The Rape of Nanking and my discontents

I just watched the 2007 film Nanking last night, and the film – on top of the rankling historical details of the event itself – leaves much to be desired. The film is structured around the narrative of several Westerners who stayed behind in Nanking during the Japanese invasion in December of 1937 and who bravely protected thousands of Nanking citizens from the brutal onslaught of the Japanese. Since none of the 22 courageous foreigners is still alive, their diaries and letters are instead re-enacted by gang of semi-famous actors including Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway.

My first and primary reaction to the film was … This is it?? One of the most gruesome and under-explored episodes of recent world history and this is what you came up with? The premise of basing the film on staged re-enactments of interviews is ill-conceived, and the execution is mediocre at best. In between leaden readings of scripts based on the first-hand accounts of the expatriots are interviews with elderly survivors of the Nanking massacre, Japanese soldiers, and images and video taken during the massacre itself. By far the most compelling parts of the film were the interviews with survivors, who were between the ages of 9 and 22 in 1937. It’s the stories of the gentle, grandparently survivors that make the film worth watching – stories of wading through mountains of bodies in the street, being raped by Japanese soldiers at age 12, watching a mother and brother bayoneted and bleed to death while the child still suckled at her breast.

However, most of the images in the film are just shown as montages without context or indeed any information at all (when/where/what/whom they depict, to begin with), and many of them seem historically out-of-context and strung together haphazardly. For historical context as well as more in-depth interviews, the excellent documentary series China – A Century of Revolution provides a much more illuminating view of China’s tumultuous history in the last century.

What gets to me is not that this particular film is so mediocre – after all, mediocre films abound and I’m sure the film-makers gave it their best try. What gets to me is that this film is by far the best and most serious attempt at documenting a historical event of massive scale. Similarly, although I applaud the bravery of Iris Chang in writing her still-definitive Rape of Nanking and rue her personal tragedy, I can only honestly characterize her book as amateurish and naïve. Her writing vacillates between the wooden description of a college thesis and stilted outrage, and as many have pointed out, her research is incomplete and full of factual errors. Despite these flaws, Chang is rightfully celebrated for beginning to bring the world’s attention to the massive atrocities. What’s heart-breaking is that thus far, no serious author has followed her lead.

In all of the years which have passed since 1937, and indeed since 1997 when Chang’s book was published, a scarce few major works have been released about this historic tragedy which is so ripe for storytelling. Where is the epic Zhang Yimou film about Nanking? The expatriots documented in Nanking who set up a Safety Zone inside the city and saved thousands of lives hew closely to the archetype of Oskar Schindler. But where is the Chinese Spielberg? Where is the Chinese Ken Burns? Surely we can do better than the community-theatre-style readings of Nanking. In this new age of digital media, in which even the Communist government of China can no longer repress the voices of its citizens, I hope that Nanking represents the beginning of a massive wave of reckoning and documentation which does justice to the scale of the massacre instead of the dying gasp of a generation whose memory is fading quickly beneath the glare of China’s new century.