It was after the fall of Nanking, and the dance was the "Nanking Occupation Celebration" in the eyes of the devils.
They took off their coats, put on their turbans, carried drums, or stood beside the carts, and marched on the Chinese soil at a slow pace, like demons and ghosts, like ghosts and devils coming back to life, showing off their victory to the gods in their eyes.
Unlike the suffering of the Chinese soldiers and civilians before, this sacrifice, drums, the solemnity reveals a joyful mood, but this out of the joy behind the flogging of the Japanese atrocities and reflections.
Initially, two topless sergeants beat the drums, warm drums, the sacrificial procession slowly forward, the dance team action neatly organized, forceful, strong visual impact of the rituals brought about by the sense of more stoic, but also meditatively expect the onset of the incentive.
This section of the scene takes nearly six minutes, depicting the most conventional and intuitive, first through the details of the close-up analysis of the beauty of the force, and then with a static camera in the long-distance view to bring out the marching queue of the huge and solemn.
Except that this is a sacrifice belonging to the Japanese, and the offerings are the dark and precarious Chinese in the refugee camps.
The ironic effect of the torture brought about by the lash in each of the people who stood on the land of Nanking as an aggressor.
In reality, this sacrifice is the entry ceremony of Class A war criminal and Japanese army general Matsui Ishigen, it is a military parade, and the dance scene in the movie is actually choreographed by director Lu Chuan.
This one, with its allegorical nature, is a scene that Lu Chuan dreamed up before he shot the movie.
He wrote in his director's notes, "That dream was the impetus for me to make the whole movie, and this scene was something I had to make no matter how much effort I put into it."
In September 2006, "Nanjing! Nanjing! While building the crew, Lu Chuan had a dream one night and suddenly saw a group of Japanese soldiers dancing on a piece of rubble, which made him relate to his own words - "The hell of death for one set of people is the playground for another set of people".
The dance in his dream, on the other hand, was something he saw in Japan when he was interviewed for the movie material, and it touched him y.
Lu Chuan thought, "How come we don't have nothing like this? Why are we left with just rice-planting songs, just square dances? How come we don't have something that everyone can forget about and participate in?
There are really only four movements in the dance, four movements of labor, all evolved from the middle of the most primitive folk dance, and then choreographed into the whole dance.
And Lu Chuan did put a lot of effort and money into filming this scene.
He looked for hundreds of actors to play soldiers, and first chose 12 dance instructors from among them to train, and then these 12 people then led their own teams to train the others, before and after two months of tossing and turning.
After the rehearsals were almost complete, the Japanese were invited over, who looked at them and said there was no problem. Finally, two more drummers were brought in from Tokyo, the best drummers in Japan.
The drums were made in Henan province, and a good drum should be made of cowhide, but the money was already tight at the time of filming, and the crew couldn't afford to spend it, but Lu Chuan felt that it had to be the right size, and that it couldn't be less than a penny, so he used donkey skin.
The Japanese drummer got off the plane and came to the scene and knocked. At dusk, the drum set in mid-air, take a high platform to set it up. Two people lifted up, knocking a round, everyone on the scene heard, all think this section must be shot.
Lu Chuan said: "We found that their spirit has been inherited, not broken, very scary. In fact, all these things were passed down from our side."
The dance is an extremely violent thing, and it has a visceral attempt to control your spirit and your aspirations.
In our ruins, their dance actually signifies a cultural and spiritual occupation, or invasion.
And now, many years after the war, even if not in the form of weapons, they express their attempts in other ways.
After the release of the film, the scene was criticized by the public, and many people thought that Lu Chuan "glorified" the Japs, and that it was easy to lead the audience to identify with Japan.
Really? The display of the arrogance of the Japs is inevitably equal to the "glorification"?
I'm afraid Lu Chuan is not that na?ve, and I'm sure the Chinese audience isn't either.
Showing the Japs' music parade on the big screen is not so much an affirmation of their bravado as it is an attempt to create absurd irony and drive a strong sense of introspection, since the parade is not in Tokyo but in Nanking.
In the former case, the effect would have been to magnify the enemy's power and kill our dignity.
But Nanking is our land, Nanking is China's Nanking, and the audience is China's audience, and the revulsion that erupted from the bottom of our hearts as we sat in a darkened theater and watched the enemy dance and howl on our ruins was no less than watching the Japanese army and its tanks brutalize and kill our compatriots.
Because those songs and dances on the ruins of Nanjing tell us the enemy's view of war: in their eyes, the reason why they were able to capture each other's capitals, not only because of the overwhelming superiority in military battles, but also in the culture and spirit of unity of the other side, tame each other.
In Lu Chuan's own words, as he mentioned in an interview, "What is war? War is when a foreign culture dances on our ruins.
When the enemy's arrogance is extreme, when the enemy not only wants to use force to suppress us, but also tries to trample our spirit underfoot, we will be equally indignant.
A man can be killed, not humiliated, Chinese men and women can be Shi, Lu Chuan with a combination of violent and gentle lens to the audience forced to the visual threshold, forcing us to look at the ultimate meaning of war: the enemy wants to occupy more than just land, more than just life, but also the soul. This is the kind of war that can't be avoided.
The inclusion of this dance ritual in the film, while formally realizing the ghosts of those who died on the battlefield, actually expresses the importance of remembering history and keeping us alert to the threat of subjugation through the powerful sound of the drums; in addition, it is also a kind of lamentation for the loss of one's own culture.
I think this was Lu Chuan's intention.
(Images from the movie "Nanjing! Nanjing!)
I think that's what Lu Chuan was trying to do.