body and soul
by
Douglas Messerli
Nagisa Oshima, Michinori Fukao, Sasaki
Mamoru, and Tamura Takeshi (writers), Nagisa Oshima (director) 絞死刑 Kōshikei (Death by Hanging) / 1968
A few seconds later, after R has been
“hung” and is found to still have a beating heart, the film changes once more,
moving into a work of a series of moral dilemmas as the Warden (Kei Sato), the
Education Chief (Fumio Watanabe), the Doctor (Rokko Toura), the Security Chief
(Masad Adachi), Chaplain (Toshiro Ishido), and Prosecuter (Hosei Komatsu) crowd
around the would-be corpse, arguing what further should be done. While some
argue for an immediate re-
hanging, others
point out that, since the prisoner is now unconscious they may be charged for
killing an outwitting man. The Chaplain, in particular, argues that R is no
longer R, for he has lost his soul, and is, therefore, no longer guilty. “The
prisoner's awareness of his own guilt is what gives execution its moral and
ethical meaning,” he argues.
Finally, as R is revived and it becomes
clear that he is suffering amnesia, one of them determines that in order to
re-hang R they must help him regain his conscience, to discover who he is. It
is here that the work becomes a kind of black comedy in the tradition of
Kafka’s The Trial and other such
works. These men, in a kind of mini-Brechtian drama, begin acting out various
of R’s crimes, his attempted rape of a young Japanese schoolgirl and his murder
of another young woman soon after. If their ridiculous play-acting begins
rather clumsily, they quite soon grow into their roles, absurdly humping one
another, strangling each other—one, in particularly, almost succeeding in
murdering his colleagues—and re-enacting, in general, what Oshima titled his
film of a year earlier, “bawdy” behavior.
Finally, it is only the ghost who begins
to help R understand. He and the ghost talk while all around them the prison
employees begin a drinking bash, which quickly turns into an even darker
bacchanal, as some recount war-time crimes, others revealing smaller sins, and
the drunken Chaplain attempting to sexually molest each of them, madly kissing
and groping his fellow colleagues.
By this time Oshima has brilliantly made
his satirical themes without even needing to further side with any particular
view; and immediately after, R, recognizing his crimes, is summarily hung for a
second time.
Death
by Hanging, restored in DVD and Blu-Ray disks this year by Criterion, is
certainly one of the best Japanese films of the 1960s, a work which uses
theater to its advantage while revealing that film need not resist its roots in
staged works. As Howard Hampton writes in the liner notes to that Criterion
edition, if Oshima is often compared with Godard, “it would be more accurate to
call him the reverse-angle JLG: instead of converting flesh and blood and tragedy
into glamorous abstractions, Oshima’s “renders ideology in skeptical, frank,
and expressed in kitchen-sink terms.” Given his contrarian nature, Oshimia
remains “committed to the human condition,” with all of “its full
kaleidoscopic, unsanitary overabundance.”
If nothing else, Oshima is a filmmaker who
is not afraid to express his anger and rage over political issues, and in that
sense, perhaps, he has a closer kinship to Britain’s angry young men (and women)
of the late 1950s and 1960s. Yet, unlike them, Oshima is seldom a realist,
preferring instead to use all the theatrical tropes available to him; and it
his inclusiveness which help make his films so very different from those of
nearly any other filmmaker of the 60s decade.
Los Angeles,
October 26, 2016
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