film, eyeballs, brain

Death by Hanging (Koshikei) begins with a question – no, a demand: Are you for or against the abolition of the death penalty? It’s a demand specifically directed at the audience, and the film allows for no fence-sitting. This claustrophobic, angry, powerful black comedy demands to be seen as well. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a movie quite like this.*

Oshima’s answer should be obvious from the start. The narrator (Oshima himself) begins to describe, in clinical and banal fashion, the interior of the execution chamber and its procedure. (“The walls are painted salmon pink.” “The curtains are dark yellow.” “Then he is given cakes and fruit for his last meal.”) He continues to describe the events almost without affect, while all we hear on the soundtrack is the sound of metal handcuffs clinking incessantly due to the blindfolded prisoner’s trembling hands.

The condemned man – with the Kafkaesque name of “R” — is accused of raping and murdering two women. There’s a problem, though: R’s heart is still beating. The prison officials are thrown into a quandary: is it legal to hang him again? Can one execute an unconscious person? Is the doctor obliged to resuscitate him just so that he can be hanged again? The priest is convinced that R’s soul has departed, and therefore the condemned man is “not R” anymore. It’s a sacrilege, the priest cries, to return a soul when it has already left, but the Education Officer argues, “I’m doing this for humanitarian reasons!”

When R eventually regains consciousness, there’s a further twist: he is practically catatonic, and he has lost his memory. If he is not aware of his guilt, or even his own identity, can he still be executed? There seems to be only one solution: to reenact R’s crimes in an attempt to jog his memory, led eagerly by the Education Officer. The ensuing scenes reenacted by the prison officers are part primal regression therapy, part bad improv theater, part Brechtian estrangement. The scenes are constantly interrupted by readings from the court transcript as a basis for the script, or by on-screen directions and injunctions like “Do it more like a Korean! Be more vulgar!” or “Can you cry more like a Korean please?” Like the rest of the film, the scenes are alternately hilarious and horrifying, shifting wildly from lacerating social critique to violent slapstick.

Death by Hanging is richer and more complex than the either/or question posed at the beginning of the film. Born of Korean ancestry in Japan, R is deprived of the rights to Japanese naturalization, and therefore possesses less rights (as both subject and human being) in the eyes of the law. When the amnesiac asks “What is Korean?”, the Education Officer is flummoxed: “What kind of a question is that? If he was a negro or someone with different skin, it would be easier.” His failed attempt to explain how R could be born in Japan and yet “still belong to the old inferior Korean race” highlights the political absurdity that wouldn’t be “resolved” until 1985, after a change in the naturalization laws finally allowed Koreans to be naturalized.

When the officials cast R to play himself in their re-creation of scenes of R’s troubled family life, the film takes on a quietly sorrowful tone. He both begins to recognize R – we learn more about the sad specifics of R’s story, like his father emigrating as indentured labor to work as a miner in Japan — and he also reluctantly steps into the identity that the state is literally trying to impose upon him. “You’re a cruel, brutal animal!” the Education Officer yells at him, and he’s frustrated that R doesn’t remember. (In this family “flashback” sequence – again, all done with apparent fidelity to the court transcripts — the execution chamber walls are covered with newspapers, a crude approximation of the jailers’ stage design and a visual reminder of how they’re literally surrounded by the authority of the text.)

Exactly halfway through, the film slips slowly into dream language: a surreal series of sequences where R is forced to revisit (and relive) the scenes of his crimes (with the police gamely tagging along as R tries to chat up different women), Oshima’s visual penchant for hanging Japanese flags everywhere kicks into fourth gear, bodies rolling into water straight out of Mouchette, the prison bureaucracy getting progressively drunker and out of control at a wake for the not-dead, a woman – visible / invisible, Korean / Japanese, sister / murder victim, alive / dead – in a coffin covered by the Japanese flag appears in the execution chamber. These dichotomies are part of a shifting destabilization of categories all throughout: state-sanctioned death and the individual act of a murderer, R’s sister and the bodies of all Korean women, innocence and culpability, the real and the imaginary, the state and the nation, the nation and the individual, Law and the law, R and not R, this R and all Rs.

I really can’t recommend Oshima’s utterly remarkable Death by Hanging more highly; it’s part of the Oshima retrospective at the PFA, all of ten years in the making, which continues – oh, such good fortune! — all the way into mid-July.

[NOTE: I'm a little loathe to do this, but it looks like it's never been released on DVD or VHS in the U.S., or in the U.K., for that matter (it's not showing up on Amazon.co.uk, at least), and the two hits on Amazon.co.jp look like they have no subtitles, and so some tips: it's available on the gray market (like iOffer), but I can't vouch for the quality of the burns; there's also a decently-seeded torrent found in the usual places; and the whole film seems like it can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube. What I'm hoping for, of course, is a handsome Criterion/Eclipse box set: if Teshigahara, Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse and Imamura have theirs, can Oshima be far behind?]

[EDIT: James Quandt, the retrospective's curator, has an interview with Michael Guillen over at Twitch, and he expects Criterion to release some more on DVD.]

[ANOTHER NOTE: I could just as easily have written on Oshima’s equally brilliant Boy (1969), which screened at the PFA just before Death by Hanging, but I found its bleakness somehow more unbearable. (Indeed, I did a double take while watching the latter, because both Fumio Watanabe and Akiko Koyama are in Boy as well. Watanabe in particular – histrionic prison officer in one, callous father in the other (and mad pirate in 1968's Three Resurrected Drunkards) is excellent.) It shares narrative similarities with A Town of Love and Hope (1959) where a boy is forced by his family to run a scam in order to survive. (They earn their keep by making him run into traffic and pretend to get hit by cars, extorting money from the unknowing driver in the process.) In Boy Oshima is more interested in splitting and reconfiguring the family unit in different combinations to see how they work: Boy and Father, Stepmother and Boy, Boy and his toddler brother Tiny. Also a beautifully-composed portrait of a family on the run – they travel north up Japan until they can go no further – Boy is unforgettable and essential viewing as well.]

*Actually, Death by Hanging’s initial premise is more or less the entirety of Wyatt Garfield and Ed Yonaitis’ 2007 short film, The Execution of Solomon Harris (available for download on iTunes, which is where I saw it), and there’s a similar scene in Stephen King’s awful serial novel, “The Green Mile”.

Popularity: 3%

Possibly related posts:

1. Nagisa Oshima, "Night and Fog in Japan" (1960).
2. Nagisa Oshima, "A Town of Love and Hope" (1959).
3. Paul W.S. Anderson, "Death Race" (2008).