In Lu Chuan’s 2009 film about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death, a harrowing panorama unfolds in which we view human cruelty and sympathy, victors and vanquished. It approximates the artistic ideal Hannah Arendt called “Homeric Impartiality”. Yet the film’s focus is the pity of war, not its grandeur. Two characters in this […]
