Death By Hanging
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| Death By Hanging (Koshikei) | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Nagisa Oshima |
| Produced by | Masayuki Nakajima Takuji Yamaguchi |
| Written by | Nagisa Oshima Kukao Michinori Mamoru Sasaki Tamura Tsutomu |
| Music by | Hikaru Hayashi |
| Cinematography | Yasuhiro Yoshioka Takeharu Sano |
| Editing by | Keiichi Uraoko |
| Running time | 117 min. |
| Language | Japanese |
| IMDb profile | |
Death By Hanging is a 1968 film directed by Nagisa Oshima, acclaimed for its innovative Brechtian techniques and complex treatments of guilt and consciousness, justice, and the persecution of ethnic Koreans in Japan.
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[edit] Plot Synopsis
Although the complexity of Death By Hanging resists easy narrative description, a general plot can be outlined. A documentary-like opening introduces a death chamber where an execution is about to take place. Inexplicably, the man to be executed, an ethnic Korean known only as R, survives hanging but loses his memory. The officials who witness the hanging debate how to proceed, as the law could be interpreted as forbidding execution of an individual who does not recognize their crime and its punishment. They decide that they must persuade R to accept guilt by reminding him of his crimes. In scenes of absurd and perverse humor, the officials recreate R's first crime, the rape of a young woman. This failing, they attempt to recreate his childhood by way of performing crude racist stereotypes of Koreans held by some Japanese. Exasperated, they resort to visiting the scene of R's other crime at an abandoned high school, but in an overzealous moment of reenactment, an official murders a girl. Back in the death chamber, a woman claiming to be R's "sister" appears one by one to the officials. She tries to convince R that his crimes are justified by Korean nationalism against a Japanese enemy, but after failing to win him over, is herself hung. At a drinking party to celebrate her hanging, the officials reveal their guilt-ridden, violent pasts, oblivious to R and his "sister" laying on the floor amongst them, themselves exploring R's psyche. Finally, R admits to the crimes, but proclaims himself innocent- stating that if the officers execute him, then they are murderers as well. In his second hanging, R's body disappears, leaving an empty noose hanging beneath the gallows.[1]
[edit] Guilt and Consciousness
For all its dark absurdity, Death By Hanging addresses themes of guilt and consciousness, viz a viz state violence, with great gravity. The guiding juxtaposition is of the criminal consciousness with the state's license to commit violence without guilt. If the state has internalized in its formation communal norms of "guilt" and "justice," thereby wielding violence legitimately, it must still prove guilt to transgressors, in the film, the character R. Guilt is culturally learned, but R presents the difficulty of not being aware of guilt or acknowledgement of violating social boundaries in his crimes. Both the assorted officials (legal, scientific, and metaphysic representatives) and his "sister" (representative of nationalism) attempt, but fail to recreate R's consciousness. In fact, their own violent actions (simulated rape, murder, recollection of war crimes) and ignorance explodes the contradiction of violence and guilt- the state that has been sanctioned to kill is constituted by people just as guilty and worthy of punishment as R, the criminal. The implications extend beyond a mere commentary on the death penalty, but pose an open-ended series of questions about the individual and the state, of violence and guilt. Another suggestive interpretation factors in R's Korean ethnicity within this theme. As Koreans were discriminated against and denied legitimacy by Japan, so R denies Japanese state authority. His body's refusal to die becomes an act of resistance against the state and its delineation of justified and unjustified violence.[2] This interpretation resonates with Oshima's long-standing concern with the plight of the Korean minority, and with the painful history of the Japanese occupation of Korea and war-time atrocities.
[edit] A Brechtian Theater of the Absurd
Despite its documentary style, from the start, as voiceover and image give contradictory information, it is clear that Death By Hanging is not a presentation of "reality." This distancing is compounded by the seven intertitles that give an indication of the action about to occur (or in a psychoanalytic interpretation, displacing R as a defined subject.) These techniques have established the film as Oshima's most Brechtian. Other ideas borrowed from Brecht include dark humor, the theme of justice, and an exploration of open-ended, unresolved contradictions. That a death chamber serves as this unlikely theater of the absurd underscores the film's dominant ironic tone. Rich in symbolism and visual allusions, Oshima's mise en scène contains a number of subtle, masterful touches, such as the newspapered walls in the reconstruction of R's youth referencing the intense media scrutiny of Ri Chin'u. Another theatrical element observed by Maureen Turim is the important role of dialogue: "much of the humor and irony is a matter of verbal repartee, presented in exquisite timing and visual framing."[3]
[edit] R, A Korean
The character R in Death By Hanging was based on Ri Chin'u, an ethnic Korean who in 1958 murdered two Japenese school girls. A precocious, talented young man, he not only confessed to his crimes, but wrote about them in great detail; his writings, collected as Crime, Death, and Love became nearly as famous as his crimes and persona. Much of his book consisted of correspondence with Bok Junan, a Korean journalist sympathetic to the communist North.[4] The "sister" character was developed from this relationship, indicating the journalist's Korean nationalist interpretation of Ri's life and experiences. Much of R and the "sister"'s dialogue is taken from this correspondence. Oshima held Ri Chin'u in high regard, despite his crimes. Claiming him to be "the most intelligent and sensitive youth produced by postwar Japan," Oshima thought his prose "ought to be included in high school textbooks." Oshima first wrote a script about him in 1963, but this was not the version that eventually was filmed.[5] Prior to 1968, the idea was conceptually reworked, with Ri Chin'u negated as hero and replaced by R, a Korean subject more open to experimental treatment and analysis. The resulting film is just as much concerned with the domestic repression of Koreans in Japan as with the death penalty, but remains cinematically important because of it's theoretical and conceptual innovations.[6]
[edit] References
- ^ Cameron, Ian. "Nagisa Oshima." In Second Wave England: November Books, 1970. P. 70-80.
- ^ Standish, Isolde. A New History of Japanese Cinema New York: Continuum, 2005. P.244-250.
- ^ Turim, Maureen. The Films of Oshima Nagisa Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. P. 61-81.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Oshima, Nagisa. "About Death By Hanging." P. 166-169 in Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956-1978, ed. Annette Michelson. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.
- ^ Turim, 1998.
