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Nanjing: Memory and Oblivion (2006)
Directed by Michael Prazan
Distributed by Icarus Films
www.icarusfilms.com
52 minutes. French with English subtitles.
Nanjing: Memory and Oblivion
As its title suggests, this film is less about the Japanese massacre of civilians in Nanking (aka Nanjing) in 1937 than about the struggle between those who insist it be remembered and those who want it erased from history. Unsurprisingly, though, the film spends a significant amount of its running time presenting the facts under dispute. Otherwise, how would we know what the fuss is all about? Thus the film, as in almost any conceivable film of this sort, takes the side of those who wish the massacre to be remembered. (One wonders how a denialist would make a documentary in support of his position. How could he show what is under dispute except by showing it, and thus establishing it? Documentaries are suitable for evidencing a positive, not a negative.)
The film presents the widely accepted version of what happened: in 1937, the Japanese army marched into Nanking and, over a period of weeks, slaughtered somewhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand men, women, and children not just indiscriminately but sadistically. Director Prazan assembles his account of the atrocities through interviews with survivors and Japanese veterans, photographs...