war, as in Joseph Vilsmaier's Stalingrad (1993), which The New York Times said "goes about as far as a movie can go in depicting modern warfare as a stomach-turning form of mass slaughter". Military–film industry relations Many war films have been produced with the cooperation of a nation's military forces. Since the Second World War, the United States Navy has provided ships and technical guidance for films such as Top Gun. The U.S. Air Force assisted with The Big Lift, Strategic Air Command and A Gathering of Eagles, which were filmed on Air Force bases; Air Force personnel appeared in many roles. Critics have argued that the film Pearl Harbor's US-biased portrayal of events is a compensation for technical assistance received from the US armed forces, noting that the premiere was held on board a U.S. Navy carrier. In another case, the U.S. Navy objected to elements of Crimson Tide, especially mutiny on board an American naval vessel, so the film was produced without their assistance. The film historian Jonathan Rayner observes that such films "have also clearly been intended to serve vital propagandist, recruitment and public relations functions". National traditions Chinese The first Chinese war films were newsreels like Battle of Wuhan (1911) and Battle of Shanghai (1913). Still in films such as Xu Xinfu's Battle Exploits (1925), war featured mainly as background. Only with the Second Sino–Japanese War from 1937 onwards did war film become a serious genre in China, with nationalistic films such as Shi Dongshan's Protect Our Land (1938). The Chinese Civil War, too, attracted films such as Cheng Yin's From Victory to Victory (1952). A more humanistic film set in the same period is Xie Jin's The Cradle (1979), while more recent large-scale commercial films include Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death (2009). Chinese directors have repeatedly attempted to cover the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the Nanking massacre (1937–1938), with films such as the political melodrama Massacre in Nanjing, Mou Tun Fei's docudrama Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, and the "contrived Sino–Japanese romance" Don't Cry, Nanking. Zhang Yimou's epic Chinese film Flowers of War (2011), based on Geling Yan's novel, portrays the violent events through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl. Indonesian Many Indonesian films deal with the occupation of the archipelago by the Japanese during the Second World War. Teguh Karya's Doea Tanda Mata (Mementos, literally "Two Eye Marks", 1985) covers