Movie Liberation Front Film Review: Death by Hanging

Death by Hanging
Director: Oshima Nagisa
(Art Theatre Guild, 1968)

The Modern Pea Pod is proud to announce the arrival of a new, semi-regular series: The Movie Liberation Front (MLF). MLF reviews will seek out the best of obscure cinema (either not readily available in the US in any format or only available on VHS), praise its merits, and ask why in the hell it isn't on DVD. Today, the Movie Liberation Front commences operations with a classic of 1960s Japanese independent cinema by In the Realm of the Senses director Oshima Nagisa. Death by Hanging is all at once a rabble-rousing indictment of the death penalty, a cry of outrage against the second-class citizenship of Korean nationals in Japan, a darkly comic one-fingered salute to authority, and a multi-layered parody of contemporary film and politics. It's also a great movie. So why the hell isn't it on DVD?

"The thing to do now is to get rid of the illusion that Japanese film exists, as quickly as possible," Oshima Nagisa wrote in his 1992 essay "Perspectives on the Japanese Film." "There is no such thing as a popular Japanese film. Only individual films exist." At the time of his writing, the Japanese cinema addressed by Oshima had been in "decline" for nearly half a century, bouyed up only by a vibrant indie scene featuring such directors as Itami Juzo (Tampopo) and Yanagimachi Mitsuo (Himatsuri). But he may as well have been talking about Japan's film industry at the time of Death by Hanging. Kurosawa, having suffered a nervous breakdown, was virtually blacklisted in his home country, only able to crank out another film with overseas funding every five years or so. Ozu was four years dead; the Shochiku New Wave, splintered. Japan's studio system was left to depend largely on genre pictures - yakuza movies, samurai action - and the softcore "pink film." It wasn't that there was a shortage of good films. Even within the the B-movie industry, up-and-coming filmmakers were finding a fertile ground for often exciting experiments with style; the avant garde, as well, flourished. But this was a time - maybe the first - when Oshima's words were quite literally true. There was no monolithic "Japanese film." Only individual films existed.

Article Author: Modern Pea Pod

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