Death by Hanging - Radical Japan: Cinema and State - Nine Films by Nagisa Oshima Part 2

The second film in Radiance’s Nagisa Oshima boxset, Death by Hanging (1968), is the one that I almost bought recently for an inflated price - the old Yume Pictures DVD release (who had released a series of Oshima’s movies, as they had Suzuki’s and some of Akira Kurosawa’s more ignored work like Scandal and The Quiet Duel). A bullet dodged in the end, as not long after I decided against splashing such cash it was announced as part of Radiance’s boxset, as well as being the also the second film chronologically.  

Yes indeed. I’m doing the chronological approach. Originality was never my strong suit.  

R (Do-yun Yu) is led to the gallows. R is hanged. Only R’s body refuses to die. If R is not dead then can he be rehung? Perhaps R can be, if R can be made to admit he is R, and to his crimes once more. 

Death by Hanging is a film that covers a lot of ground, starting off in documentary fashion, describing statistics for public opinion on the death penalty before moving into a description of the space where, and how, an execution takes place, which is done with a chillingly clinical detachment. It covers racism and imperialism – R is Korean, and racial stereotypes are described frequently as are the crimes of the Japanese against Korea – and anti-death penalty sentiment. There are aspects of anti-war sentiment: what’s the difference between killing in war vs executing prisoners? 

It’s a film of absurdism, too. Though it opens in a tone, while not solemn, clearly sets out its stall in terms of its point of view. The film and Oshima as the director and co-writer wants you to know where he stands. The way in which they move about the building to where prisoners are hanged is managed with a calm descriptiveness, even down to the dimensions of the rooms. Why? Because we are going to be spending a lot of time here. 

From here we move into something far more subjective. R is hanged but his body refuses to die – his heart has not stopped beating - but surely they can hang him again? Oh no! All the various individuals: the warden, the chaplain, the doctor, you name them, each one explains why the rules won’t allow it in a moment of beautifully executed bureaucratic absurdism – almost everyone there knows of a reason why it would be illegal, or unethical, to kill him again without R returning to his right mind, and thus those august figures there to watch the execution, this death by hanging, must recreate R’s crimes to help him recall his life and his two crimes of murderous rape. R must face his guilt or else he cannot be killed; after all, if he cannot remember his life as R, is R even the same person that killed two women? 

And so starts the absurdism proper, as the prison staff start to describe and enact his crimes. The Education Chief (Fumio Watanabe) – no one has names here, only titles – may straddle one of his peers, pretending to rape and murder them in the hope that R will admit that he recognises his crimes and will admit to them so that he can be hung again. The Education Chief, talking about how jiggling arses seen leaving a station should cause R to be overcome with sexual, murderous desire, is treated by the characters very seriously if not by the film. Each official becomes rapist, murderer and victim, and there are moments that are genuinely funny, not that the situation is one of overt humour but because of how, as a viewer, you need an outlet for what you are seeing. The staff desperately try and tell R of his crimes and attempt to recreate them in the small space, often watched over by the audience of The Prosecutor and other dignitaries. It may be me, but it’s noticeable that the moment when R’s Japanese name is noted it feels like it has a similarity to Joseph K, the protagonist in Kafka’s The Trial. There’s something of The Trial’s absurdity to Death by Hanging and also of its bureaucracy. 

For all of this, Death by Hanging is not a perfect film and much of the messaging is set out within the opening 50-minutes as those responsible for the hanging all try and recreate R’s crimes to make him remember then morphs into something else. We suddenly move into R’s home, the walls of the hanging space are plastered with newspapers; we see his life acted out before him (some prison staff acting as his sisters even have bows in their hair) and the prison staff's racism becomes apparent as they complain how their compatriots are not behaving as they would expect of a stereotypical Korean. (Arguably, it’s the equivalent of 1930s black characters in Hollywood.) This occurs against the backdrop of the Education Chief trying to explain to R why he is different - why a Korean born in Japan is different to a Japanese person born in Japan. He fails. Everyone that intervenes fails. There is a theme of nations being meaningless, often except to try and exclude and not include (something I wholeheartedly agree with). 

Then the film moves outside, enacting the crime by the hand of the Education Chief and it stalls for a while. I’d argue it tries too hard to get its point across and surprisingly is better when in the limited arena of the small building built to kill prisoners. The more intimate the film the more effective it is. The film tries too hard to make too many points - while many hit home, there were moments where I struggled to fully understand what the film was trying to say. The second half of the film isn't as successful as the first in terms of messaging. Returning to the moment where the Education Chief or anyone else being able to describe why R, a Japanese born Korean, is less of a person than a Japanese born Japanese citizen, it’s a short but  effective scene that needs no explanation or extrapolation. It says everything that it needs to so efficiently and beautifully that anything else is just treading water. 

There are also times where the film seems to repeat itself, possibly due to experimenting with its own form, but a good twenty or thirty minutes could easily be cut. You can see how the film would have grabbed attention outside Japan and, like the first film in the set (The Catch), is scathing on some aspects of Japanese society. Once it starts trying to be clever, the focus is lost - essentially what we need to know is whether the R that exists after the failed hanging is the same person as they were before, or a new soul in the old body. 

Yes, there is a lot to admire here but also a lot that makes you wish that Oshima could have restrained some of his more abstract sensibilities and created a more focused film.  

That said I think that the film is in part a product of its time, a product of experimentation, and so when first released may have been much more effective. Looking at it today, it seems to be a film that was constantly distracted by bending the rules of cinema. Yet it’s never dull and, at its absurdist best takes, apart racism, imperialism and capital punishment with ease.