Quote:
"[The footage in The Mask of Nippon] of Japanese soldiers brutalizing a crowd of Chinese civilians [...] was the most atrocity-filled war footage ever shown to Canadians. The crowd scene, the burying alive of prisoners, the woman, and the bayoneted child were in fact staged, taken from a Chinese-made propaganda film and inserted as actuality footage along with segments of the Magee film [John Magee's footage from the Nanking Atrocity]. Mixing black (staged) and white (authentic) propaganda was allowable if the result articulated the true larger picture. The narration made reference neither to Nanking nor to the provenance of the footage. The evocative impact of soldiers bayoneting the child remained indelible as audiences would have absorbed the whole as 'authentic'. A number of stills from the staged sequences continue today to be used, (probably unknowingly), as actuality photographs from Nanking."
-- Gary Evans

Source:
Evans, Gary. "The Nanking Atrocity: Still and Moving Images 1937-1944." Media and Communication 2, no. 2 (2014). (p. 68)