Lu Chuan remembers having a clearly defined image of the Nanking Massacre during his days as a student of English language and literature at the PLA Institute of International Relations in Nanjing. 'The Japanese invaded China, the Chinese didn't put up a fight and then 300,000 people were slaughtered,' says the filmmaker. 'That's how I comprehended the events and that's how a lot of Chinese do too. I felt the Japanese - the ones from 70 years ago, at least - were animals, beasts.'
Lu's perspective has since undergone a sweeping change, as is evident in City of Life and Death, the 38-year-old filmmaker's epic, monochrome account of the Japanese army's decimation of the former Chinese capital during a six-week campaign of murder, rape and plunder after taking the city on December 9, 1937.
The first person on screen is a Japanese soldier named Kadokawa; rather than being a monstrous killer, the young conscript appears tired and distressed. He cowers under the mighty roar of powerful artillery as his army begins the assault on the city; later, as Kadokawa and his squadron wander the empty streets, they happen on crates of soft drinks, which they devour joyfully.
'I read a lot of historical material to prepare for the film,' says Lu. 'A wealthy friend from Sichuan spent 200 million yuan [HK$227 million] on vast amounts of [Japanese] artefacts from the second world war - the letters Japanese soldiers wrote home, their diaries, wartime magazines and photographs. I was reading through those diaries and I was shocked to discover they were all human; they wrote about human matters and they appeared to have been very sober, ordinary people: they were definitely not madmen.'
In the film, Japanese soldiers are seen engaging in everyday activities: joking with each other by the river, having their hair cut by their comrades and playing football. The sight of these young men enjoying themselves and behaving so normally serves to bring their murderous deeds into sharper focus, Lu says.
'It is even more terrifying to see normal people go out and murder,' he says. 'It brings another layer of meaning to the film. We are all normal people, but would we take part in a massacre if we were caught up in a war? My way of seeing it is that [the Nanking Massacre] was not down to some problem with the Japanese cultural psyche; the problem lies with the notion of war itself. War makes a person, or an entire nation, crazy, and people do things they wouldn't normally have imagined doing.'
