Death by Hanging

A Japanese film set in an execution chamber. The film opens with an explanation. A voiceover describes how the chamber works and shows the room. Then the execution is carried out. The prisoner does not die. He lies on the floor, breathing, and remembers nothing. Not who he is, not what he did, not even that he is Korean. The officials are stuck. The law orders hanging until death; but hanging a man who has lost consciousness of himself is also unlawful. From there the film becomes a story of re-enactment. The man has to be reminded who he is. The officials decide to do it. They build his house in the room. They play his family. They act out his poverty, his school and his neighbourhood. Then they act out the crime. The prosecutor plays the victim. The performance breaks down every time. The officials bring their own prejudices onto the stage, and what they act out is not the man but the Korean in their heads. What the narrative is interested in is not execution but identity: its idea is that the state must first fit a person into an identity in order to hang him, and that it produced the identity itself. A woman appears. Who she is stays unclear; perhaps an imagining, perhaps a witness. After that point the narrative stops separating reality from the play. The tone is comic. The officials are inept, they argue, they blame each other, and the more absurd it gets the heavier it becomes. The form is close to Brecht's theatre. There are chapter titles, a narrator, and the audience is addressed directly. The case comes from a real one. The trial of a young Korean man in Japan in the fifties had caused a great argument. The narrative takes direct aim at Japan's view of its Korean minority. Yun Yun-Do, Kei Satō, Fumio Watanabe and Akiko Koyama are in the cast. Nagisa Ōshima directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes political cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the narrative is deliberately artificial and becomes wholly abstract in its last section.