Death by Hanging
Director: Oshima Nagisa
(Art Theatre Guild, 1968)

The Modern Pea Pod is proud to announce the arrival of a new, semi-regular series: The Movie Liberation Front (MLF). MLF reviews will seek out the best of obscure cinema (either not readily available in the US in any format or only available on VHS), praise its merits, and ask why in the hell it isn’t on DVD. Today, the Movie Liberation Front commences operations with a classic of 1960s Japanese independent cinema by In the Realm of the Senses director Oshima Nagisa. Death by Hanging is all at once a rabble-rousing indictment of the death penalty, a cry of outrage against the second-class citizenship of Korean nationals in Japan, a darkly comic one-fingered salute to authority, and a multi-layered parody of contemporary film and politics. It’s also a great movie. So why the hell isn’t it on DVD?

“The thing to do now is to get rid of the illusion that Japanese film exists, as quickly as possible,” Oshima Nagisa wrote in his 1992 essay “Perspectives on the Japanese Film.” “There is no such thing as a popular Japanese film. Only individual films exist.” At the time of his writing, the Japanese cinema addressed by Oshima had been in “decline” for nearly half a century, bouyed up only by a vibrant indie scene featuring such directors as Itami Juzo (Tampopo) and Yanagimachi Mitsuo (Himatsuri). But he may as well have been talking about Japan’s film industry at the time of Death by Hanging. Kurosawa, having suffered a nervous breakdown, was virtually blacklisted in his home country, only able to crank out another film with overseas funding every five years or so. Ozu was four years dead; the Shochiku New Wave, splintered. Japan’s studio system was left to depend largely on genre pictures – yakuza movies, samurai action – and the softcore “pink film.” It wasn’t that there was a shortage of good films. Even within the the B-movie industry, up-and-coming filmmakers were finding a fertile ground for often exciting experiments with style; the avant garde, as well, flourished. But this was a time – maybe the first – when Oshima’s words were quite literally true. There was no monolithic “Japanese film.” Only individual films existed.

Death by Hanging is nothing if not an “individual film.” On every level, it defies easy description. It is experimental, but its narrative is engrossing. It addresses serious political issues, but it is often manic in its hilarity. It views its subject matter with a strictly documentarian (or propagandistic) eye one moment, only to cross the line into pure surrealism the next. Even the “message,” as it were, remains ambiguous at the best – by the time the movie comes to its conclusion, we’ve been presented with so many disjointed images, conflicting ideologies and meta-narratives, we don’t even know what (or who) to believe anymore. But that’s probably the point: Death by Hanging is about asking questions, not getting answers.

Oshima begins his film, in fact, with a question: “Have you ever seen an execution?” Then, he shows us one. Straightforward as that. The condemned – a convicted rapist/murderer known only as “R” – steps forward to the noose, flanked by uniformed police, his hands shaking and rattling the cuffs. He is blindfolded. The trap door gives way, and the hanging is completed…only something goes wrong. R does not die. Worse than that, he refuses to acknowledge his guilt, or even his identity. Faced with a moral dilemma – what is the purpose of capital punishment if it doesn’t make a criminal regret his crime? – R’s captors set about trying to convince him of his guilt, through an increasingly farcical series of means…even to the point of recommitting the murder. It’s an ingenious way to attack what could have been a ham-fisted protest movie; not just a screed against capital punishment, Hanging paints a captivating, darkly comic portrait of authority driving itself mad.

Never one to content himself with a single mood, Oshima also manages to blend in Kafkaesque dark humor and alienation, Brechtian theatre of the absurd, Messiah imagery, even full-blown satire of Hollywood melodrama – a sequence where the police “reenact” R’s imaginary and heinously stereotyped Korean Japanese upbringing is both hilarious and an effective comment on universal prejudice – all without ever losing grip of the fascinating examination of identity which is at the heart of the film. So maybe it gets a little confusing at the end, and the introduction of an incestuous, radical invective-spouting “sister” character might be too much for some (my take is she’s a none-too-subtle stab at the traditionally Leftist politics Oshima had left behind). Hanging’s refusal to give straight answers, too, may be alienating at first – especially when we’re dealing with charged issues like rape, oppression and the corruption of the judicial system. But take this movie for the wild, disorienting trip it is, and its status as an underground masterpiece is more than justified.

Simply put, Death by Hanging is a great film: powerful, radical and utterly unique. Even in Oshima’s forty-year body of work, there’s nothing quite like it. Is it a “Japanese film?” It certainly deals with Japanese issues; but those same issues could be applied just as easily to any place…or time. Rather, this is a prime example of truly independent cinema – independent of country, independent of decade, independent of any particular codes or conventions. And if it takes an industry crisis to produce cinema this startling…well, all I have to say is burn, Hollywood, burn.

Read Japanese? Buy a Region 2, unsubtitled DVD at YesAsia.

Reviewed by Zach Hoskins