrary, it is very consciously part of a long line of films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (1996), or even Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). Everyone knows that this list represents a catalog of the world’s most “classic films,” as well as a catalog of the world’s “elite directors.” However, when compared to other, similar films in this “catalog of classics,” Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death cannot give anyone—including its audience and its characters—any comfort or hope. All it can do is employ a kind of “quasi-fascist aesthetic” to show the inescapable omnipresence of death and decay in “war.” It is often easy, when employing humanism to express the meaning of death in war—the ravaged bodies, the homes trampled underfoot, the destruction of life, the souls swallowed up and the beliefs broken down—to reduce these things to abstract rhetorics of human nature or cheap, universal values. Lu Chuan’s greatest flaw, as well as his greatest danger, is that his priorities are reversed; he has chosen to use war and death as mechanisms to express his infatuation with so-called “humanism,” to the extent that in depicting this resistance against a fascist war of aggression, he has chosen a Japanese soldier—Kadokawa—as the primary male lead. In fact, when City of Life and Death opened, the first thing to grab everyone’s attention was the matter of this Japanese Kadokawa’s “viewpoint.” This viewpoint, unprecedented in Chinese film, dominated the discussions of ordinary audiences and film critics alike. Some authors have pointed out that this kind of reflective viewpoint suggests that Lu Chuan has begun to set his sights on history, as well as the bitter recollections the Chinese people have of this history. This marks a conscious shift by younger directors to move away from the confines of personal growth narratives, and assume a filmmaker’s cultural, moral, and historically enlightening role. However, in the case of Lu Chuan, whose priorities are so backward that he is not afraid to deceive his own audience’s emotions, there is still a very large question mark over whether he can really take on this heavy responsibility. As my friend wrote in her own article: “The most novel aspect of City of Life and Death is seeing the Nanjing Massacre through .

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