Director: Nagisa Oshima
MPAA Rating: NR
Run Time: 117 Minutes
Purchase: Amazon
The release of Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968) – on Blu-ray/DVD and Hulu Plus – marks the fourth installment of Oshima’s oeuvre to the Criterion Collection, the first of his work from the sixties (excluding the Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties box-set, which includes five films from that time period). In the chronology of his filmography Death by Hanging slots in between Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967) and Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968), while also being his second feature-length to focus and explore the tenuous relations between the Japanese and the Koreans. That’s a total of 9 feature films that have been released under the Criterion umbrella, not to mention the seven other films available by Criterion on Hulu Plus.
Writings included in the jacket include a piece that originally appeared in the 1968 installment of the multivolume The Works of Nagisa Oshima written by Oshima himself, a handful of paragraphs outlining the genesis of the film, his thoughts on the real-life criminal Chin-u Ri and the letters he wrote from prison that prompted Oshima to center a film around Ri in order to explore “the Korean problem”, as well as expressing “deep gratitude” to a number of the film’s participants.
The other essay included happens to be from Howard Hampton, titled Hanging By A Thread, a wonderful read of exemplary writing. The kind of writing that one paragraph deep into, the proposition of viewing the film being discussed becomes increasingly overwhelming to the point that consumption of the text needs to be paused in order to commence said viewing.
As for the supplements that accompany the film on the Blu-ray, they remain rather slight in volume. Only two substantial extras find their way onto an ancillary occupancy – an experimental documentary from 1965 titled Diary of Yunbogi and Challenging Consensus: Tony Rayns on Death by Hanging, an interview conducted in 2015.
Diary of Yunbogi, the short experimental documentary, runs 24 minutes and provides an excellent precursor to Death by Hanging; produced in 1965, it is an earlier exploration of Japanese-Korean relations using still photography that Oshima, himself, captured while visiting the country, employing these photographs in a procession accompanied with voiceover narration recounting the impoverished nature of a ten year boy in Daegu, South Korea. A heartbreaking slideshow that paints a portrait of post-war Korea – specifically the young children that reside within, lives of peddling gum, selling papers and evading arrest and reformatory schools; creating a framework of context beneficial towards the three features that examine the relations between the Japanese and Koreans that follow.
While Diary of Yunbogi plays an excellent viewing experience before the film, the interview conducted with film critic Tony Rayns, on the other hand, should be considered after viewing the film itself. Within the 30 minute runtime of the interview Rayns discusses the film at-length (after a bit of introductory dialogue, a sort of biographical breakdown of the director, his life and schooling), breaking down and interpreting various scenes in a standard, ho-hum talking head style presentation; the monotony of which is broken up throughout by interspersing stills and scene playbacks. Even though Rayns lacks a bit of excitement and/or verve to his discussions they do remain carefully thought out and intellectually stimulating due to his insightfulness. Consider Rayns’ thoughtful examination a digestif to Diary of Yunbogi’s apertif, permitting yourself the opportunity of forming your own readings and interpretations of Death by Hanging before opening yourself to the influence of Rayns.
