Visual Symbols, Ethical Negotiation, and the Sovereignty of Memory: The Cinematic Representation of Christianity in Nanjing Massacre Films
Abstract
This article examines the changing cinematic functions of Christian imagery, religiously inflected space, and theological language in films about the Nanjing Massacre. Missionaries, Christian schools, hospitals, and relief workers form part of the historical archive on which these films draw, but cinema reorganizes that archive through framing, sound, performance, genre, and narrative focus. Combining historical film theory with a dialogical theology-and-film approach, the article traces how refuge, conscience, sacrifice, and witness become visible, and how moral agency is distributed among foreign rescuers, perpetrator-witnesses, Chinese victims, and civilian custodians of evidence. Films from 1987 to 1995 established a grammar of bodily suffering, ruined urban space, archival authentication, and temporary shelter. John Rabe and City of Life and Death (2009) redirected moral attention toward rescue and perpetrator conscience, while The Flowers of War (2011) placed church architecture, clerical performance, sacred music, and substitutionary sacrifice at the center of its visual world. Dead to Rights (2025) relocates witnessing to a photographic studio where Chinese civilians develop, preserve, and transmit evidence. The article argues that Christianity functions as a historically grounded but shifting cinematic resource whose sacred functions and witnessing authority are repeatedly redistributed.