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Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

T.F. Mou, the director of "Black Sun: Nanking Massacre," is the same chap who lensed the stomach churning tour de force "Men Behind the Sun" back in the late 1980s. The two films are connected in that they both deal with the atrocities visited upon the residents of China by Japanese military occupation in the 1930s and 1940s. If you're familiar at all with the history of World War II, you likely know that the holocaust wasn't the only genocide going on in the world at that time. The Japanese were masters of atrocity, in many ways far worse than the Germans, and it's unfortunate most of their crimes have gone underreported in the post-war years. Much of the meager attention to these brutalities today focuses on Laboratory 731 (covered in Mou's first film), a place where the Japanese military carried out all sorts of heinous biological and chemical experiments on helpless human subjects. "Black Sun: Nanking Massacre" goes back further, to the horrific year 1937, when Japanese soldiers occupied the Chinese city of Nanking. Over the course of several months, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians perished in the worst ways imaginable at the hands of these heartless occupiers.

Individual characters aren't important in "Black Sun" except as vehicles through which we bear witness to the mass murders unfolding on the streets of the city. Mou's camera does zoom in on one particular Chinese family, one of the many with the misfortune to remain behind in the city as the Chinese Army fled, and members of this clan serve as our eyes and ears to what follows. It should go without saying that what happens is not pretty. We've got Japanese soldiers driving bayonets into hapless civilians. We've got soldiers machine gunning innocent civilians. We've got contests going on in the Japanese Army to see who can decapitate the most civilians with their samurai swords. We also see Chinese women rounded up to serve as "entertainment" for the rowdy occupiers. Men, women, children, and the elderly--all receive the same punishments at the hands of the human monsters roaming about the city. As time goes by, the streets and alleys of the city fill up with mountains of corpses. And still the killing continues. As Japanese generals debate various philosophies about what's going on in the city, soldiers burn thousands of bodies on the riverbanks in order to make room for even more bodies. Mou mixes in real photos of the massacre to give the film a documentary feel.

"Black Sun: Nanking Massacre" is NOT your traditional horror/exploitation film, although I think some viewers could definitely interpret the massacres depicted in the movie that way. I can understand how some viewers would think Mou's simply trying to make a quick buck off of human misery, but several scenes in the movie hint at something far more profound here. A pure exploitation film wouldn't waste time trying to convey the philosophy behind the killings and carnage. Mou wants us to understand, if it's possible to understand, why this behavior occurred. The Japanese officers in charge of coordinating the occupation and subjugation of the city seem divided on the best techniques to employ. Some caution against wide scale killing, not because they are squeamish about mass murder but because they believe such methods will unite the entire country against them and thus make occupation more difficult. Most, however, are virulent racists who believe that the Chinese are "sub-humans" and should be exterminated. From what we see in the movie, and from what we know thanks to film footage taken at the time by westerners in the city, we know what philosophy won the day.

As someone who has seen both "Men Behind the Sun" and "Black Sun: Nanking Massacre," I can aver with some certainty that the former film is far worse in terms of icky special effects and killings shot in unrelenting closeup (Except for one scene in "Black Sun" involving a pregnant woman and a Japanese bayonet. It's extremely tough to watch this scene, yet most of the film concerns mass killing.). Both movies work, however, because both show different aspects of the same murderous ideology, an ideology at work in Asia and in Europe before and during the Second World War. One need only watch Mou's two films to understand that the Japanese and the Germans were definitely seeing eye to eye about what sort of world order should rule over the planet. The ordering of humanity into rigid racial hierarchies, the nonchalant reliance on mass murder to achieve political goals, the propensity to use "sub-humans" as guinea pigs in order to advance "scientific" research--yep, the Japanese and the Germans were definitely working out of the same playbook. You hate to say it, but dropping those two atomic bombs was not only the correct course of action but also justified.

Unearthed Films, a DVD company I'm coming to love, gives us a disc bursting at the seams with relevant and informative extras. Aside from the film, which receives about as good a transfer as a film like this could hope for, the company also gives us the hour long documentary film "Why We Fight: The Battle For China." Although a propaganda film, this piece recognizes China's unique contributions to world history and highlights the horrors visited upon Nanking and other places by the Japanese Army. Trailers, production notes, historical text concerning the massacre, maps, real photos from Nanking, and text interviews with director Mou round out the disc. If you've read Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" or similar texts, you'll want to give this one a watch. Careful though, it's a doozy.

I had never heard of the Nanking Massacre before. It doesn't concern the United States, so it isn't really surprising. Filmmaker T.F. Mou (who is sometimes referred to as T.F. Mous) is probably best known as the director of the infamous Men Behind the Sun. It's a cult-exploitation legend--a film that portrays Japanese war atrocities committed in World War II with gruesome FX, real cadavers, and the onscreen killing of a live cat. Love it or hate it (and I've never been entirely sure where I fall in that spectrum), there's no denying MBtS was a powerful piece of filmmaking--it's just that the naysayers felt Mou maybe went a bit too far with the exploitation elements. Of course, if one faults Mou for this, you have to fault everyone who made a Nazi exploitation film as well--and there was a whole subgenre of those.

Mou (who's never been a prolific filmmaker) returned to the fertile ground of Japanese war crimes in 1995 with his film Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre--arguably the most powerful World War II film that most audiences will never see. Based on the real life events at Nanking--wherein Japanese occupying forces slaughtered at least 300,000 Chinese citizens--Black Sun is a harrowing tale of the genocidal jihad the Japanese waged against the Chinese people. Unfortunately, when one thinks of WWII, they invariably think of the Nazis and the Jews--but as Mou's film demonstrates, the Japanese were no less cruel, no less barbaric, and no less efficient at killing large numbers of their enemies than their Nazi counterparts. What is truly disturbing is that many of the Japanese war criminals got off lightly since they allowed the U.S. access to their "research" conducted on innocent civilians.

With a combination of stunningly real film making, some real photos and some accounts from survivors, filmmaker T. F. Mou makes one of the truly disturbing films of his or any generation. While this will appeal to history buffs, beware. The gore, while subdued compared to real life (I can only imagine) is still incredibly hard to watch. The film is in stunning black and white and there is something about it that makes the killings far more realistic and thus offensive to the average viewer. Scenes like soldiers cutting off the heads of Chinese peasants just to see how sharp their swords are. And yet for every moment where the film could derail into pure atrocity (which could be justified--as Mou points out, the Japanese did far worse than what's shown in the film), there are at least three others where it redeems itself. The film is never an easy ride, but it doesn't exist solely to wallow in exploitation elements, either. Total disregard for life on multiple levels.

While not a pleasant film by any stretch of the imagination, Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre is something people should see. Everyone knows about the Nazis and the Holocaust, but few realize just how brutal the Japanese were during the war or how much the Chinese people suffered at their hands. Thankfully, with filmmakers like T.F. Mou around, this sad chapter in history will never be truly forgotten.

TF Mou, director of Men Behind teh Sun pulls no punches in this, the only film to show the atrocities of Nanking. Not for the faint of heart but a must for people interested in the Nanking Massacre. Real footage was used during some of the film from the footage Father McGee shot will trying to help the people of Nanking.

If more people watched films like this I think the world would be better off from it.

BLACK SUN: THE NANKING MASSACRE
[Hei Tai Yang Nan Jing Da Tu Sha]

(Hong Kong - 1995)

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Theatrical soundtrack: Mono

Dramatized account of events in 1937-38, when Japanese military forces overran the city of Nanking, unleashing a wave of barbarous cruelty on the defenceless population.

Though hyped by its director as a sincere depiction of China's darkest hour, BLACK SUN: THE NANKING MASSACRE will be remembered chiefly for its exploitation trimmings, such as the scene in which a sneering Japanese soldier uses his bayonet to cut a foetus from the womb of a pregnant Chinese woman. It sounds horrific, but the incident is staged with freak-show explicitness more likely to generate laughter than horror - until one remembers that such things DID happen during this period, and much worse besides...

In narrative terms, the film offers a curious mixture of gruesome horror and earnest recreations of historical events, punctuated by lengthy scenes in which high-ranking Japanese officials argue the merits (or not) of their behavior toward 'enemy' civilians. Unlike the scenes of carnage, however, these dialogue exchanges are rendered with little or no visual flair, a stylistic conceit which serves the demand for historical accuracy whilst simultaneously blunting any possible sympathy the audience may develop for the Japanese characters. Director Mau Dui-fai - billed as 'T.F. Mous' - was previously responsible for such see-'em-and-vomit items as LOST SOULS (1980) and the notorious MEN BEHIND THE SUN (1988), and here he demonstrates an aptitude for sideshow theatrics which renders him uniquely suited to the subject at hand.

For all its sensationalism, however, the movie is distinguished by an extraordinary LACK of melodrama. Mau depicts the worst horrors (rape, decapitation, mass shootings and burnings) with po-faced solemnity, lapsing into carnival grotesquerie only when the pace threatens to flag. Those looking for sleazy thrills will get their money's worth, but "Black Sun" straddles the gap between commercial exploitation and journalistic integrity, and takes few prisoners along the way. Performances by a largely unknown cast are uniformly fine, and production values are top-notch for such downmarket fare.

There are two great films on the Nanking Massacre, this is one of them.

Don't be fooled into wasting your money on the garbage produced by Leonsis. The Leonsis film failed in China and was laughed out of Nanking.

Now, I admit, I was reluctant to buy this film after watching the director's (Tun Fei Mou's) other film on Unit 731 (Men Behind the Sun). The Men Behind the Sun, Unit 731 film was boring boring boring.

Black Sun is a great film which chronicles many of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking, during an 8 week time period during the 1937-1938 winter. Women and children are tortured, burned alive, the squirming fetus is ripped from its mother's womb while Japanese soldiers laugh. This is a true story!

Black sun is not a documentary but a feature film. If you are looking for a documentary, I recommend The Rape of Nanking which you can watch on youtube or buy here at Amazon.

<strong>Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre</strong> (Tun Fei Mou, 1995)

Most of the time I was watching <em>Black Sun</em>, I was mulling over one question: is this really a Man Behind the Sun film, as it was marketed both here and in its native Hong Kong? It is, I think, in the same sense that <em>Killing Birds</em> had anything to do with the Zombie franchise, or <em>The Ogre</em> anything to do with the Demons franchise. In other words, it was a convenient marketing ploy to draw the rubes to a movie they would probably have not otherwise seen. But where <em>Killing Birds</em> and <em>The Ogre</em> are both awful, awful films after which everyone who went to a theater to see them should have demanded their money back, <em>Black Sun</em>, Mou's final film (to date; while he has not directed for the past sixteen years, he is still alive), may well be his best, in terms of technical filmmaking. It's possible that film wasn't given the Man Behind the Sun brand to expose it to Mou fans (he directed the infamous 1988 film that kicked off the series), but in order to save the brand itself from the execrable second and third films, <em>Laboratory of the Devil</em> and <em>A Narrow Escape</em>, both directed by martial-arts hack Godfrey Ho. (A terrible choice to have anything to do with the franchise... but I digress.)

I'm sure you won't be at all surprised when I tell you that <em>Black Sun</em> takes us back from the 1945 settings of the previous three films in the series to the thirties, given that the subtitle of the film is <em>The Nanking Massacre</em>. The Nanking (/Nanjing) Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was carried out by the Japanese in December of 1937, and to this day stands as one of history's most hideous war crimes; over the course of ten days, an estimated two to three hundred thousand Chinese nationals were treated, for all intents and purposes, like animals by the invading Japanese army (a variation of the "maruta" treatment given to experimental subjects in the Unit 731 camps, designed to dehumanize the oppressed). Mou, presenting the information in docudrama fashion much as he did in the original <em>Man Behind the Sun</em>, takes us through the Japanese reign of terror through the eyes of two Chinese nationals, the last surviving monk from one of the town's temples and an eight-year-old boy who fled with his younger sister when the Japanese invaded their home, and has since been living on the street, trying to avoid the occupiers.

Mou has a better grasp of the docudrama gig here than he did in 1988. Which is not to say there isn't a great deal of naked emotional manipulation to be had, nor that there are none of the gratuitous shock scenes that made Mou so infamous with <em>Man Behind the Sun</em>. But both have been toned down considerably in this film (there are four or five shots that squeamish audience members should be prepared for, but much of the atrocity is either offscreen or shot with a wide-angle lens from high above the city in order to give a sense of magnitude). But here he backs up his allegations with a great deal of written documentation, usually voice-overed while being shown on the screen, as well as footage from the infamous John Magee footage shot during the Massacre itself (there are a number of scenes where the film will freeze, and then the tableau will fade to black and white, so you can see how Mou has built the action to recreating a still from the Magee film). It's powerful stuff if you're trying to convey to your audience that yes, you're really showing things the way they happened, or as best you can given that very few people who were actually there were alive to tell the tale after the fact.

Interesting, this. I'm not sure I can call it "good", but it's undeniably powerful. ***

It is hard to imagine the barbarism that went on during WWII, but much of it did. This movie (gory as it may be) goes a long way towards capturing the essence of what one culture can do to another. Needless to say more.
Aside from that, the CD arrived in very good condition with a very good turn around time.
P. Blair
Syracuse, New York

I seldom bothered to write reviews but this movie was such a major disappointment that I felt compelled to write.
Holliwood made numerous movies about WW II and the horror of concentration camps but none about the Japanese invasion of China, probably because of it's limited market appeal. So when I heard about this movie, I thought, finally, someone made a movie about the atrocities of the Japanese Army during WW II. However,this movie should be subtitled "How Not To Make A Movie" since it was sooooooo bad !

In Chinese, we have a saying loosely translated go something like " Illustrating the intestine when doing a portrait". What it means is one is over doing the obvious.

The movie was supposed to show the horor of war but instead, it was like a elementary school contest. By that I mean in grade schools,contests are held and students are asked to do a poster with captions on health or safety issue. Usually kids come up with graphics illustrating the ill effects of smoking or whatever the theme may be. Well, The Black Sun is just like that. The director, Mr. T. F. Mou assumes that the audience have no comprehension skills and have to be spoon fed on all the facts. Every so often, a short clip of documentary or photos are shown. This is done , I supposed, to tell the audience what the truth is. Well, Mr. Mou, we are not idiots, we have a mind, we can tell for ourselves what is going on.

The acting was wooden, the characters are stereotypical, and the dialogues are even worse. After a few scenes of civilians being shot or brutalized. we get the picture, and it soon became tedious to watch the same thing over and over again.
I knew this wasn't the Bridge of River Kwai or the Schindeller's List, but boy, this movie was a complete waste of time. A huge disappointment.

Mr. Mou, the director, was supposed to have taken film making course in Taiwan, well, this movie certainly didn't bode well for film making schools in that country. As a matter of fact, Mr. T.F. Mou should do the audience a favour and find another line of work. Ed Wood, the reputed worst director in the world, is now the second worst director in the world, in my opinion.

This movie looks like typical 1980s Mainland cinema - the production values are basic, the storytelling lacks any charisma or talent to manipulate the audience to take any position. It just tries to depict the Japanese in China using Chinese actors. Gross but doesn't really inform or advance comprehension like a home invading Michael Myers picarism.

BUT there is a gem in this film and that is the cameo of one John Rabe who in front of the American representative, George Fitcher, handed the Japanese army the excuse to invade the refugee camp in the international section that the Japanese had agreed to leave alone by ADDING that there HAPPENED to be some disarmed Chinese soldiers in the camp and that he HOPED that the Japanese would respect humanitarianism.

There is NO such thing as a GOOD Nazi.

Prepared to watch massacre would be surprised by a level of horror this talented movie-doco presents.

It is it of this doco genre.