Playroom (1): The Good Earth Runs Red

'The Good Earth Runs Red'. Produced in 1938 by the United Council for Civilian Relief in China, an organization led by Theodore Roosevelt Jr., this film vividly shows the nation of China under assault by the Japanese Imperial Army and documents the brutality of the invaders.  The UCCR was created before U.S. involvement in WWII when the nation was technically a neutral power.  Some Americans however felt it was important to speak out against Japanese aggression and the war crimes that were being committed.  The film spares little grace in painting a portrait of the Japanese soldiers as monsters who repeatedly rape and torture women, bayonet young children, and have no regard whatsoever for civilian casualties.   The film was apparently shown as part of an American fundraising drive made in concert with Madame Chiang Kai-shek that included an event in New York City called "A Night in Old China" and a series of "bowl of rice" parties across the United States.  Nearly $1 million was raised for relief efforts as a result of the campaign.
The film begins with an introduction and music, providing an overview of China's 40 centuries of civilization, its recent nationhood, and how Modern China has embraced Western friendship and trade, improving workers' standards of living through modern factories while maintaining traditional rural life.  The younger generation works towards a greater China. The narrative then shifts to the horrors of 1937, with Japanese air raids on Nanking causing massive destruction and loss of life. Civilians fled, and those who remained faced brutal occupation, with many being slaughtered or subjected to unimaginable cruelty. China appealed to the world for aid, looking to America for support. The text closes with a call for help and renewed courage from America's response.
00:00  Overview of China's 40 centuries of civilization and recent nationhood.0:20: Modern China embraces Western friendship and trade.0:40: Cargo boats transport produce to seaports and global markets.0:50: Modern factories improve workers' standards of living.1:00: Traditional life continues in rural villages.1:13: Commerce brings great buildings to coastal cities.1:28: Department stores in cities like Shanghai resemble those in New York and London.1:40: Education introduces young Chinese to Western world.1:50: Women share in establishing new traditions.2:03: Younger generation works towards a greater China.2:16: America and the world recognize China's progress.2:30: Bond of friendship between America and China.2:44: Transition to the horrors of 1937.3:08: Japanese air raids on Nanking cause destruction and loss of life.3:21: Chinese forces valiantly defend the city.3:31: 850,000 civilians flee Nanking.3:38: Refugee camps established by foreigners.3:53: Japanese forces occupy Nanking.4:01: Chinese women plead for their husbands' lives.4:19: Civilians suspected of being ex-soldiers are slaughtered.4:37: Old woman stands before ruins of her home.4:50: Foreign relief agencies set up emergency hospitals.5:07: Hospitals filled with survivors of Japanese brutality.5:20: Actual cases of civilian victims shown.5:32: Farmer shot by Japanese soldiers.5:42: Respect for the aged not shown by enemies.5:49: Women frequently victims of brutality.6:01: Civilians often unable to walk after release.6:13: Children subjected to tortures.6:15: Common injuries from bayonets and bullets.6:20: Woman forced to wash clothes and raped repeatedly.6:39: Woman found in a pool of blood after attempted beheading.6:42: Boy bayonetted by Japanese soldiers.6:55: Pregnant girl stabbed resisting rape.7:05: Girl slashed by bayonet after parents killed.7:18: Sole survivor of 80 men shot by Japanese soldiers.7:30: Relief workers also targeted by invaders.7:43: Man shot and set on fire by Japanese soldier.7:54: Man stabbed for refusing to set fire to hotel.8:08: Boy beaten and bayonetted by soldiers.8:19: Woman repeatedly raped by soldiers.8:21: gony of victims of Japanese brutality.8:30: China's history of peaceful defense and cultural contributions.8:53: Japan's institutions influenced by Chinese culture.9:01: Japan's military leaders seek to dominate China.9:14: Japanese forces attempt to destroy China's will to live.9:27: Villagers wait in resignation for bombing planes.9:32: Chinese people resolve to survive as a free nation.9:44: China appeals to the world for aid.9:51: Aid needed for civilians suffering under Japanese occupation.10:06: China's renewed courage from America's response.
This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com.'

A film appears and yields itself to a kind of waiting that is older than waiting for knowledge. The screen receives what it has been made to receive. A voice speaks in the manner of an announcement that pretends to have no centre. Faces come forward and withdraw. The world outside is held back for the length of a reel. What is shown is not a story that takes us in hand and leads us toward a proof. It is a sequence of certainties that already know their end and for that reason cannot end. One sees a city that could be any city because it is a city that has already been emptied of assurance. One sees rooms that are rooms for the sick, and the beds give the measure that cannot be measured. The beds are all the same and so the bodies must be singular. The film was made to ask for help and it makes its request with the artlessness of a bell. The bell does not move and the air is moved for it. Sound spreads. The empty space is where the demand takes shape.

What is a film that wants only to be useful? The answer it gives is that usefulness in this unquiet form lies in the refusal to turn pain into a theme. The images retain the clarity of things that have not been interpreted yet are already beyond interpretation. Streets run in straight lines and carry the mark of an order that has been overpassed by the event that carries no order. The camera looks without becoming a witness in the strong sense. The narration says what is there and is careful not to say more. The spareness is not an aesthetic choice. It is a condition. Speech has entered the region where it cannot bring back what the eyes meet and yet it continues because the continuation is the last duty.

This region is not the region of silence alone. It is not made by the absence of sound. It is made by the pressure of what will not let language finish. The voice describes schools and factories and ships. It names progress because progress is the figure by which we recognise ourselves. Then the voice turns and in the turn something like air goes out of the room. The city that was described as industrious becomes a place where the industrious are patients and the measure of productivity becomes the number of bandages and the litres of boiled water. We are asked to remain. We are asked to sit where we are and to follow what can be said to the edge of what cannot. In that small obedience the audience comes into relation with one another and with those who do not know these strangers exist. This is a community that does not have a name, and because it does not have a name it does not seek to remain. It is present for a time that refuses to be possessed.

What is shown of bodies is not the body as a ground for meaning. The film does not tell us who these people were before they were placed in beds. It does not tell us what they believed, what they expected from the day that had begun as a day with errands and small talk. The camera does not remove the blanket to teach the viewer a lesson. It leaves a blanket where a blanket is needed and becomes exact at the level of the face. The face is sometimes still. Sometimes it moves in a way that cannot be read except as movement. The narrative names the forms of harm, and the names are brief and historical. Words that would normally form a sequence are now given in a list. The list is the refusal of a tale. It collects and counts and finds that counting cannot do more than point. The pointing is enough, not because enough has been said, but because the film is the kind of object that knows it must end before the subject is finished.

The appeal that follows will strike some as a trade. Give attention, receive a claim on your purse. Yet what happens in the room cannot be reduced to the exchange. The film imposes a use that exceeds use. For a little while the spectators are delivered to the time of others. It is not the time of empathy in the sentimental sense. It is the time that exposes the viewer to the truth that nothing offered will be returned as knowledge. One is not enriched by having seen. One discovers that seeing is the form of impoverishment that corresponds to the thing seen. The reel passes. The facts as facts are retained for a time and then they falter. What remains is a moment of common exposure that will not be claimed as anyone’s achievement. The money in the bowl is a figure of this loss that arrives as a necessary act. It leaves the hand and it does not return. It leaves the hand in company, which is the condition that allows the loss to be borne.

There is a problem that presents itself whenever a body is used to call another body to action at a distance. The problem is the temptation to make an image serve the end of a new self knowledge. The film resists this by keeping its grammar unadorned. It does not invite the viewer to be the one who understands. It invites the viewer to be the one who does not flee from the plainness of what has been shown. The actors here are unnamed because their only role is the role they did not choose. In that role they resist being taken into the story of the audience. The audience does not become good by having looked. The audience is given a chance to let the time of looking carry them forward to an act that is simple and cannot elevate them. A stranger requires this. The film is the messenger that does not add a word to the message.

A short work that gives itself this severity also gives itself to repetition. It is designed to be shown again and again, in rooms that will never be named, to listeners who will never be counted except as the sum required to heat those rooms and to pay the caretaker who locks up when all have gone. In repeating, the film places its spectators under the sign of a rite. The rite does not convert the event into a confidence that could hide the difficulty to come. It establishes a rhythm by which the hour can be held. In that rhythm, a city that might otherwise be too far away becomes a name one can bear for a moment. The bearing is not identification and it is not appropriation. It is an approach that stops short where it should stop. The stopping is part of the approach. The screen refuses the closeness that would replace what has happened with the comfort of imagination.

There is a temptation to ask whether the sequence of modern scenes that opens the film is meant to flatter the viewer and to invite a resemblance that will soften the act of giving. Possibly this is so. Yet the movement from likeness to unlikeness is also the movement by which the distance that cannot be crossed is admitted without despair. One cannot live entirely in a realm of exception. One must have roads and shops and schools if only to understand that the ruins made by force are not a natural order. The opening is not a promise that the world is one. It is the registration of the minimum commonness by which the whole can be heard. The force that cancels that commonness appears without metaphors. It is said to be what it is. The camera records what it can and the commentary avoids any claim to speak for those who are not there to hear themselves spoken.

The neutrality that holds the film together is not the neutrality of indifference. It is the neutrality that keeps a space where the subject can remain without being made into an example. The narration never climbs above the images. It stays just behind them and lets their order claim the room. In this way the film turns the ordinary constraint of a public projection into a discipline that protects the event from the viewer and the viewer from the event. Both are saved from the gesture that would convert an encounter into possession. The images do not open the past. They open the limit that the present keeps with it when it looks at what it cannot enclose.

The title bears a weight that a title is not usually asked to bear. To say 'good earth' is an old word. To say 'runs red' is a sudden word. The one evokes endurance and the work of hands. The other evokes what leaks into the work and makes it unworkable. The combination is not a shock because it comes after the fact, and the fact has already taken away surprise. There is no subtlety in the phrase and for that reason it is exact. It is the form in which a truth that cannot be argued presents itself to those who will not remain if they are not addressed in the first words they understand.

Some will want to integrate the film into a wider history of representation and power. They will read each sentence for the trace of a plan. They will measure the rooms in which these reels were shown by the other meetings those rooms have hosted. They will be right to do so. Every appeal has a context that gives it force and takes some force away. Yet to keep only to this reading would be to abandon what happens in the time of the film. The time is not suffused by doctrine. It is held by the strictest modesty. There is a claim that must be honoured. There is a refusal that must be honoured at the same time. The claim is that the hurt exists, and that what can be given should be given. The refusal is that the hurt will not become the ground of a new certainty. These two together make the reel almost an impossible object. It works on us and it will not work for us. It leaves a trace and the trace is of something that does not belong to those who carry it away.

The refusal takes another shape in the way the film denies the audience an ending. The end comes because the time has been used up. The end does not come because the work is done. The last shots do not promise that attention has produced a result that can be looked at with satisfaction. The bowl that moves down the row is not a conclusion. It is a continuation of looking in another form. The hands that reach are the same hands that were still when the face on the bed filled the screen. The same silence follows. 

There is in the film a light that has nothing to do with technique. It is the light that makes a face visible when the face does not desire an audience. The look given to the camera is less a look than a condition. It is the look of a person whose look must pass through the demand of another. The demand is not chosen and so the look has the absolute contact of what an appeal is when nothing else can be offered. The director here is not a personality. It is the border that a machine makes when it frames. We often think that framing is the first decision of art. Here it is the last patience of necessity. There are only these edges. The rest of the world has not been denied. It is absent because absence is the world’s current state.

Often in such works the commentary will reach for a sentence that can bind the disparate images to a cause. The cause settles nerves and lets the spectator doubt less. Here the voice does not attempt such a settlement. It names the offices of relief, names the need, names the acts that can follow from the seeing we have done. It stops short of naming why we should be proud to have been present. This shortness is not a lack of skill. It is a respect. The room becomes a place where respect touches the boundary of ignorance and remains there. One is not educated here. One is called to a form of endurance that holds the call itself without ornament.

The film was made to travel, yet in every place the experience would be the same experience under a different ceiling. A few seats would be repaired with tape. There would be a draught that could not be stopped. The projector would falter once and the operator would shake his head in a theatrical regret that would return each time the bulb threatened to fail. People would cough because people cough when they do not know where to put their hands. In this scene the work gains its truth. It is not the fact of a single screening that matters. It is the multiplication of a patience that refuses to announce itself. It is the way these small inconveniences open to what is not a metaphor. The discomfort here is not a symbol of the hurt there. It is only a reminder that a life without interruptions is not the life into which this film has come.

There is always a question in such undertakings about the lawfulness of looking. What has one been given the right to see in order to be moved? The film answers by keeping the right to a minimum. It does not claim a special permission. It does not claim that the audience and the sufferers share a secret. It permits only this simple contact. You are here and they are there and the distance is a fact. This fact does not end the matter. It begins it and the only form of continuation that does not trespass is the act of giving that does not pretend to be an act of comprehension. There are kinds of knowledge that can follow, and they are not forbidden. But they must follow and not precede the acceptance that the first requirement is to do nothing with the images except keep faith with them long enough to let them change a small part of our day.

To say that a film changes a day is to give it more agency than it wants. It is more accurate to say that the day lets itself be altered when a reel like this intrudes. The workday stops. The evening’s plan is broken. The errand takes a detour that ends in a hall where the chairs remember worse lectures. Because rooms are where all these things happen. The interruption is the substance. The fact of having ceased to be always for oneself is the small event that has occasioned the projection. No one can know whether this interruption persists beyond the walk home. No one can know whether the hand that opens the door to the kitchen will still carry what the eye could barely keep in place. It is enough that for a time the possible has been given room. The possible is not redemption or understanding. It is the thinness in our ordinary claims. It gives us back the humility that does not have a face.

The authority of this little film comes from its renunciation. It could have sought to surpass itself with words that leave no remainder. It could have offered examples that make the mind secure in the belief that the stilled body has been honoured by a narrative that places it in order. Instead it has chosen to be a messenger of the smallest range. It carries only the notice that must be carried. It carries the notice that an event cannot be domesticated and that the right form for response is the unpretending act that passes from one hand to another. To be a bearer of so little is to be accused of weakness. But the weakness keeps safe the ungraspable centre of what has been recorded.

There is a sense in which the film is not about the past at all. The past is present here only as the force that refuses to give us the present back. We watch what has happened and are made to feel that happening does not stay put. It spreads into hours that did not cause it and into rooms that could never contain it. That is why those who leave the screening with a plan to discuss the politics of the message often speak too loudly and with too much satisfaction in their conclusions. The right tone is lower. The right conclusion is disgust with conclusions. In that refusal the experience will not be resolved and yet it will not fade. It will remain as the background to minor thought, you might say like a dull weather in the head that keeps one honest.

There are in the film two kinds of distance. There is the distance of geography and time, which is the excuse people often give to themselves for inaction. There is the distance of experience, which is not an excuse but a fact. The first can be crossed by money, by ships, by the coordinated efforts of organisations and by memory. The second cannot be crossed. The film never pretends to cross it. It asks that the first be traversed in the full knowledge that the second will remain. This is not a tragedy. It is what keeps the other as other. When the other is preserved in this way, the act that comes from seeing avoids becoming a project of appropriation. It remains humble, often clumsy, seldom sufficient. In that form it is the only act that answers to what the screen has demanded.

The notion that a piece of propaganda could be gentle will bother those who imagine that persuasion must reduce what it touches. Here persuasion takes the shape of restraint. The persuasion lies in not pushing. It lies in letting what is visible be the instrument of its own effect. That this was arranged by a committee, that it was fitted into evenings that had schedules and hosts and donors, does not undo the fact that the film conducts itself as if it had been asked to speak only once and to do so without flourish. It does not wish to survive itself as an object of admiration. It wishes to disappear into the help it collects. If we remember it, it is because we fail to achieve this wish and perhaps we should fail. To forget would be to imagine that the gesture has been completed. To remember is to know that the slight sense of failure is the safeguard of our attention.

The screen darkens and the noise of the projector goes on as if the images were still there. People do not speak at first because they do not know what it would be to speak. They do not speak because they are listening to the machine surrender its last useless rotations. The operator kills the light and with the same small movement he calls the room back to itself. The call is secular and yet something like a benediction hangs in the air that no one would think to name. Coins are persuasive in such moments precisely because they do not aspire to beauty. They clink and they have weight, and afterwards one carries the absence of them as a pocket unexpectedly light. The lightness is a sign and not a proof. The film has made itself a passing presence and has departed. It has left behind something that will not announce itself and will nevertheless act.

In the end the work has the innocence of an object that knows it is not enough. The honesty is severe because it refuses to be made into a miracle. It asks nothing for itself. It asks only for that which will go beyond it toward those who will never think of the audience that sat and watched. It is right that there should be no memory in the places where help arrives of the rooms where the help was raised. It is right that the film should be forgotten by those who do not need it. For those who watched, forgetting is never complete. A name returns. A corridor under harsh lights returns. A hand that lay on a sheet, neither extended nor clenched, returns. These do not call for tears. They call for the care that can neither boast nor despair, the only care we are equal to when we have looked and found no comfort.