Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

City of Life and Death poster

Two movies about the Nanjing Massacre are in theaters in China this month.

City of Life and Death (南京!南京!, "Nanjing! Nanjing!"), directed by Lu Chuan, presents events from the point of view of the city's military defense, civilian refugees, and Japanese invaders. John Rabe (拉贝日记), a Sino-German production, examines the Massacre through the experiences of the title character, a German businessman in China who helped set up a refugee zone in the city.

Lu's film has been lauded for its gritty, unflinching depiction of the horrors of the massacre, and its portrayal of Japanese characters as actual people instead of faceless demons has been both praised and deplored, depending on political leanings of the individual viewer. The German film, directed by Florian Gallenberger and starring Ulrich Tukur in the title role, is either an honest biopic untarnished by the ideological demands of China's film censorship regime, or is yet another example of how westerners don't understand China.

And that's even before you get into the merits of the two as movies.

The title of Raymond Zhou's review in the China Daily, "1 massacre, 2 films and 3 perspectives," sums up the numerous elements that a reviewer of the two movies has to deal with. Zhou comes down on the side of Lu's film:

Most important of all, Lu was able to display the violence without letting it drown out the humanity. He not only drew subtle and convincing portrayals of the victims and survivors, but gave ample screen time to the Japanese soldiers, one of whom almost got top billing.

The John Rabe biopic could have been a great film because it has a limited scope and is therefore better equipped to fully explore its key characters. Unfortunately, it is overtaken by political correctness and ends up as a feeble supplement to the main story.

John Rabe poster

Translated below are responses from a few bloggers to one or both of the films. This selection is not intended to be representative of the overall reaction of Chinese audiences to City of Life and Death and John Rabe; see Further Reading for a list of other articles, in both Chinese and English.

• In Don't Be Unfair to John Rabe, Phoenix Weekly lead writer Huang Zhangjin looks forward to John Rabe after being thoroughly unimpressed by Lu Chuan's effort. [↓]
• In John Rabe's Bowdlerized Diary, fantasy writer Jeremy Zeng argues that John Rabe's effectiveness is undermined by the liberties it takes with history, especially in how it smooths over the horrors that the historical John Rabe recorded in his diary. [↓]
• In City of Life and Death: Fantasizing the Mainstream Historical Outlook, Douban poster jix sees Lu Chuan's fictionalized Nanjing unmoored from its historical anchors and essentially reduced to a set of symbols that head off any meaningful discussion. [↓]
• In When Lu Chuan Gets Depressed, We Get Uncomfortable, Teng Yun, a journalist whose commentary we've translated in the past, finds City of Life and Death a grab-bag of tired narrative tropes. [↓]
• And in All City of Life and Death Box Office Receipts Should Go Toward Building a Carrier, "fairy tale king" Zheng Yuanjie suggests one way that the profits from the film could be put to use. [↓]