Death by Hanging (Oshima, 1968): ICA Cinema, 4pm
This film, which is also screened on August 5th, is part of the Nagisa Oshima season at the ICA Cinema. You can find the full details here.Chicago Reader review:
One of Nagisa Oshima’s very best, this Japanese feature from 1968 is
concerned with the death penalty and the public’s understanding of a
rape and murder committed by a Korean youth. The inventive staging is
not merely dazzling but purposeful: a group of Japanese officials
discovers, through a fantasy conceit, that the Korean prisoner refuses
to die because the issues of his crime and his punishments aren’t
understood, and the film works through a series of imaginative
reconstructions of the events leading up to the rape and murder. (The
issue of Japanese persecution of Koreans is also pertinent to the
proceedings.) The results are Brechtian in the best sense: entertaining,
instructive, gripping, mind-boggling, often humorous, and very much
alive.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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