Death by Hanging

Director: Nagisa Ôshima, Nagisa Oshima

1968 / 118min / 35mm

Condemned to execution, the protagonist of Oshima’s blackly comic Brechtian farce—an ethnic Korean student who’s referred to, in Kafkaesque fashion, only as “R.”—inexplicably survives his trip to the gallows, but loses his memory in the process, creating a sticky situation for the panel of officials (headed by renegade filmmaker Masao Adachi) overseeing the hanging, who determine that R. must remember and accept guilt for his violent crimes before punishment can proceed, a process to be pursued by forcing him to participate in a series of increasingly outlandish re-enactments of his past life intended to aide in reconstructing his identity. An acerbic, envelope-pushing commentary on ingrained racism and state violence in postwar Japan.