CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH (NANJING! NANJING!) .World Cinema

Lu Chuan’s essential epic, exquisitely photographed in black and white by Cau Yu, re-creates the atrocities committed by the Japanese army during its occupation of Nanking in December 1937 Lu begins with a ferocious bottle sequence, with the lost Chinese soldiers desperately attempting to hold back the invaders, then refocuses the story on a small group of Westerners and Chinese who engage in desperate but ultimately hopeless negotiations with the Japanese to limit the suffering of the civilian population. Then begins the Nanking Massacre-or the Rope of Nanking – a sixweek period when 300,000 civilians were murdered and countless females violated Lu’s focus on characters enriches the film a Nazi official’s secretary betrays those he is charged with protecting in a futile attempt to save his family; and a Japanese soldier, anguished by the deeds of his comrades, participates anyway. Lu Chuan successfully conveys each character’s complicity in the moral ambiguity of war.