Death by Hanging
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| Directed by | Nagisa Oshima |
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| Music by | Hikaru Hayashi |
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| Edited by | Keiichi Uraoka |
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117 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Death by Hanging (絞死刑 Kōshikei?) is a 1968 Japanese film directed by Nagisa Oshima, starring Do-yun Yu. It was acclaimed for its innovative Brechtian techniques and complex treatments of guilt and consciousness, justice, and the persecution of ethnic Koreans in Japan.
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 – at this point the film moves into a highly theatricalized film-within-a-film structure.
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 hanged. At a drinking party to celebrate her hanging, the officials reveal their guilt-ridden, violent pasts, oblivious to R and his "sister" lying on the floor amongst them, themselves exploring R's psyche. The prosecutor invites R to leave a free man, but when he opens the door, he is driven back by an intense burst of light from outside, symbolizing the fact that as a Korean he will never be accepted by Japanese society. 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.
The character R in Death by Hanging was based on Ri Chin'u, an ethnic Korean who in 1958 murdered two Japanese 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. 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. 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 its theoretical and conceptual innovations.
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