Introduction
Ever since it was released to movie theaters in 2009, the film City of Life and Death (directed by Lu Chuan) never ceased sparking a public controversy in China – all due to the director’s unconventional (by Chinese standards) approach to depicting what is now known as the Nanking Massacre of 1937. After all, the City of Life and Death promotes a strongly defined constructivist outlook on the significance of the historical event in question, which does not quite correlate with the Chinese official stance on what should be considered the massacre’s discursive implications (Silbey 27).
In particular, Chuan’s film portrays the concerned wartime atrocity as such that has taken place as a result of the war’s dehumanizing effects on the functioning of the human psyche, regardless of the affected people’s nationality. As the director himself pointed out in one of his interviews: “The problem lies with the notion of war itself. War makes a person, or an entire nation, crazy, and people do things they wouldn’t normally have imagined doing” (Zhu 96).
In its turn, this prompted many film critics to suggest that the City of Life and Death is revisionist to an extent. The reason for this is that the film’s specified feature indeed provides a certain rationale to refer to Chuan’s masterpiece as being rather unconventional, in the sense of helping to relieve the Japanese of at least a part of their historical guilt, on account of having been the actual instigators of the 1937-1945 Sino-Japanese War.
Nevertheless, the director’s agenda does not seem to have been deliberately “revisionist.” Rather, Chuan strived to promote the idea that bestiality in men cannot be discussed outside of the affecting situational context – something that endows the City of Life and Death with the strongly defined humanist sounding and adds more than anything to the film’s cinematographic value. This particular suggestion will serve as the paper’s main thesis.
Discussion
As it was implied in the Introduction, there is much logic in defining City of Life and Death as being closely affiliated with the expressionist conventions of film editing, based on the assumption that it is in the very nature of a cinematic action to be highly subjective. In this regard, we can mention the director’s insistence to use specifically the black-and-white color format for the movie – something clearly indicative of Chuan’s psycho-cognitive eccentricity.
As Giannetti noted: “Formalist (expressionist) movies are stylistically deviant. Their directors are concerned with expressing their unabashedly subjective experience of reality, not how other people might see it” (4). Evidently enough, Chuan wanted to ensure that there would be a certain documentary-like quality to the film’s representation of the Nanking Massacre, which in turn would encourage viewers to consider City of Life and Death thoroughly authentic, in the historical sense of this word (Denton 86).
What also contributes towards strengthening the audience’s impression, in this regard, is that there is a multi-perceptual subtlety to the film’s narration. That is, viewers are enabled to relate to the on-screen action through the eyes of both the Chinese and Japanese. In its turn, this can be interpreted reflective of the director’s intention to have City of Life and Death serving the purpose of educating the audience about the origins of irrational bloodthirstiness in people – something that would help both nations to address the issue of historical animosity between them.
As Brown aptly observed: “By telling the story of Nanjing from multiple perspectives, with all their contradictions and complexity, Lu Chuan hoped to… help audiences everywhere reflect on the historical implications of violence (530).
After having been exposed to Chuan’s film, viewers will be likely to assume that there is nothing intrinsically evil about people’s willingness to perpetrate the acts of genocide. The reason for this is that, as it can be inferred from the movie, one’s emotional comfortableness with taking an active part in the concerned activity is rather socially then biologically predetermined. According to Chuan, the very fact that the Japanese soldiers have been recruited in the army and forced to undergo a military training resulted in depriving them of their humanity, which in turn explains the sheer ease with which most of the film’s Japanese characters have gone about killing the Chinese civilians.
What this means is that there is a certain logic to think of the former as having been the victims of circumstances, in a somewhat similar manner with what it was the case with their Chinese adversaries. Hence, the earlier mentioned criticism of Chuan’s film, as seen from the Chinese ideological perspective: “In China… critics have accused Lu of diminishing Chinese history, downplaying the horrors of the massacre, and justifying the actions of Japanese perpetrators” (Yang 249).
After all, once assessed from this particular perspective, City of Life and Death will indeed appear as the cinematographic piece that “destabilizes the boundary between heroism and victimization and the distinction between the perpetrators and victims” (Zhu 85). Such a point of view, however, is clearly shortsighted. Those who promote it do not take into consideration the film’s overall significance as the cultural/intellectual product that is meant to contribute to the cause of humanity’s betterment. The validity of this suggestion is best substantiated with respect to what can be deemed the film’s “Darwinian” overtones.
Probably the most notable of them has to do with the fact that, as it can be seen in Chuan’s film, the layer of civility over the person’s primeval self of a “hairless ape” is only skin-deep. Once people find themselves in the “life or death” kind of a situation, they cease giving any thought to the considerations of morality/ethics, whatsoever, while trying to ensure their physical survival.
And, as the discussed movie implies, it takes a really heroic effort, on the part of just about anyone, to act like a human being – especially if this type of behavior is inconsistent with the workings of the survival instinct in people. This is exactly what makes the City of Life and Death truly exceptional. Despite having been produced with the Chinese audience in mind, Chuan’s film does have what it takes to appeal to moviegoers internationally.
Conclusion
I believe that the deployed arguments, in support of the suggestion that the City of Life and Death indeed deserves to be considered critically acclaimed, correlate well with the paper’s initial thesis. Apparently, there is nothing incidental about the fact that Chuan’s film continues to be regarded as exemplary of the Chinese cinematography at its best. This simply could not be otherwise, as the concerned movie is both aesthetically refined and intellectually stimulating. I would certainly recommend it for watching by just about anyone who aspires to have a better understanding of China’s history.
Works Cited
Brown, Stephanie. “Victims, Heroes, Men, and Monsters: Revisiting a Violent History in City of Life and Death.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 32, no. 6, 2015, pp. 527-537.
Denton, Kirk. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. University of Hawaii Press, 2014.
Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. Pearson, 2017.
Silbey, Jessica. “Persuasive Visions: Film and Memory.” Law, Culture and the Humanities, vol. 10, no.1, 2014, pp. 24-42.
Yang, Jing. “Rewriting the Chinese National Epic in an Age of Global Consumerism: City of Life and Death and the Flowers of War.” New Global Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2014, pp. 245-258.
Zhu, Yanhong. “A Past Revisited: Representation of the Nanjing Massacre in City of Life and Death.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013, pp. 85-108.