New Age Artists

Chapter 640 When Magical Realism Really Comes

12 month 15 day.

The two brothers, who had suffered so much torture, were driven to the base of the Shuixi Gate city wall.

Lu Dachuan suddenly poked his brother with his elbow and reminded him: "Look at that lame Japanese soldier - he is sorting bullets!"

Sure enough, the lame soldier packed the rusty bullets into boxes individually, his movements as meticulous as a pharmacy clerk weighing medicinal herbs.

There are many magical flashbacks in the movie.

During the Yijiangmen stampede, the pocket watch in the victim's pocket always stopped at 17:23.

Dark red blood beads seeped out of the Ming Dynasty bricks on the Nanjing city wall.

The rats in the granary of the safe zone died of a collective hunger strike.

An engineer invented the "corpse gas lamp" in desperation.

As the first city in China to implement modern urban planning, its sewer system has become a technology for hiding corpses.

Bates, an engineer at Siemens Nanjing Office, not only repaired the city's power grid, but also secretly destroyed the memory carriers of the Japanese army's communication lines.

The pebbles and bone powder at the Yanziji massacre site are flying in the air.

These are all historical facts. In 2004, the Institute of Geology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences confirmed after testing that there is still residual bone meal in the soil.

Brother Lu Dachuan is still begging for life.

He smeared his face with the blood of the dead, used corpse oil to cover up his body odor, and took his younger brother with him, trying his best to find a glimmer of hope.

The film uses lenses to delve into the complex historical aspects. From beginning to end, the Japanese invaders appear in a functional manner, showing more of the joys, sorrows, anger and happiness of the Chinese people.

The atrocities committed by the Japanese invaders were not portrayed in depth, and the film maintained as much restraint as possible.

It was restraint that gave the Chinese people living in Nanjing life and vitality, so the destruction of all this was even more shocking.

When the faces were smeared with blood, the audience felt tense on their faces. When the corpse oil was applied, slight vomiting sounds were heard.

Gradually more and more spectators could not bear it and had to leave.

On the 17th.

The commander of the Central China Front Army, Iwane Matsui, held a ceremony to enter the city, and the systematic massacre reached its peak.

The Japanese army arrested more than 5000 people in the safety zone that day and took them to the Yangtze River for execution.

In the Zhongshan Wharf Massacre, the death toll on December 12 alone exceeded 17.

When they were driven to Jiangdong Gate, the Japanese soldiers were divided into four groups of two and began a beheading competition.

The severed head was thrown on the ground and someone was taking pictures nearby.

The two brothers were extremely sad to see their compatriots falling one by one in front of them.

At that moment, both of them were ready to die.

The Japanese soldiers grabbed a pregnant woman and attempted to rape her in front of everyone.

The pregnant woman struggled desperately, but the enraged Japanese soldiers simply slashed open her belly, took out the baby, and hung it on a bayonet for public display.

The audience in the auditorium exclaimed, retched, and some even collapsed.

The movie continues.

Lu Dachuan suddenly coughed and reminded his frightened brother, "It's going to rain, remember to collect the blue cloth drying in the backyard."

This was the code their mother used to tell them when they were young to avoid creditors.

The younger brother immediately curled up into the fetal position and his older brother threw himself on top of him, with dozens of bodies lying on top of them.

When the Japanese army poured gasoline on his brother, Okawa wrote on his brother's palm: "If you want to pretend to be dead, hold your breath and count your heartbeats. Pant after the sound of the cars. If you can't wait, hold on until you count to 200 and then take a deep breath."

The two men escaped by stacking corpses, and waited for the shift change and moved with the Japanese army's corpse-carrying team.

More magical scenes flashed across the camera.

Someone was crawling over the pile of corpses, the red silk wrapped around his hands looked like it was wrapped around a Buddha's hand.

The dye vat turned into a tombstone, and the suitcase soaked in a pool of blood turned into a boat.

Shuisheng picked up a bullet shell that reflected the morning sun and gradually turned into color.

In the distance on the Yangtze River, the masts of British ships were like a forest, making strange noises.

Night of the 18th.

Lu Dachuan was running a high fever and talking nonsense. He was observing the Japanese soldiers: "They are shorter than Lao Qintou. But all shoe repairmen know to take turns sharpening their knives."

Suddenly grabbing his brother's collar, Lu Dachuan warned his brother: "Remember! The devils are not scary, what's scary is that they even have a schedule for killing people!"

Lu Dachuan was terrified, but also trying to survive.

Judging from their physique alone, the Japanese soldiers are even smaller than the Chinese, but they have organizational skills and good teamwork.

It’s not that the Chinese don’t have equipment. They are not afraid of having poor equipment, but they don’t even have the opportunity to use the capabilities of their equipment.

No organizational skills.

Many people in Nanjing were resisting, but their resistance was sporadic and unorganized, so they could only watch themselves being slaughtered.

Lu Dachuan thought of the late Ming Dynasty, and it was probably the same.

He is not afraid of death, but it would be a shame to die like this.

The lower-level soldiers were not afraid of death, but the upper-level command system was completely paralyzed.

It's so sad!
Winter Solstice on the 23rd.

The two brothers found the refugee camp and relying on their survival experience, they helped more people survive.

Someone used two silver dollars to exchange for a rotten rice ball, and human flesh trading appeared on the black market. The two brothers came into contact with the citizen self-help network, and the salt gang and coffin shop participated in rescuing refugees, swimming across the Qinhuai River, or holding on until the ice formed so that they could find a way to sneak into the safe zone.

After ten days of fear and numerous escapes from death, the two brothers finally found hope of leaving the city and of staying alive.

Lu Dachuan sewed seven grains of coarse salt in his pocket and told his brother the news he had heard.

Fearing that something might happen to him, he drew a simple map with ink on the back of the invitation and also gave the old citizen map he had bought to his younger brother.

On the 24th.

A special slaughter mode appears on Christmas Eve.

The Japanese army forced the church choir to sing "Silent Night" at the massacre site.

A "Christmas massacre show" was set up in Xinjiekou Square, where captives were dressed up as Santa Claus and then shot.

The search party launched a massive manhunt.

Lu Dachuan's self-rescue team was discovered, and he sacrificed himself to divert the enemy, allowing his brother and others to escape.

"Go to Sanshan Street and find Zhouji Coffin Shop. Don't forget the code. The world is wide."

Suffering made the young Lu Shuisheng grow up quickly.

With tears in his eyes, he watched his brother curse the Japanese invaders as he went to his death, and he fled silently with his fist clenched.

12 month 25 day.

Lu Shuisheng knocked on the door and found the coffin shop.

Boss Zhou saw that the salt grains in his hand were arranged in the shape of a plum blossom - this was the secret code for apprentices in the Nanjing pickle workshop.

A blue shirt was handed out from under the counter: "Put it on and go to Maqun Town to find the Anhui gang that pickles cabbages."

end.

Lu Shuisheng found 37 surnames engraved on the bottom of the Anhui Gang's pickle jar. They were all refugees who had been hidden by the salt workers.

When he added the word "Lu".

Lu Shuisheng was thinking about what his brother had been observing. An organization like the Salt Gang allowed him to escape and allowed more than 30 people to survive. What if it was a larger organization?
With organization, perhaps this land would be different.

The audience who persevered to the end felt their knuckles tense up at the same time as Lu Shuisheng carved the words into the jar.

It is the entire nation's neurological resonance with the scars of history.

The audience who persevered to the end breathed a sigh of relief because Lu Shuisheng survived.

However, more magical scenes appeared.

In the Main Hall of Qixia Temple, dark red liquid was oozing from the eye sockets of the bronze Buddha statue, dripping along the broken lotus pattern in the hands of the Three Buddhas.

The bronze Buddha wept blood, and the blood beads condensed into a reverse “卍” pattern on the blue bricks, staining the sake cups on the altar red.

Bloody scratches appeared on the bluestone slabs. At the end of the alley, beneath the lotus pedestal of the stone sculpture of Guanyin, hundreds of charred corpses were carving words on the stone surface with their finger bones.

In the Buddha's Crown Palace on Niu Shou Mountain, a mopping-up team is hunting down fugitives, and the eighty-one bronze mirrors in the underground palace seem to reflect different times and spaces.

The Japanese invader was unaware and chopped off the head of the captured man with his sword, and then stabbed another one into the throat.

Lu Jiangsheng escaped, but Nanjing was in endless wailing.

This is the blood and tears of a city, as well as the blood and tears of the Chinese nation. It is suffering that can never be forgotten.

When magic really comes into reality, the audience only feels heavy.

Ghosts and gods are useless, just as international reputation is useless. We have no choice but to rely on ghosts and gods.

However, ghosts and gods are useless, but we have to rely on them.

This is where the main feature of the movie ends.

Chiang had a damn fantasy that Britain and the United States would mediate and stop the Japanese invaders.

The Japanese invaders, without sufficient military supplies, marched all the way with only the momentum left over from the Battle of Shanghai.

Chiang was damned. On the one hand, he was afraid of the Japanese invaders' strength and wanted to abandon Nanjing. On the other hand, he was afraid of public accusation that he "escaped without fighting" and had to defend Nanjing symbolically.

As a result, the capital was moved before the battle even started, the soldiers obeyed orders but the generals dispersed.

After the Japanese invaders occupied Nanjing, they carried out unprecedented and inhumane massacres, rapes and looting. The blood of more than 30 Chinese soldiers and civilians dyed the surging Yangtze River red.

It is known in history as the "Nanjing Massacre."

Nanjing, the prosperous ancient capital of the Six Dynasties, has become a ghost town filled with bones and an eerie atmosphere.

There were 28 mass killings, killing 19.5 people.

There were 858 scattered massacres, killing 15 people.

The total number of casualties exceeded 30, including a large number of bodies that were burned or thrown into the river and cannot be counted.

According to statistics from the Nanjing District Court in 1946, only about 1000 registered survivors.

The dead are not a number, not cold history, not a repetitive cycle, but living people.

The filmmaking process maintained maximum restraint, focusing on the Chinese people and approaching the film from the perspective of ordinary people.

Some anthropomorphic things confuse right and wrong in the history of the Nanjing Massacre and jump left and right at sensitive historical junctures. The public finds this abominable, but they have no specific, clear and vivid understanding of how abominable it is.

Only by expressing suffering through popular movies can we sublimate historical suffering into the cornerstone of the reconstruction of the national spirit, reach a broad consensus, and better understand the hateful nature of any forces and individuals that deconstruct suffering.

In the play "1937", Shen Santong wants to show suffering, survival and hope.

Suffering is the keynote and survival is the theme.

And hope, hope is in the future.

(End of this chapter)