City of Life and Death
| City of Life and Death | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Traditional | 南京！南京！ |
| Simplified | 南京！南京！ |
| Directed by | Lu Chuan |
| Written by | Lu Chuan |
| Produced by | Zhao Haicheng Yang Xinli Han Xiaoli Jiang Tao Liang Yong |
| Starring | Liu Ye Gao Yuanyuan Fan Wei Qin Lan Nakaizumi Hideo Jiang Yiyan Yao Di John Paisley |
| Cinematography | Cao Yu He Lei |
| Edited by | Teng Yu |
| Music by | Liu Tong |
Production companies | Media Asia Entertainment Group China Film Group Stellar Megamedia Group Jiangsu Broadcasting System Chuan Production Film Studio |
| Distributed by | Media Asia Distribution Ltd. China Film Group |
Release date |
|
Running time | 133 minutes |
| Country | China |
| Languages | Mandarin, English, German, Japanese |
| Budget | US$12 million |
City of Life and Death is a 2009 Chinese drama film written and directed by Lu Chuan, marking his third feature film. The film deals with the Battle of Nanjing and the following massacre committed by the Japanese army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The film is also known as Nanking! Nanking! or Nanjing! Nanjing!. The film was released in China on April 22, 2009, and became a major box office success in the country, earning CN¥150 million (approximately US$20 million) in its first two and a half weeks alone.[1]
Plot[edit]
City of Life and Death is set in 1937, shortly after the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Imperial Japanese Army has just captured Nanjing (or Nanking), capital of the Republic of China. What followed is historically known as the Nanking Massacre, a period of several weeks wherein massive numbers of Chinese prisoners-of-war and civilians were killed by the Japanese military.
After some commanders of the National Revolutionary Army flee Nanking, a Chinese soldier Lieutenant Lu Jianxiong and his comrade-in-arms Shunzi attempt to stop a group of deserting troops from leaving the city, but as they exit the gates, they are captured by Japanese forces that have surrounded the city.
As the Japanese comb the city for enemy forces, Superior Private (later Sergeant) Kadokawa Masao and his men are attacked by Lu Jianxiong and a small unit of both regular and non-regular soldiers, who fire at them from buildings. Lu and his companions are eventually forced to surrender as more Japanese troops arrive. The Chinese prisoners-of-war are systematically escorted to various locations to be mass executed. Shunzi and a boy called Xiaodouzi survive the shootings and they flee to the Nanking Safety Zone, run by the German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe and other Westerners. Thousands of Chinese women, children, elderly men and wounded soldiers take refuge in this safety zone. However, the zone is forcefully entered several times by bands of Japanese soldiers intent on making sexual advances on female refugees. Due to the repeated intrusions, the women are urged to cut their hair and dress like men to protect themselves from being raped. A prostitute called Xiaojiang refuses to do so, saying that she needs to keep her hair in order to earn a living.
Meanwhile, Kadokawa develops feelings for a Japanese prostitute named Yuriko, and struggles to come to terms with the omnipresent violence around him with his own conflicting impulses. Despite his feelings of alienation, Kadokawa brings Yuriko candy and gifts from Japan, and promises to marry her after the war.
Rabe's secretary Tang Tianxiang and a teacher named Jiang Shuyun manage the daily operations of the safety zone. Even though he is in a privileged position, Tang is still unable to protect his young daughter from being thrown out of a window by a Japanese soldier, and his sister-in-law from being raped. When the Japanese officer Second Lieutenant Ida Osamu demands that the refugees provide 100 women to serve as "comfort women", Rabe and Jiang tearfully make the announcement to the community. Xiaojiang and others volunteer themselves, hoping that their sacrifice would save the refugees.
Kadokawa meets Xiaojiang and brings her rice but witnesses another soldier raping her as she lies almost lifeless. Later, many "comfort women", including Xiaojiang, die from the abuse, and Kadokawa sees their naked bodies being taken away. Kadokawa feels further estranged when he witnesses Ida shooting Tang's sister-in-law May, who has become insane.
Rabe receives an order to return to Germany because his activities in the safety zone are detrimental to diplomatic ties between his country and Japan. Tang and his wife are allowed to leave Nanking with Rabe. However Tang changes his mind at the last moment and trades places with a Chinese soldier pretending to be Rabe's assistant, saying that he wants to stay behind to find May. Mrs Tang reveals that she is pregnant before bidding her husband farewell. Not long after Rabe left, Ida has Tang executed by firing squad.
The Japanese disband the safety zone and start hunting for Chinese men who were previously soldiers, promising that these men would find work and receive pay if they turn themselves in. However, men deemed to be soldiers are huddled into trucks and sent for execution. Shunzi, who survived the earlier mass killings, is physically checked and initially deemed to be a non-combatant, but is later recognised by a Japanese soldier and brought onto a truck as well.
After Minnie Vautrin and other Westerners plead with the Japanese, Ida permits each refugee to choose only one man from the trucks to be saved. Jiang Shuyun rescues a man, pretending to be his wife, and then returns for Shunzi, claiming that he is her husband, while Xiaodouzi acts as their son. Kadokawa sees through Jiang's ruse but does not expose her. Despite this, another Japanese soldier points her out to Ida and the three of them are captured. Shunzi is taken away again, this time together with Xiaodouzi. Jiang, knowing that she will be raped, asks Kadokawa to kill her. He grants her her wish and shoots her, much to his comrades' surprise.
Afterwards, Kadokawa looks for Yuriko and learns that she has died after leaving Nanking. He says that she was his wife and requests that she be given a proper funeral. As the Japanese perform a dance-ritual to celebrate their conquest of Nanking and honour their war dead, Kadokawa reveals his emotional turmoil over what he has done and witnessed.
Kadokawa and another Japanese soldier march Shunzi and Xiaodouzi out of town to be executed, but to their surprise, Kadokawa releases them instead. Kadokawa tells the other soldier, "Life is more difficult than death." The soldier bows to show his respect for Kadokawa's decision and walks away. Kadokawa then weeps before shooting himself to escape from his guilt.
In the end credits, it is revealed that Mrs Tang lived into old age, as did Ida Osamu, and that Xiaodouzi is still alive today.
Cast[edit]
- Liu Ye as Lu Jianxiong
- Gao Yuanyuan as Jiang Shuyun
- Fan Wei as Tang Tianxiang (Mr. Tang)
- Qin Lan as Madam Zhou (Mrs. Tang)
- Nakaizumi Hideo as Kadokawa Masao
- Jiang Yiyan as Jiang Xiangjun (Xiaojiang)
- Yao Di as Zhou Xiaomei (May)
- John Paisley as John Rabe
- Kohata Ryu as Ida Osamu
- Zhao Yisui as Shunzi
- Liu Bin as Xiaodouzi
- Miyamoto Yuko as Yuriko
- Beverly Peckous as Minnie Vautrin
- Sam Voutas as Durdin
- Aisling Dunne as Grace the missionary
- Kajioka Junichi as Mr. Tomita
- Liu Jinling
- Zhao Zhenhua
Production[edit]
Filming began in Tianjin in October 2007,[2] working under a budget of 80 million yuan (US$12 million), and was produced by the China Film Group, Stella Megamedia Group, Media Asia Entertainment Group and Jiangsu Broadcasting System.[2]
The film endured a lengthy period undergoing analysis by Chinese censors, waiting six months for script approval, and another six months for approval of the finished film.[3] It was finally approved for release on April 22, 2009.[4] However, the Film Bureau did require some minor edits and cuts, including a scene of a Japanese officer beheading a prisoner, a scene of a woman being tied down prior to being raped, and an interrogation scene of a Chinese soldier and a Japanese commander.[3]
Release[edit]
City of Life and Death was released on 535 film prints and 700 digital screens on April 22 grossing an estimated US$10.2 million (70 million yuan) in its first five days. This made it the second biggest opener in 2009, after the second part of Red Cliff, which opened with US$14.86 million (101.5 million yuan) in its first four days of release. The film is also the highest new box office record for director Lu Chuan, whose second feature film Kekexili: Mountain Patrol grossed US$1.26 million (8.6 million yuan) in 2004.
The film received a limited U.S. release in May, 2011.[5]
Despite its success, City of Life and Death created controversy upon its release in mainland China. In particular, some criticised the film's sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese soldier Kadokawa. The film was nearly pulled from theaters, and Lu even received online death threats to both himself and his family.[3]
Awards[edit]
The film won the top Golden Shell prize at the 2009 San Sebastian Film Festival and also won the Best Cinematography prize. At the 2009 Asia Pacific Screen Awards, the film won Achievement in Directing (Lu Chuan) and Achievement in Cinematography (Cao Yu). The film also won Best Director (Lu Chuan) and Best Cinematographer (Cao Yu) Awards at the 4th Asian Film Awards in 2010. The film won Best Cinematography (Cao Yu) at the 46th Golden Horse Film Awards and was nominated for Best Visual Effects. At the Oslo Film Festival in 2009, the film also won Best Film Prize.
Critical reception[edit]
City of Life and Death has received extremely positive reviews. The film received a 93% approval rating from critics based on 54 reviews on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 8.4/10.[6]
Kate Muir of The Times gave the film five out of five stars, describes the film as "harrowing, shocking and searingly emotional", and states "the picture has the grandeur of a classic. It should be witnessed."[7] Derek Elley of Variety states "at times semi-impressionistic, at others gut-wrenchingly up close and personal, Nanjing massacre chronicle City of Life and Death lives up to hype and expectations."[8] Maggie Lee of The Hollywood Reporter states the film is "Potently cinematic and full of personal stylistic bravura."[9]
Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times describes the film as "Truly a masterpiece in black and white and pain" and the film contains "some of the most affectingly choreographed battle scenes to be found, with Lu Chuan a master at moving from the micro of a face to the macro of a city in ruins."[10] Karina Longworth of IndieWire describe the film "manages to convey the total horror of the Japanese atrocities from the perspective of both perpetrators and victims, all with exceptional nuance, sensitivity and sadness" and the film "has the feel of a lost post-War foreign classic, a masterwork implicating the viewer in the horrors of bearing witness."[11]
Michael O'Sullivan at The Washington Post gave it three out of four stars, elucidating it as "...a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small."[12]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Elley, Derek (2009-05-14). "City of Life and Death Review". Variety. Retrieved 2009-05-16.
- ^ a b Ho, Vicci (2007-10-05). "Lu Chuan's 'Nanking' begins filming". Variety. Retrieved 2008-01-06.
- ^ a b c Wong, Edward (2009-05-23). "Showing the Glimmer of Humanity Amid the Atrocities of War". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-23.
- ^ Coonan, Clifford (2009-03-23). "China OKs Rape of Nanking Pics". Variety. Retrieved 2009-03-27.
- ^ "City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!) gets a limited release in the US". Asia Pacific Arts. 2011-04-20. Archived from the original on 2016-01-22. Retrieved 2011-04-25.
- ^ "City of Life and Death". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. Retrieved September 18, 2012.
- ^ "City of Life and Death". The Times. Retrieved 2012-11-17.
- ^ Elley, Derek (2009-05-14). "City of Life and Death". Variety.
- ^ Lee, Maggie (2009-06-02). "City of Life and Death: Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter.
- ^ Betsy Sharkey (2009-09-12). "Of men and children and war..." Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Karina Longworth (2009-09-17). "Reviews: The Horrors of Bearing Witness: Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death"". IndieWIRE.
- ^ "A Chinese view of war's horrors", Michael O'Sullivan. Washington Post. June 10, 2011. Accessed June 10, 2011
External links[edit]
- City of Life and Death at IMDb
- City of Life and Death at AllMovie
- City of Life and Death at Metacritic
2] NPR
The Horror Of War In The 'City Of Life And Death'
June 21, 20113:07 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
HOWIE MOVSHOVITZ
https://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137296321/the-horror-of-war-in-the-city-of-life-and-death
LISTEN· 1:151-Minute ListenAdd toPLAYLIST
Transcript
A scene from the film City of Life and Death, written and directed by Lu Chuan.Kino International
Lu Chuan's film City of Life and Death lives up to its title. In documentary-like black and white, the writer/director shows the systematic murder of thousands of Chinese soldiers; some are machine gunned, some marched into the sea, some burned, some buried alive. Then the invaders turn to the civilian population and the process of killing continues.
The movie takes a fictional approach to one of the most horrific events in human history, In late 1937, the Japanese army stormed the Chinese city of Nanking — then the country's capital and now called Nanjing. More than 200,000 people, many of them civilians, were raped and killed in what's known as "the Rape of Nanking." Lu says that in his film, which has raised controversy in both Japan and China, he wanted to show that the Japanese had a program for killing:
"I really wanted to show that a massacre in the battlefield is just like industry. It's just like a machine, you know? It use a very complicated program to control the whole machine to eliminate the enemies. So it's [a] human being, you know, [that] can design a complicated program to kill people — it's a very brutal nature."
Director Lu Chuan Talks About The Censorship Challenges He Faced During The Making Of 'City Of Life And Death
Watch A Clip
Japanese Troops Approach A Church Warily, While Hundreds Of Chinese Wait
Credit: Kino International
To understand the experience, Lu interviewed some of the Japanese soldiers who occupied Nanking.
"Basically, they don't want to face their memory. But some of them tell me the truth," he says. "But I should say, to my surprise, they didn't show any regret. They just say something about, 'Yes, I kill people. Yes, I rape some girls. But you know, everybody do that. So I have to do that.' But they never say 'Sorry.' They never feel regret. So for me it's a very bad experience, you know."
Nevertheless, one of the central characters in City of Life and Death is a sympathetic Japanese soldier. And this has turned many Chinese against the film. Lu says that even though many people went to see the film in China, he got death threats.
"Lots of audience — Chinese audience — hate this movie because I choose the angle of Japanese soldier, you know," Lu says. "So they hate this movie because the traditional history education gives most of the Chinese people a feeling that Japanese people are beasts, not human beings, not human beings just like us. So, in my movie, it's the first time I show the humanity of Japanese soldier. So the Chinese audience cannot accept it."
Though the film was made in 2009, controversy has stalled its release outside China. Now it's finally making its way into theaters in the United States; it opened in New York in May and began playing in Los Angeles on June 17. The story of the atrocities depicted in the film has been told in recent years by the late historian Iris Chang, whose book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII was a best-seller. (Iris Chang's mother, Ying-Ying Chang, recently published a memoir of her daughter's life called The Woman Who Could Not Forget.)
One of the reasons Lu chose to show the innate decency of the Japanese soldier was to create a portrait of human behavior rather than an indictment of one nation or culture.
Richard Pena, director of the New York Film Festival, says that City of Life and Death really includes three points of view — that of Japanese soldiers, the Chinese in Nanking and the observations of Westerners in the city, chronicles of the invasion displayed on postcards sent home.
"If there's one concept that I think really unites the aesthetic principle of the film it is that of 'witnessing,' " Pena says. "And you know, for a long time under the People's Republic [of China], it was practically forbidden to talk about [the massacre] because it was seen really in many ways as a symbol of Chinese weakness. The fact that so few Japanese had been able to terrorize, humiliate and murder so many Chinese was seen in an uncomfortable light. So this film offers, you know, in ways that some people support and some people don't, a kind of varied position on it. And I think in the end the idea that films like this are made — and made in such a way that really not only, how could you say, excite emotions but incite thought, incite reflection, incite meditation — that's what's great. And that gives you hope. That gives you hope that we're, you know, we're better than that was."
Surprises and ambiguities revealed within the film's shifting points of view are central to the story Lu wants to tell. He's made a violent war film because he hates violence and war, and he made a film in which one group of people brutalizes another to show that all people are capable of both horror and remorse.
"I think everybody is the Japanese soldier," he says.
Besides interviewing Japanese soldiers who had been in Nanking, and Chinese survivors of the attack, Lu read journals and diaries and even made a trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to see how the killing in Europe is remembered. He says that what he saw through the making of City of Life and Death did not comfort him:
"I felt I open many, many doors toward the darkness of the heart, you know? So every [time] I open the door, I go deeper and deeper to the soul, to the soul of humanity. So I feel, sometimes I was scared. I'm really scared."
What's most surprising about City of Life and Death is that after all of the horror and fear, some people find the strength to go on.
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City of Life and Death
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/apr/18/city-of-life-and-death-review
Philip French
More graphic in its depiction of rape and systematic killing than the German film, City of Life and Death is relentlessly, unforgettably horrific. Rabe is present, but more prominence is given to his dedicated assistant, Mr Tan, who begins as a somewhat comic character and ends as a hero. After his little daughter is thrown through an attic window and his sister commandeered as a Japanese military prostitute, Tang arranges for his wife to go into exile with Rabe, before he himself faces a firing squad, preferring to keep his glasses on rather than submit to a blindfold.
MOVIE REVIEW | 'CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH'
A Tale of Nanjing Atrocities That Spares No Brutal Detail
City of Life and DeathNYT Critic's Pick
By Manohla DargisMay 10, 2011
Two terrible faces stare out from “City of Life and Death,” a fictionalized telling of the Rape of Nanjing, a pair of indelible bookends for this anguished film. The first belongs to Lu (Liu Ye), who, with hundreds of other soldiers, has been rounded up by invading Japanese troops amid a frenzy of violence. The close-up of Lu’s impassive face locked in unspoken emotion floods the screen. Much later, after innumerable deaths and acts of barbarism and heroism, the face of a woman will similarly fill the screen in close-up, her frantic eyes stretched wide, as if they had been permanently shocked open by what they have seen.
These faces are mirrors of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians tortured and killed during the mass butchery also known as the Nanjing (formerly Nanking) massacre and recounted with reverberant melancholy in “City of Life and Death.” Some 70 years after it made world news, the story of Nanjing has begun to re-emerge in fiction and nonfiction books and films, including Iris Chang’s 1997 “Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” the first full-length history in English. Written and directed by Lu Chuan, “City of Life and Death” hews close to the account that Ms. Chang (an American whose grandparents fled Nanjing before the siege) culled from survivors and other sources.
Image
Liu Ye, left, in “City of Life and Death,” which closely follows the accounting in Iris Chang's 1997 book, “Rape of Nanking.”Credit...Kino InternationalHistory weighs hard and steady on “City of Life and Death” without encumbering it. Mr. Lu provides little background and context for the massacre, which occurred nearly half a year after the start of the second Sino-Japanese war (1937), doubtless because his Chinese audience needed no such instruction. Instead, after briefly setting the scene through a series of handwritten postcards, he opens with Japanese troops breaching the monumental wall that once circled Nanjing. Restlessly and with increasingly clear narrative purpose, he begins cutting between the Chinese surging to escape and the advancing Japanese soldiers who refuse to let them pass, a tactic that sets the film’s insistent contrasts — the immense and the intimate, the mass and the individual, the cruelties and the kindnesses — immediately into dynamic, dramatic play.
Mr. Lu’s last film was “Mountain Patrol: Kekexili,” a surprisingly tense fictionalization of the attempts to stem the illegal trade in the Tibetan antelope, or chiru, which has been driven to near extinction because of consumer lust for its wool (shahtoosh). He is an extraordinary visual artist and here, working in wide screen and shooting in black and white, he singles out specific images — dead and naked prostitutes stacked in a cart like wood, a sole dead woman tossed in a ditch — that encapsulate a multitude of horrors. Watching this film, you are reminded of how much needless explaining characters do in American cinema.
Among the dozen or so men and women who emerge from this chaos is Miss Jiang (Gao Yuanyuan), a teacher who, with other Chinese and a few foreigners, struggles to protect the thousands who attempt and sometimes fail to find refuge in the safety zone. Though drawn in vague strokes (a crucifix suggests what inspires her extraordinary bravery), Miss Jiang emerges as a vivid presence, someone to hang onto. Improbably so does John Rabe (John Paisley), a German Nazi based on the real employee of the Siemens China Company who saved thousands. (On returning to Germany after the siege, he sent a report about the atrocities to Hitler, but was silenced to protect relations between the allies.) Equally startling is the young Japanese soldier Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), an increasingly shocked and desperate witness.
After the end of World War II, as Ms. Chang writes, the cold war helped keep the silence surrounding Nanjing. The Japanese refused to acknowledge the massacre officially, while the Chinese, anxious to maintain relations with Japan, did not press the case, a tragedy twice over for the massacre’s victims. “City of Life and Death” doesn’t address the politics of this silence, but Mr. Lu’s insistence on humanizing the Japanese, particularly through Kadokawa, is itself boldly political, and moral. By refusing to turn the Japanese into the monsters or beasts of history, he affirms both that their ravenous savagery was horribly human and that there was a ghastly price paid by soldiers ordered to “kill all, loot all and burn all.”
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1:43Trailer: 'City of Life and Death'The trailer for "City of Life and Death," Lu Chuan's film about the 1937 Nanjing massacre.
“City of Life and Death” isn’t cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must. In one awful, surreal interlude, severed male heads swing from rope like ornaments, while in another, Japanese soldiers — having buried some Chinese men alive — stamp down the earth as if planting a crop.
However appalling, these are relatively restrained images, and the use of black and white, which keeps the screen from flooding red, is a minor mercy. That the reality was unspeakably worse is obvious, a truth that makes “City of Life and Death” bearable and still necessary.
CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Lu Chuan; director of photography, Cao Yu; edited by Teng Yun; music by Liu Tong; production design by Hao Yi and Lin Chaoxiang; produced by Han Sanping, Qin Hong, Zhou Li, John Chong and Andy Zhang; released by Kino International. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In Mandarin, Japanese, English and Shanghainese, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Liu Ye (Lu Jianxiong), Gao Yuanyuan (Miss Jiang), Hideo Nakaizumi (Kadokawa), Fan Wei (Mr. Tang), Jiang Yiyan (Xiao Jiang), Ryu Kohata (Ida), Qui Lan (Mrs. Tang), John Paisley (John Rabe) and Yao Di (Tang Xiaomei).
City of Life and Death
NYT Critic's Pick
DirectorChuan Lu
WriterChuan Lu
StarsYe Liu, Wei Fan, Hideo Nakaizumi, Yuanyuan Gao, Lan Qin
RatingR
Running Time2h 12m
GenresDrama, History, War
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