Nanking 2007

Of the three movies about the infamous massacre ( the others being City of Life and Death (2010), ARTE's Rape of Nanking),  the present one is the clearest, combining footage with the accounts of Chinese, Japanese and Western eye witnesses. Japan invaded China in 1937 and following the fall of Shanghai, Nanking was first brought to it's knees by aerial bombardment and then the army entered the capital city to carry out an unprecedented pogrom involving an estimated 200,000 deaths and 20,000 rapes over a period of several months. Due to the heroic efforts of a group of foreigners ( John Rabe, a saintly Nazi businessman, the Schindler of Nanking; Miss Vautrin, a Christian missionary; John Magee, another minister; Bob Wilson, a doctor) a Safety Zone was created in the heart of the city with UN concurrence leading to saving 250,000 lives.

In contrast to the industrial efficiency of the Nazi machine of extermination, the scene in Nanking is one of  bestiality at it's unimaginable lowest-women and girls bayoneted after rape, children bayoneted, crowds machine-gunned and the survivors bayonneted. It is alarming to discover that we human beings have such potential for bestiality, that evil can exist in such collectivised form, and even gain social sanction and admiration within the social mass comprising the perpetrators. The Japanese officers turn the eyes away, their embassy offers lame justification.

The film skillfully weaves narration and footage to present a coherent and adequate portrayal of one of the most goresome chapters of modern history. Since we have become immunized to images, the narrative form which the movie eloquently conveys the enormity through gestures, expressions, and tears. This enactment of the written words of the witnesses, victims and still nonchalant perpetrators ( the capacity for contrition seems ill-developed in human beings) is what gives the documentary it's force of reality. The film is balanced and engrossing, with no attempt at exaggeration or dramatization (there is no scope for that).

Come and See

Elem Klimov, 1906-96, USSR, 1985, 2 hours

"And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."...Bible

Few films depict the horror of war so powerfully as this one. It has been recently anointed a Great Movie by Ebert, which is what brought me to it. It describes the German invasion of Belarus during WW2. Two million lives were lost. The central sequence in the film depicts how the inhabitants of a Jewish village are burnt alive. This chronicles the historical fact of over six hundred villages which suffered this fate at the hand of the Nazis.

The beauty of the coniferous forest with shafts of sunlight pouring through the foliage into the lush undergrowth of ferns contrasts with the heaps of bodies and the gore of torn blood-splattered limbs. The hues of a lush sun sprayed woodland in an oblique way parallel the colors of a splattered body with the organs bulging out. The carnage becomes all the more terrible as we view it through the eyes of a pair of beautiful teenagers. Older people become immunized to anything and children may lack understanding but adolescence is an age when one's capacity for feeling is at a peak. The boy becomes partially deaf from the explosions and his muted humming world revolves dizzily as he wakes out of innocence in a short period. The stunning beauty of the countryside is captured in rainbow colors by the camera even as the enemy's murder machine closes like a vice and men, women and children are crammed into barns before being set aflame.

The sheer coldness of calculation and machine like efficiency of the invaders reveals the depths of evil to which human beings are capable of sinking. Such events seem to have been the rule rather than an exception in the annals of our past. Vindication comes with the gunning down of the chief Nazi officer and some others. The movie closes with a documentary like montage on the rise and fall of the Hitler-phenomenon. This is a film of breathtaking beauty and power and surely one which expands one's vision of the collective past.

Roger Ebert's review

The Human Condition-II & III (1960)

Kobayashi (1916-96), 1959-61, 3hrs+3 1/2 hours

The trilogy unfolds furthur as a sprawling historical and geographical drama wound around the life of the naive and idealistic hero Kaji. In it's vast canvas it resembles Dr Zhivago and Gone with the Wind. The film was made around 1960 and was a box-office success in Japan because it must have reflected the prevalent anti-war sentiments. It must have been a mirror for that country with Kaji representing the views with which a large fraction of Japanese would have found easy to identify--cathartic viewing, it's timeliness justifying it's length.

Kaji with his pro-labor views is found too troublesome as a civilian officer in the mines and  is conscripted. Part 3 (each of the films is divided into two parts so the first part of the second film is part 3 in the trilogy) is the training period, and we have a possibly caricaturised picture of the internal brutality in the imperial forces where slapping and belaboring seems an established routine. (The mutual slapping at times becomes a virtual Punch and Judy show.) Kaji with his anachronistic humanistic ideas stands out like a sore thumb.

The training is over in due course and he is despatched to the Manchurian border. We get a clear picture of the complex triangular military situation with the Chinese Reds, the Soviets and the  weakening Japanese pitted against each other. With rumblings from the West about the defeat of the fascists and Nazi's the morale of the Japanese is sinking and finally it is every man for himself and Kaji sets out on a long trek through the the forests and tundra towards his wife.

The English title of the film is a misnomer since the original has the connotation of how hard it is to be human. It is hard at any time to be a decent human being in a corrupt environment, and the protagonists effort is somewhat unconvincing and quixotic and foredoomed for disillusionment, and we are left to conclude that he is more a prototype of views prevailing after the war contrasted to the wartime jingoism, than a creature of flesh and blood. For a 1960 film it is prescient in it's portrayal of the in-humanism inherent in the Marxist ideology.

For whatever flaws it may have, it's movie well worth the effort of watching, for the grandeur of it's universal sweep and for it's portrayal of an era and a territory most of us are unfamiliar with.

The Human Condition-Part 1

Kobayashi, 206m, 1959

Manchuria, the North Eastern part of China, was occupied by Japan in the thirties. The military machine ruthlessly exploited the resources as well as the labor. The present film is set in the closing years of the war. It is a long, lavish and for the most absorbing film which serves as a good history lesson. As a human drama it is bland.

Kaji, a young manager with his new bride takes over as a labor supervisor in an iron mine. With the ongoing war and the requirements of steel the Chinese are brutally driven to give increased production. Kaji is put in charge of a contingent of special labor comprising prisoners of war. His humanism comes into head-on clash with the methods of the management, which works under the surveillance of the military.

Kaji's character is unconvincing because the idealism is too undiluted and too much on the surface. It has no complexity like, say, Schindler, to make him interesting and convincing. His flaw is that he has too few flaws, making him an unlikely candidate even for a saint. The face is flat and expressionless, the mouth wide upon, eyes blank and staring into space, and of course he is given no chance to smile. The villains are wittier and more interesting. The film in it's sentimentality, overacting and melodrama has tinges of Bollywood of the black and white era.

The film is redeemed by it's accurate and well encapsulated historical information, since the director himself was in Manchuria during the period described. It is a chronicle of his own experience but he is not very successful in transmuting it into a truly great or universal film. I am not particularly inclined to continue with the remaining two parts of this trilogy having a combined duration of almost ten hours. I must add it has been widely acclaimed, even as the best film of all time.

Parting, a poem of adolescence, by AT

The cloud unfolded it’s golden wings

before the two of us

We both heard the mute song of parting

in the dying hours of the evening

- I, under the old cassia tree in the courtyard,

and you on the long road to freedom.

Alas! You could not hear the words it whispered to me.

And what it said to you was lost forever in the rising wind.
 Sampanmitra