City of Life and Death

Perspective is of vital importance when tackling a historical subject for the screen, but even more so when it is a film that takes on a subject as sensitive and controversial as the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and in particular their assault on the city of Nanking, a single atrocity of horrifying proportions that resulted in the deaths of more than 300,000 Chinese citizens. Dealing with such a subject, there is a danger that the content is just too extreme to take in or simply unfilmable, requiring a one-step-remove distance in order to make it in some way more palatable to a mainstream film audience, as in the case of Schindler’s List where the Holocaust is seen primarily from the non-Jewish perspective of a German businessman. Regardless of the debatable merits of such an approach, it does at least find a way to create a necessary structure and narrative, as well as a critical perspective from which to impose a modern-day reading of the events for the director’s perceived audience.

The danger with making a film about the Rape of Nanking is that there is also a Schindler figure at the centre of the subject here – John Rabe, a German businessman working in Nanking at the time, officially aligned with the Nazi party, who attempted to establish a “Safe Zone” within the city, to protect ordinary civilians from the unspeakable atrocities going on elsewhere – and it’s precisely from that viewpoint that there is another film about Nanking currently on release, Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe. Directed by Chinese filmmaker Lu Chuan, City of Life and Death would on a superficial level also appear to adopt the Spielberg method, shooting the film in ‘scope ratio black-and-white, with immaculately composed photography and a firm sense of structure and narrative, but it’s the perspective that is of vital importance here, the Chinese director necessarily taking in multiple perspectives, but experienced primarily through the unexpected medium of a Japanese soldier.


City of Life and Death then makes strong use of the secondary perspectives to impose structure, while the emotional balance of the film comes from that of Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), a young Japanese virgin soldier who witnesses the horrific unfolding of events from the side of the perpetrators. The opening part of the film throws the viewer into the heat of battle as the ancient city walls of Nanking are destroyed and the Chinese troops are overwhelmed by the Japanese forces, the events seen from the perspective of a Chinese soldier (Liu Ye) on the ground, fighting close intense battles among the ruins of the city. That section significantly comes to an end at a point marked by the meeting of eyes of the Chinese soldier and the Japanese soldier, before the film turns its attention to the establishment of John Rabe’s Safe Zone. The events in this part of the film are seen mainly from the viewpoint of the German businessman’s personal secretary Mr Tang (Qin Lan), where he and his family’s attempts to provide food and aid to survivors become increasingly desperate as they try to resist the almost unstoppable tide of the Japanese army, but that perspective is again balanced with the experience of Kadokawa. The final section of the film could be seen as the aftermath of the collapse of the Safe Zone following John Rabe’s forced evacuation from Nanking, and it’s here that the film various viewpoints coalesce to impressive effect.

Comparisons with Spielberg’s Schindler’s List are indeed inevitable, the film striving for an epic quality that does justice to the scale of one of the most notorious of wartime atrocities, while trying to use one or two examples of individual experiences to stand in for the many. City of Life and Death similarly also has to strike a balance between depicting the full horror of what occurred and keeping it acceptable for viewing to a mainstream audience (the black-and-white tones used to reduce the impact of what would otherwise be an overwhelming excess of bloodletting). It’s an unenviable task, and while some sequences do occasionally feel too manipulative in their use of music and slow motion imagery, those moments are admittedly few. Elsewhere Lu Chuan manages to find a way to convey the full horror of the situation through fleeting glimpses of random moments of extraordinary hell-on-earth inhumanity by setting them into relief against understated and unconventional moments of tenderness, sacrifice and compassion.


Where City of Life and Death is most successful however is in its aforementioned choice of perspective and in how the director manages to bring everything together into a powerful summation not just of the Rape of Nanking, but taking it beyond that into a commentary on the whole history of the Japanese invasion of China and even on the nature of war in general. Through the fates of the characters, through those who die by the end of the film and through those who live on – including significantly one unborn child being carried out of Nanjing by its pregnant mother – the director creates space for reflection and allows a vital sense of rebirth and moving on to arise out of it. This gives City of Life and Death a much greater scope than just being a grim, near unwatchable historical document of one of the worst war crimes of the last century, endowing it with a true sense of artistic vision and purpose without letting it be diminished by sentimentality.

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