No intellectual enterprise is more fraught than the study of atrocity, as witnessed by the tragedy of Iris Chang, who is one of the dedicatees of the documentary film “Nanking.”
Brilliant, young and beautiful, in 1997 she published the bestseller “The Rape of Nanking,” which restored to memory the hideous events in the then-capital city of China over six weeks of Japanese predation in 1937. She wrote another book and was researching still another, but in 2004 she shot and killed herself.
“Nanking” is not based on Chang’s book, but it wouldn’t exist without Chang’s spadework — the same issues that surely disturbed Chang are in play: What is the point of remembering how evil men can be? Are we in any way improved by looking at piles of dead babies, or hearing the accounts of an army gone mad with rape fever? Can’t we all just get along?
Yet with the study of such maelstroms of destruction — much of it so horrifying it’s painful — comes things we should know. If evil is eternal, so is goodness and, thankfully, courage.
The story that emerges from Nanking is also a story of heroes of the real kind, ordinary people (a Nazi, even) who at a certain point just said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter if they kill me, I just can’t let this go on without doing something about it.”
The facts, recounted from archival sources in the film, are melancholy. The Japanese million-man army had already taken Shanghai by November 1937, and moved swiftly on Nanking, a hundred or so miles inland. Strategists still debate whether the city was worth defending, and Chiang Kai-shek cannot claim any triumph from what happened. First he left an army there to defend it; then, in the midst of the battle, he ordered his troops to abandon it. About half fought, half ran. The Japanese, meanwhile, bombed and shelled for a month, then finally entered the city Dec. 13 through gaps pounded in its walls.
Numbers are still debated. Many Japanese say the civilian casualties were never more than 20,000 and refer to what happened as an “incident,” not a massacre. The testimony of 22 Western witnesses suggest the Chinese contention that 300,000 were murdered and more than 80,000 women were raped is closer to the truth.
Whatever the numbers, it is certain by testimony that hell had been delivered on Earth and the Japanese soldiers obeyed the orders of their leaders, which consisted of “the three alls”: “Kill all, burn all, loot all.”
The movie, directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, finds these voices irresistible. They include the American diplomats John Fitch, Bob Wilson and Lewis Smith, the American missionaries John Magee and Minnie Vautrin and the German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe. In some sense, the drama becomes theirs, and not that of the Chinese, of whom we know little.
Guttenberg and Sturman use archival film, artfully selected and edited, since the event itself, unlike so many in history, follows the narrative convention of beginning, middle and end. But to dramatize more potently, the directors have hired actors to — hmm, there seems not to be a word. The actors do more than read, but they do less than perform. Rather you might say they occupy their characters. The performers read dramatically from the letters, journals and diaries of the Western missionaries and diplomats; they “perform” but in the limited sense, using only face and voice to communicate with the camera.
And you have to say: Wow.
So what does it prove? Atrocity, 70 years ago, and the world didn’t blink an eyelash. Atrocity, the next century: We still don’t seem to blink an eyelash. So the film asks the question: Have we learned a damned thing?
“Nanking”
R for disturbing images and descriptions of wartime atrocities. 1 hour, 29 minutes. Directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman. Starring Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, Stephen Dorff, Jurgen Prochnow, Rosalind Chao, John Getz. Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
