Military conflicts have taken place for distinct geopolitical reasons throughout human history, and the 20th century was not an exception. In fact, in the last hundred years, nations were involved in multiple wars, incomparable in their scopes, complexity, and severity. The Japanese-Chinese War (1937-1945) and the Second World War (1939-1945) are two bright examples of massive wartime struggles involving enormous amounts of people from diverse backgrounds and inducing an extremely high toll of dead and injured in different parts of the globe.
Considering multiple ethical and social implications of military conflicts, it is not surprising that cinema directors exploit this subject to teach the audience about the importance of basic human values and resilience, and convey pacifist messages to viewers. The movies The City of Life and Death also known as Nanjing! Nanjing! (2009) by Chuan Lu and Schindler’s List (1993) by Steven Spielberg provide distinct perspectives on war and its effects on human behaviors and lives in general.
The former picture focuses on the Nanking massacre − an unprecedented act of violence against civilians in one of the Chinese settlements by Japanese soldiers occupying the city, − while the latter movie is a biographical and historical drama devoted to the problems of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s cruelty towards the Jewish population. Although the narratives in the two pictures are drastically different because they depict two distinct historical events, nevertheless, they share some common semantic features. The comparative analysis, which will be conducted in this paper, will help reveal similarities and differences in the directors’ interpretations of world history and wars.
The City of Life and Death reveals a page in a chronicle of the word genocide, little-known for a Western viewer. In December 1937, less than six months after the outbreak of the Japanese-Chinese War, Japan’s Imperial Army captured Nanjing, which was the capital of China at that time. In the city hastily left by the Chinese government, the civilian population was left under the rule of the occupiers. As a result, mass destruction started, and up to 300 thousand people were tortured and killed (“The Death Toll: Early Estimates”).
The historical evidence revealed in recent years confirms numerous episodes of mass torture and sadism that happened in Nanking. Due to a large scope of the tragedy, Lu Chuan could not dramatize all the details of the “Asian Holocaust,” but what the author dared to show was shocking enough. It is difficult to reproach the movie in speculation, as the abundance of naturalistic scenes instead indicates the director’s attempt to maintain an objective approach.
The City of Life and Death continued the series of grand artistic epics about the steadfastness of the human spirit in wartime, such as Schindler’s List. Steven Spielberg’s picture tells the story of a German entrepreneur who saved thousands of Polish Jews from death in concentration camps. Just like Lu Chuan’s movie, it is based on real historical events. However, Spielberg’s cinema obtained almost a documentary quality because, during its creation, the director used the evidence and stories about the overall situation in Poland occupied by Nazis and Schindler, in particular, told by people whom he saved and which were documented in the hero’s biography by Thomas Keneally. In real life, Schindler was a controversial man.
An enterprising businessman, a “well-mannered and generous lover,” a drinker, he can be regarded as an example of an unprincipled man making money on another’s grief (Keneally 14). At the beginning of the movie, Schindler is represented exactly like that. The war for him is a fortunate coincidence, a driving force, and a guarantor of the prosperity for his business, which gained momentum due to ties with the Nazi leadership, a confiscated wealth of Jews deprived of the right to use their money, and free labor from the Cracow ghetto. However, soon Schindler takes an opposite stance and becomes a humanist, forgetting about his profit for the sake of other people whom he did not even know.
The evolution of Schindler from an egoistic financial aristocrat to a wholesome altruist forms the basis of the film. It is possible to say that the focus on the life of a single person is one of the primary differences between Schindler’s List and The City of Life and Death because, in the latter, Lu Chuan develops the plot on several levels by focusing on a series on individuals’ lives. Although both the directors employed multi-figure composition many times in their movies, it is possible to say that Lu Chuan managed to observe the scale of the historical narrative much better. Nevertheless, Schindler’s List and The City of Life and Death depict the depth of human suffering during the war with equal intensity.
While the protagonist in Spielberg’s film is a symbol of humanism’s superiority over aggression and injustice, and his figure conveys a message that even one person can exceed basic human capabilities when deciding to make the right thing even in the face of great risks, Lu Chuan’s characters rather symbolize the power of individuals’ cohesion.
A few peacemakers and humanists are also represented in The City of Life and Death, but their role is nominal, and their actions do not influence the outcome of the plot significantly as it can often be seen in pro-Hollywood historical pictures relying on the cult of a strong personality. For example, a German missionary, John Rabe, who arranged the Nanking Safety Zone for civilians is reduced in its importance in Lu Chuan’s picture.
Rabe was a member of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) and an official representative of Hitler’s Germany in Nanjing (Shen 664). Under the guise of his state duties and with the help of assistants, Rabe managed to limit the territory of lawlessness in Nanking and save thousands of innocent lives from violent death. Similarly to Schindler, Rabe plays a role of a “good Nazi,” meaning that “he is loyal to the Hitler regime, but also arguably ‘good’, because he acted against the party line to protect what Nazi ideology would term one ‘subhuman’ race – the Chinese – from the brutality of another ‘subhuman’ race” (Shen 664).
Thus, the importance of the German humanist was enormous (and it is demonstrated in the film to some extent), yet by shifting the focus from this character, the director emphasized that in the nightmarish situation in Nanjing of 1937, the limits of human capabilities were limited.
A reduced significance of individual characters in the movie can be explained by the initial intention behind the creation of The City of Life and Death. The ideological task of the film is to demonstrate the scale of the catastrophe that has been hushed up for decades, both in China and Japan. However, one can notice that by doing so, Lu Chuan did not aim to prosecute the Japanese side. The author’s attempt to remove contradictions in the relations between the two countries was reinforced by the plotline of a Japanese soldier incapable of accepting the inhuman behavior of his compatriots. Conversely, Spielberg did not pursue a goal of demonstrating Nazis as regular, weak people, walking on a leash of adverse consequences.
For instance, the character of Amon Göth, the Commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp, is a villain who actively and deliberately engages in violence. Spielberg depicts him in such a way that he is perceived by viewers as an infinitely vicious, born murderer. Considering himself a representative of the superior race, Göth does not show any mercy for the lives of Jewish prisoners, and only his passionate attraction to Helen Hirsch, a Jewish maid, indicates that there might be something of an ordinary man in him. Nevertheless, completely absorbed in the Nazi ideology, he uses this passion for causing even greater harm.
It is valid to say that the evil nature of Göth’s deeds was not exaggerated in Schindler’s List. The member of NSDAP and Hitler’s elite army, who was among the major runners of Operation Reinhard aimed to liquidate Jewish Ghettos in Poland and relocate their inhabitants to three death camps, he was accused of “personally issuing orders to deprive people of freedom, to ill-treat and exterminate individuals and whole groups of people.” (“Amon Goeth, Plaszow Commandant”).
Nevertheless, the movie lacks the representation of regular soldiers’ experiences and their perceptions of the whole situation, those individuals who were misled by propaganda and forced to fight against others out of fear of imminent death. In this respect, Lu Chuan’s plot is more balanced as he tried to look at the problem of wartime violence from more diverse perspectives, from the eyes of the characters fighting on the opposite sides.
The City of Life and Death and Schindler’s List are the historical dramas of significant value as they demonstrate the demoralizing effects of war on people in contrast with which such basic human values as respect for individual dignity appear in all their simplicity and magnitude. However, the directors chose diametrically opposite approaches to the depiction of the selected events. While Lu Chuan preferred to combine multiple narration lines and endowed them with equal levels of importance to capture the scope of the Nanking tragedy, Spielberg rather centered the narration in one person making the character and his contribution to the progress of historical events particularly significant.
The movies are created within different moviemaking traditions − this is where most of the identified differences originate from. Lu Chuan tried to keep balance and objectivity even when working with extremely delicate and sensitive matters and depicting horrors of war from multiple angles. At the same time, although Spielberg also aimed to remain objective while depicting the Holocaust and paying tribute to the heroes, he still tended to romanticize war.
Even though over a thousand people were saved due to Schindler’s heroism, the movie captures the suffering and tortures underwent by millions of Jewish people throughout the Second World War only partially. Still, in their way, both movies add a few more strokes to the depiction of the devilish face of war, which always drags people into the abyss of insanity and animal violence, which cannot be compensated even by the biggest expressions of humanism.
Works Cited
“Amon Goeth, Plaszow Commandant.” Scrapbookpages.com. 2012. Web.
Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. Simon and Schuster, 2013.
Shen, Qinna. Revisiting the Wound of a Nation: The ‘Good Nazi’ John Rabe and the Nanking Massacre, 2011. Web.
“The Death Toll: Early Estimates.” The Nanking Massacre, 2000. Web.