Blu-ray Review: Criterion Tackles the Death Penalty with Nagisa Oshima's DEATH BY HANGING

The Criterion Collection has been good to Japanese provocateur Nagisa Oshima. His celebrated, explicit-sex shocker In The Realm of the Senses (along with its sorta-sequel, Empire of Passion) have seen disc from the company, and Criterion has also released a shotgun blast of his 1960s films via their lower-fi Eclipse series.

Now Oshima's 1968 film, Death By Hanging, joins the collection as spine #798. It's not a title I was familiar with prior to now, but I had a great time familiarizing myself with it in this format, and am surprised there isn't more conversation about this film and its seemingly inexhaustible formal daring. (As the liner notes themselves point out: with Death By Hanging alongside 2001, If..., Once Upon a Time in the West and Rosemary's Baby among others, 1968 was one hell of a year for filmmaking, wasn't it?)

Shot in high-contrast black and white almost entirely in a single, deceptively elaborate set, Death By Hanging pops off the screen on Criterion's blu-ray, as Oshima charts a strange, spiral-shaped course through his story.

The setup is nicely high concept. Tasked with executing a convicted criminal named R, a group of prison officials go about their grisly business right up until the moment when R sort of, uh, fails to die. "R'S BODY REFUSES TO BE EXECUTED," the first of a series of cheekily metaphysical intertitles asserts.

This kicks off an all-points legal quandary, as the prison officials, lawyers, magistrates and witnesses attempt to determine the precise logistics around re-executing someone who has, technically, already been executed. The scenario opens up an odd theological point as well, as the Catholic chaplain asserts that having already received last rites, R's soul has been forgiven and is on its way to heaven - and that from a certain point of view, therefore, R's body is exempt responsibility for the crimes for which R was being put to death in the first place.

As a point of satire, this would be more than enough to make a meal of, but Oshima has barely gotten started. The prison officials begin attempting to revive R's memory of the crimes he has committed (he has post-strangulation amnesia) through increasingly elaborate - and, by necessity, appalling - pantomime and role-play. We learn that R raped and murdered two women; and then watch in gruesome fascination as the other men (lead by an unhinged Education Chief) reenact the details of both rapes, first with reluctance, and then with greater and greater diabolical gusto.

As all this unfolds, we delve into a further layer: R is of Korean descent, a minority culture in Japan. The conversation becomes racially charged and inherently bigoted (instructed to "act more Korean," one of the players immediately mimes whipping out his penis and urinating all over the rest of the group). As the common consensus among the men begins to fracture, we watch this ad-hoc society strenuously attempt to maintain the institutional othering that people like R have had to face in Japanese society. Poverty and crime are linked, as are R's displacement from "proper" society" and his dissociative fantasies of achieving something like a normal life.

It's an uncommonly rich broth of ideas. By the third act, furthermore, the rules of what you or I would call "reality" have been firmly... well, if not thrown out altogether, at least thoroughly questioned.

The film clips along as questions of class, race, gender and citizenship double back on themselves over and over again. State-sanctioned murder - capital punishment and war - are consciously linked, monetized, and gendered.

It's an eerily relatable piece of filmmaking in 2016, revolving as it does around how wealth disparity and criminalization work together to enforce social rules, all set against a painfully contemporary question of immigration and assimilation whose argument has, sadly, only strengthened with time.

While Criterion's audio-visual presentation of Death By Hanging is excellent, I have to point out that the supplemental content is surprisingly thin this time around. The most interesting extra on the disc is a 25-minute documentary film by Oshima called Diary of Yunbogi, which also deals with the Korean immigration question, through first-person narration and a series of still photographs taken by the director himself.

There's also a half-hour interview with Asian cinema critic Tony Rayns, who does a good job of positioning Death By Hanging amidst the haphazard independent entries in the director's 1960s output. You'll be digging out your Eclipse box set of Oshima's Outlaw Sixties as soon as you put Death By Hanging on the shelf, to follow his inquiry into anti-Korean racism into Three Resurrected Drunkards and Sing a Song of Sex.

Additionally, at this point I think it's time to say farewell to the Criterion Collection's printed insert booklet. They seem to have moved permanently to single-page fold-outs, which still puts them ahead of every other DVD racket in the market, who have abandoned liner notes altogether; but still feels a bit cheap and awkward, even if you're only likely to read the essays once. Nonetheless, Howard Hampton's piece here - along with Oshima's own director's statement from 1968 - is well worth a look.