Nanking (2007) Reviews

• A Nutshell Review: Nanking

  DICK STEEL2007-03-31

  If I am going to recommend a documentary, then Nanking will be it. The Rape of Nanking just prior to World War II is examined in this film, which contains real stock footage of clips smuggled out of China during the time of Japanese occupation. Interviews with surviving Chinese victims, and a number of Japanese Imperial Army soldiers who took part in the campaign, are conducted by the filmmakers, and it is always chilling to learn from them first hand, on their respective perspective of those horrible years of the Japanese invasion of China. You will definitely squirm at the tearful, vivid recollection of atrocities from rapes, shootings, knifing from bayonets, and even burning, while the archive clips bring to screen scenes and pictures of such barbaric acts. Tales of plundering, looting, the forceful taking away of young men to be shot and young girls or boys, children even, for brutal rape, are told with an unflinching eye. In fact, nothing is re-enacted in this film, opting instead for actors (such as Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemmingway and Michelle Krusiec) to portray real historical characters and only as narrators of their personal diaries and memoirs of their stay in Nanking during the invasion and subsequent occupation. While the rest of the world stood by and did nothing, a handful of foreigners who opted to stay in the city, did what they could by organizing themselves and setting up a Safety Zone for the Chinese refugees, using all the power that they could (which was very little, save for the fact that they are foreigners) to protect their charges from the looting, plundering, killing and rape that takes place on a regular basis outside their zone. And it is indeed this Zone which had saved thousands of lives, that this documentary paid a sort of tribute to. If this is an anti-war picture, then I'd say it would have done a very good job, highlighting the immense amount of evil that man is capable of inflicting on fellow man. Even up until today, the Massacre of Nanjing is still hotly debated, especially on the number of unfortunate casualties and victims, and the enshrinement of war criminals which have irked the Chinese.

• "We didn't want to be observed"

  Chris Knipp2007-12-20

  Filmmakers Guttentag and Sturman have produced a short but unforgettable documentary about one of the ugliest stories in twentieth century warfare: the event known as "the rape of Nanking." During a brief period in late December 1937 Japanese forces bombed the city of Nanking, then the capital of China, moving on after assaulting Shanghai. Much of the city's population fled. But the poor had to remain, lacking the money to get out. Troops then moved in and brutally executed several hundred thousand civilians using guns and bayonets and fire, and raped tens of thousands of woman, leaving most of the once beautiful, prosperous city in ruins. They also immediately executed, by various methods, thousands of captured soldiers. The positive side of the story is that a group of foreigners, perhaps less that two dozen, who had been resident in Nanking remained there to help save the helpless civilians (and soldiers who had fled) and created a Safety Zone to protect them. It was not respected, but nonetheless they were able to save perhaps another couple of hundred thousand people. The presentation lasts only 88 minutes but is packed with mind-boggling material. Using a ground approach similar to the Culture Project's theater events 'Exonerated' and 'Guantanamo,' in which a group of actors dramatically read actual accounts, the foreigners' stories (and that of one Japanese soldier) are reconstructed by Stephen Dorff, Woody Harrelson. Mariel Hemingway, and others. In between their accounts there are interviews with Chinese survivors and some Japanese soldiers involved in the massacres. The most important foreigners are Bob Wilson, Minnie Vautrin, and John Rabe, whose accounts are voiced by Harrelson, Hemingway, and Jürgen Prochnow, respectively. Wilson was a surgeon born in China, son of a missionary, who stayed on after the bombing. Vautrin was a missionary and head of the education department of a college; she hid her women students and saved them from being raped. Rabe was a German businessman and Nazi Pary member who protected hundreds of Chinese civilians on his estate. He and Wilson and Magee were the most active in establishing the two-square-mile Safety Zone that provided a shaky but essential shield for refugees who fled their homes. There are some film clips of killings. John Magee (voiced here by Hugo Armstrong) was an Episcopal minister and a filmmaker who helped maintain a hospital. His film footage of maimed and disfigured victims of the atrocities was smuggled out of the country and only discovered in the 1980s in Germany. The accounts of the foreigners provide a sense of the time line and the main events of Nanking. But it is the Chinese survivors, bravely describing unimaginable horrors, who make the most vivid impression. I say "unimaginable," but we have heard about them as children, perhaps, and all imagined them. But here they are, described as vividly as if they happened yesterday, to a mother and a baby brother, right before the eyes of a seven-year-old. What must it be like to have been that seven-year-old and to carry such memories through all one's life? That is what one doesn't want to imagine. Some of the Japanese veterans are smiling as they speak. They acknowledge the rapes and atrocities and massacres and tell how they did it. (How can they be smiling? Perhaps out of embarrassment. Or is the word shame? These are the most troubling moments of the film.) The dozen or so high ranking Japanese officers who were convicted of war crimes afterward have a memorial in their name in Tokyo and it is a place where right-wing pro-war Japanese like to hold rallies. Getting the films of Japanese survivors was a tricky business, because people in Japan don't want to acknowledge, or even talk about, this moment in their history. They have often denied that things were as bad as some said. The evidence of the film, and the accounts of the Japanese veterans themselves, disproves those denials. We have witnesses, and that is the basic function of this film: to bear witness. Japanese officials complained that foreigners were not supposed to be there, that this was the "first time" (hardly) a war had taken place with neutral observers. "We did not want to be observed," they said. But this is not, of course, meant as the attack on one nationality or an incitement to revenge. It's a story of madness in wartime and hence an indictment of war itself. And the film is also a moving account of the bravery of the few foreigners who saw the horrible events as a challenge to perform acts of extraordinary courage and goodness. The film is a heavy burden to take on, but it is not without hope, and proof of the ability of the Chinese to endure.

• Truth told by foreigners

  sandygigicn2007-08-20

  As a Chinese, I knew the Nanking massacre when I was young. I was frightened when I saw so many horrible pictures taken at that time. When I learned that the film Nanking would be shown, I was hesitated. I should watch it because I'm a Chinese, but I didn't have the nerve. I didn't have the nerve to see my countrymen being butchered most brutally and I didn't want to arouse the sad memories. After a week of hesitation, I went to the cinema and watched it finally. I really want to know more about the truth. When I was sitting in the cinema and watching, my tears kept rolling down. I felt my heart so cold and my head so painful. I feel so painful for my countrymen at that time and so moved by the foreigners who risked their own lives for saving the innocent and helpless Chinese. The massacre did happened. No one can deny. I appreciated Ms Chang who bravely wrote the book and the directors of this movie. It tells the truth yet does not arouse the hatred. A sentence in the movie impressed me a great deal, it approximately goes like this: We don't make you to hate the Japanese, we want you to know how horrible war is. Yes, we hate war and love peace.

• Stunningly powerful documentary film-making and an elegant monument to its heroes

  movedout2007-12-02

  "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.

• Superb

  Caliann2007-02-16

  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.