the Nanking Massacre which records real-life images of the devastated city and of Japan's occupying army. Documentary film director Shinkichi Noda has pointed out that, though they had filmed the situation in Nanking immediately after the fall of the city in a variety of ways, because the taping of the massacres was completely forbidden the movie does not go beyond being a standard propaganda newsreel. He received the impression that the movie was reporting on slivers of light in the darkness of Nanking with the Japanese soldiers all being filmed in cheerful settings behind the front lines and with no trace of the nervousness of the Chinese people who were forced to remain silent. The historian Tokushi Kasahara has said that there was almost no chance that Japanese cameramen could have captured the massacres on film given the Japanese Army's censorship guidelines, but though footage of scenes portraying the Japanese Army unfavorably were naturally avoided, some unavoidable traces of the backdrop of the Nanking Massacre were caught on camera, such as the devastation of a city that had been damaged, looted, and put to flame following the occupation as well as the exhausted and spiritless expressions on the faces of the Chinese refugees. He believes that these are, upon closer inspection, pieces of photographic evidence of the Nanking Massacre. Film critic Jinshi Fujii has indicated that the movie's most distinctive characteristic lies in its unbalanced nature full of contradiction, which he calls "a stylized chaos". Throughout the movie the images of Nanking as a city lack clarity and daily life of the city is completely missing. The Japanese soldiers just conduct one function after another and the Chinese are rarely seen with the exception of the scene of Chinese people lining up to get identification papers, but if the camera crew had gone a short distance from the whereabouts of the Japanese Army then what they would have portrayed would have been just desolate ruins. Fujii states that because this was a reality that the camera crew saw but was not able to film, Nanking is a documentary telling the story of a hard-fought battle without showing the reality behind it. See also The Battle of China The Truth about Nanjing – A movie that uses footage from the film Nanking'' to deny the existence of the Nanking Massacre. References External links entry on Nanking at the Internet Movie Database