《纽约时报》：南京暴行的一场淋漓尽致的刻画

　　《纽约时报》5月11日的报道

　　南京暴行的一场淋漓尽致的刻画

　　作者：MANOHLA DARGIS

　　《南京！南京！》11日开始在曼哈顿上映。影片里有两张令人震撼的面孔。第一张属于陆建雄（刘烨饰演），他和其他数百名军人遭到侵华日军的包围。 陆建雄面无表情的脸有一种难以言说的情感，整块银幕就是他的这张脸。影片后半部分，在观众看过了无数死亡、暴行和英勇行为后，出现了一个女人脸部的特写镜头，同样是占据了整块银幕，她双眼圆睁，眼神中充满了紧张，似乎眼前的一切让这双眼睛永远都保持这样的状态。

　　这两张脸是镜子，映出了在南京大屠杀中遭到折磨与杀戮的数十万军人和平民的脸。70多年前的南京大屠杀震惊了世界，如今这段历史以书籍和电影的形式再次呈现在人们面前，其中包括张纯如1997年出版的《南京暴行：被遗忘的大屠杀》，这是第一本用英文全面讲述这段历史的书。

　　由陆川执导的这部《南京！南京！》承载着沉甸甸的历史，不过没有受到历史的拖累。陆川没有讲述多少背景，而是上来就从日军攻破南京城墙开始。

　　正如张纯如在书中所说，二战结束后，冷战让各方在南京大屠杀的问题上保持沉默。《南京！南京！》虽然没有关注这种沉默态度所涉及的政治问题，但陆川坚持将日本军人还原为人（特别是通过塑造角川这个日本人角色），这本身就是政治上的大胆之举。他没有把日本人变成魔鬼或禽兽，而是既说他们身上的兽性是人性中非常可怕的东西，同时又表现了奉命烧杀抢掠的日本兵本身也付出了惨痛的代价。

　　《南京！南京！》中的惨状令人不忍目睹，但陆川又让你必须看下去。在有一个镜头中，一些男性的头颅像装饰品一样挂在绳子上，而在另一个镜头中，日本兵在活埋了中国人之后，将土踩实，就像在种庄稼。

　　尽管这样的场面触目惊心，但相对来说这部电影的画面还是很克制的。而且使用黑白两色让银幕上的场景不会太血腥。显然，当年发生的一切远比电影展现得更糟糕，正是这样的事实让《南京！南京！》既让人能够承受，又不可或缺。

　　对比手法是这部电影的一大特色——有时场面宏大，有时细腻，有时侧重群体，有时关注个人，残酷与温暖并存。

　　陆川是一位视觉艺术大师，通过黑白影像及宽屏拍摄，他向观众展现出一幕幕难忘的、独特的画面——死去的妓女像柴火一样被扔在手推车上，扔在阴沟里的一具女尸——这些都是恐惧的浓缩体。观看这部电影，让人不禁想到美国的许多电影中的角色过于罗里罗嗦。

　　陆川对于日军（角川为代表）人性化的刻画在政治上、及道德上都是一个大胆的一步。他拒绝将日军刻画成恶魔或野兽，而是强调他们残暴也是人性的一面，这些被变成“杀人机器”的士兵也会为自己的行为付出惨重的代价。

　　A Tale of Nanjing Atrocities That Spares No Brutal Detail

　　By MANOHLA DARGIS

　　Published: May 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.

　　History 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.”

　　“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.