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A Korean man is sentenced to death by hanging, but he survives the execution. For the following two hours, his executioners try to work out how to handle the situation in this black farce. (NR. 118 min.)
(TBD)
Japanese New Wave series @ The Moxie
Free for Members
Genius provocateur Nagisa Oshima, an influential figure in the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, made one of his most startling political statements with the compelling pitch-black satire Death by Hanging. In this macabre farce, a Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next. At once disturbing and oddly amusing, Oshima’s constantly surprising film is a subversive and surreal indictment of both capital punishment and the treatment of Korean immigrants in his country. [Janus]
Starring: Kei Satô, Do-yun Yu, Fumio Watanabe
Director: Nagisa Ôshima
Language: Japanese
Genre: Drama, Crime, Comedy
"A true classic."
— Panos Kotzathanasis, Asian Movie Pulse
"One of the supreme achievements by this great provocateur of Japanese cinema."
— Ben Sachs, Cine-File
"Morbidly amusing, Death by Hanging features many of Oshima's signature flourishes, and is a fascinating mixture of social issue drama and surreal black comedy."
— Nicholas Bell, IONCINEMA.com
"Death by Hanging is an ingeniously conceived, subversive, provocative, and elegantly modulated tragicomedy on intolerance, assimilation, and capital punishment."
— Acquarllo, Strictly Film School
"One of Nagisa Oshima's very best... The inventive staging is not merely dazzling but purposeful... The results are Brechtian in the best sense: entertaining, instructive, gripping, mind-boggling, often humorous, and very much alive."
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Reader
"A thought experiment that's a radical critique of both the justice system and Japanese xenophobia, Oshima's existential farce was his first film for the critic-guided Art Theatre Guild. It was a breakthrough for the director internationally, and its trip through the noose and the looking-glass remains coruscatingly brilliant."
— Nicolas Rapold, Film Comment
"Death by Hanging, simultaneously insouciant and claustrophobic, was a cinema-of-the-absurd milestone and ferocious entertainment on a par with The Exterminating Angel, Dr. Strangelove, Shock Corridor, and Weekend... Outburst for mordant outburst, scene for remorselessly obscene scene, minute by unpredictable minute, I'd rate it the most invigorating movie of what was a pretty interesting year for cinema."
— Howard Hampton, Criterion
