DEVELOPING MISSION by Joseph W. Ho

Author:Joseph W. Ho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.1. Screenshot from John G. Magee Nanjing film, reel 9, ca. 1938, John G. Magee Family Papers, Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

Despite these visual cues indicating Magee’s filmmaking presence on the ground, much of the violence in the film is visualized after the fact, in shots of unburied corpses, camps packed with throngs of refugees, and wounded and dying individuals undergoing emergency treatment in the University of Nanking hospital. The latter scenes, both in visual framing and textual description, mirror the medical imaging produced by missionaries before the war. Magee filmed nurses and doctors examining horribly injured patients at close distance, focusing on their wounds. The textual descriptions accompanying these scenes routinely drift into clinical language, perhaps as a result of collecting information directly from the medical staff.46 For example, Magee noted that a man filmed in the hospital had “six bayonet wounds, one of which penetrated his pleura giving rise to a general sub-cutaneous Emphysema. He [would] recover.”47 These images, however, do not simple rehash preexisting narratives about medical missions and humanitarian care. Rather, they recontextualize them, with broken bodies and images of treatment pointing to the military brutalities that caused the grotesque wounds and deaths.

Magee thus used the images as a focal point for numbingly detailed textual descriptions of violence against civilians. The films’ indexicality serves to heighten horrors not seen on screen. One particularly disturbing example appears in shots of an elderly woman followed by “the picture show[ing] the bodies of . . . 16 and 14 year old girls, each lying in a group of people slain at the same time.” Although the images are visually jarring in their own right, the events that lay behind them were even more so. The woman was in fact the survivor of a terrifying attack—an entire family shot and stabbed to death, the girls gang-raped, mutilated, and then brutally killed by Japanese troops—on which Magee reported at such breathless length that the full accompanying text could not possibly be read or even accurately paraphrased while watching the film in real-time. Enacting vernacular investigative filmmaking, Magee not only filmed the survivors and victims of the killings but also interacted directly with the subjects of his film to collect as many eyewitness details and additional footage as possible. The missionary, using linguistic skills developed in peacetime mission work, assembled his descriptions by interviewing the survivors of the killings, not least an eight-year-old girl who hid in another room of the house (“where lay the [bayonetted] body of her mother”). She and an uninjured four-year-old sister had subsisted for two weeks “on puffed rice and rice crusts that form in the pan when the rice is cooked [guo ba],” surrounded by their murdered family members. “It was from the older of these children,” Magee wrote, “that the photographer was able to get part of the story, and verify and correct certain details told him by a neighbor and a relative . . . after 14 days the old woman shown in the picture returned to the neighborhood and found the two children.

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