I saw Flowers of War in Changzhou, a city that is about an hour by train from Nanjing, on Christmas Eve-afternoon. It was a more emotional experience seeing the film in China rather than seeing it in the States because I am so near the museum commemorating the victims of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. The memory of visiting that museum in August 2011 and touching the notebooks filled with transcribed interviews from survivors of the massacre- oral history fresh and raw in the Chinese memory- shapes my perception of the event in a way that would have never happened had I remained in America.
My students at the Changzhou High School of Jiangsu Province and I have discussed issues of censorship and art in our Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class. We also discussed the credibility of one of my senior 3 students to critique the film in the context of the rhetorical triangle- her ethos.
Read what the director, Zhang Yimou, had to say about the making of the film in this L.A. Times article.
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