"The City of Life and Death"

CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH

This film has been well recognized as a sober drama of the horrors of the massacre of Nanking in 1937. It takes all of one’s energy to endure the extraordinary violence portrayed in the film. There is nothing positive to mention, except that it captures in a fiction the extreme horror that was so real to so many.

However, what I experienced was something that has often seemed so strange to me, viz., hatred.   Whenever I read about the Sunnis and their conflicts with the Shias and Kurds, or the Tutsis and Hutus, or the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, I tend to be amazed that such hatred to last for generations.  Watching this film made it easy for me to understand how such hatred could be generated by such atrocities as occurred in Nanking.

The film has a long series of pure violence, killing with no regard of the other. For the Japanese soldiers, the Chinese inhabitants were no more than gnats needing to be swatted away. How one can perpetrate such violence on another is beyond my comprehension and yet, I was “forced” to stay with the film in spite of my horror even watching it vicariously.

I started to think how I could possible counsel those whose family suffered such a horrendous fate. What could I offer that possibly could make it different so that their hatred could be ameliorated? I was unable to come up with a narrative that would even attempt to modify their feelings of hatred of their enemy.

If the hatreds documented between ethic groups that result in death and violence flows from a history “comparable” to the Massacre that occurred in Nanking, I feel totally helpless and despair of a day when the world could ever experience a peace that we all pray for.