Atrocity, Unvarnished

No intellectual enterprise is more fraught than the study of atrocity, as witness the tragedy of Iris Chang, who is one of the dedicatees of the documentary film "Nanking." Brilliant, young and beautiful, in 1997 she published the bestseller "The Rape of Nanking," which restored to memory the hideous events in the then-capital city of China over six weeks of Japanese predation in 1937. She wrote another book and was researching still another, but perhaps the dark energies she had released in her contemplation of the event's hundreds of thousands of casualties proved too much for her to bear; in 2004 she shot and killed herself.

In "Nanking" the same issues that surely disturbed Chang are in play. Yet with the study of such maelstroms of destruction -- indeed, much of it so horrifying it's painful -- come things we should know. If evil is eternal, so is goodness and, thankfully, courage. The story that emerges from the long dying at Nanking is also a story of heroes of the real kind, ordinary people (a Nazi, even) who at a certain point said, "You know, it doesn't really matter if they kill me; I just can't let this go on without doing something about it."

The facts, recounted from archival sources, are melancholy. The Japanese million-man army had taken Shanghai by November of 1937 and moved swiftly on Nanking. Numbers are still debated. Many Japanese say the civilian casualties were never more than 20,000. The testimony of 22 Western witnesses (Nanking had a sizable Western population) suggests that the Chinese contention that 300,000 were murdered and more than 80,000 women raped is closer to the truth.

The movie, directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman and produced by local AOL guy and Caps owner Ted Leonsis, uses archival film, artfully selected and edited. But to dramatize more potently, the directors have hired actors to -- hmm, there seems not to be a word. The actors do more than read, but they do less than perform. Rather you might say they occupy their characters. In clothes reminiscent of the '30s (but not, strictly speaking, costumes) the performers read dramatically from the letters, journals and diaries of the Western missionaries and diplomats; they "perform," but in the limited sense, using only face and voice to communicate with the camera.

-- Stephen Hunter

Nanking R, 89 minutes Disturbing images and descriptions of wartime atrocities, including rape. At the Avalon. Nanking R, 89 minutes Disturbing images and descriptions of wartime atrocities, including rape. At the Avalon.