Death by Hanging (1968)
Nagisa Oshima was a prominent director of the Japanese New Wave, and his film Death By Hanging (1968) is a lacerating satire about the absurdity of the death penalty. Oshima has no interest in asking you to identify with his main character R, but instead, wants to use his art form to express argument. We’ve seen a number of films throughout the semester that are interested in emotion, but Oshima’s film is far more concerned with its ideas. It wants to convince you of something—it is an act of persuasive cinema. As a result, its technique and approach is very different from empathic, classical filmmaking. We’ll walk through exactly what Oshima is up to in this challenging, confrontational film.
Brecht
While Death By Hanging is not realistic, it is not quite accurate to call it expressionistic, either. Oshima is up to something else entirely. In crafting this story about R (Do-yun Yu), who improbably survives his own execution, the filmmaker is drawing upon the approach of German theorist and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who advocated for a very different method of constructing drama. Beginning his work in the 1920s in Germany (the Weimar Republic era between the wars), Brecht believed that drama was too reliant on creating emotional identification between characters and the audience. For Brecht, emotional attachment to characters’ psychological journeys prevented dramatic texts from truly reaching intellectual heights. He wanted his work to make arguments about social and political issues, mostly from a Marxist perspective. In order to achieve this goal, Brecht devised an approach that he would refer to as “epic theatre,” which would generally reject emotional identification in favor of other methods.
Once he established the theory, Brecht needed to figure out how to put it into practice. He directed actors to say their lines as if they weren’t really acting, but speaking as though their lines had “quotes” around them. Actors are trained to rely on the empathy of audiences, and in order to achieve Brecht’s desired performances, they had to think of their characters less as people and more as representations of ideas. In Death By Hanging, Oshima achieves this through naming the central character R: he has no name, but is identifiable by a letter. Likewise, the Japanese officials are known only by their role (warden, education minister, etc.) rather than their names. They aren’t really people – they’re constructs meant to illustrate Oshima’s larger critique of the absurdity of the death penalty. In forcing R to reenact his crimes, the officials separate the crime from its victims, making criminal activity a literal performance. This strategy stands in distinction to another strategy that might have been available to Oshima, which would be to show a flashback of R’s crime. A flashback like that might have created an emotional response to R, whether it be empathy for his victim and disgust for him, or even understanding of how he acted in the moment. Because the crime itself remains vague, we dissociate from it.
This is a core Brechtian idea. Many of his principles can be summed up in one lengthy German word: verfremdungseffekt. Loosely translated, it means “alienation effect,” which is how Brecht wanted to deconstruct the conventions of drama that comforted audiences, leaving behind a sense of unease, discomfort, and distancing. Most narratives draw audiences in through emotion, but Brecht wanted to disrupt the self-contained world of stories by calling attention to the fact that they were stories. He routinely achieved this through formal choices: in the theatre, he used projectors to show artificial backgrounds or shine words on the wall; he asked the actors to wear strange makeup that made them look inhuman; he routinely included disruptive music where it did not seem to belong; he also wrote monologues for actors during which they broke the fourth wall and addressed the audience directly. Each of these devices was designed to draw attention to artifice; he was not interested in the slightest in depicting reality. He was not quite trying to achieve a unified vision of expressionism, either, though. Brecht would adopt and discard devices at will, so long as they suited his intellectual purpose and served the general principles upon which he built “epic theatre.”
Oshima relies heavily on unconventional formal devices to achieve the Brechtian distancing effect. He wants to push audiences away. In the earlygoing, the cold, informative, documentary style builds a wall between the spectator and R, preventing emotional identification. Oshima has no interest in asking the spectator to identify with or express sympathy for a man on death row; instead, he is attempting to draw attention to the absurdity of the death penalty as policy. After R survives the execution, the increasing desperation of the public officials makes the entire idea of putting anyone to death seem ridiculous.
Argument
A number of filmmakers have used Brecht's techniques of alienation to make arguments about their contemporary context. One such filmmaker is the influential French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, who spent a good portion of his career deconstructing film form in order to highlight cultural, societal, and political contradictions.
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At left, watch this extended clip from Godard's 1967 film Weekend. Ostensibly, its story is about a couple, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc), who travel by car from Paris to the country to attend the reading of Roland's mother's will. The film is not so conventional as that narrative description would imply, as the clip demonstrates. In it, Godard tracks to the right in an unbroken take as he follows Roland and Corinne in their black car through a traffic jam. The soundtrack is dominated by motorists' angry shouting and an endless cacophony of honking horns. The line of cars stretches on into seeming infinity, and Godard escalates the absurdity as it moves forward. Watch all the way to the end.
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Godard delays the revelation of the cause of the traffic jam, and for a while, it seems as though the gridlock has no real cause. One car, ridiculously, is turned backwards. Another group of stranded drivers play chess on the ground. The midpoint revelation of a wreck seems like it provides an answer, but ultimately the line continues. When Roland and Corinne finally reach the end, and the bloody victims of a terrible accident are revealed strewn about the highway, the film does not change its tone. The shouting and the horns continue, and so does Roland and Corinne's annoyance. The entire scene demonstrates a Brechtian approach in action. First, you become aware of the duration of the shot a few moments in. You stop empathizing with Roland and Corinne, experiencing emotional numbness as the traffic jam continues on. Eventually, when the resolution is offered and the cause of the traffic is revealed, you feel no sense of relief. The scene asks you not to empathize with anyone in traffic, not even to feel for the victims (who remain in wide shot), but instead to think about the gap between the bloody accident and the characters' indifference to the dead.
Oshima
Throughout his career, Nagisa Oshima created a cinema of provocation, deliberately pushing boundaries and confronting audiences with cultural taboos. For example, one of his most famous films is In The Realm of the Senses (1976), a sexually explicit movie about a passionate affair between a man and a woman that culminates in the woman severing her lover’s penis after she strangles him to death. Like the French New Wave’s Jean-Luc Godard, whose movie Weekend I offered a clip from above, Oshima made radical experiments in both narrative and form, mostly from a politically charged vantage point. Films like In The Realm of the Senses were designed to attack audiences’ complacency; by depicting sexually explicit material in an ostensibly non-pornographic art film, Oshima attempted to collapse the critically drawn boundaries between high and low mediums. Author Maureen Turim offers a useful comparison between Oshima and Godard, one that was invited by Oshima’s home studio, Shochiku: “Once their film careers were both underway in the early sixties, Shochiku marketed Oshima as the ‘Japanese Godard,’ a phrase that continues even today in reviews and advertisements for revivals of Oshima’s films. Certainly throughout the sixties and particularly at the point Oshima comes to Cannes and Paris, the filmmakers are engaged in a kind of filmic dialogue, perhaps between themselves, but certainly in the minds of critics and audiences.”
Oshima’s tendency towards politically provocative material and formal experimentation stretched across his work, but Death By Hanging shows him turning his focus on the death penalty and Japanese society from a Brechtian standpoint. Turim offers useful comparisons between Oshima and Brecht, as well: “Oshima’s reactions against both commercial film and the left’s naturalist melodrama parallel Brecht’s critique of the emotional appeals of identification in the theater and the commercial imperatives of the film industry, but how much is a parallel and how much conscious, concerted theoretical application at this point cannot be decided, nor is it all that germane. The point is that one process, the attack on melodrama, overlaps with the other, a search for theoretical techniques of cinematic transformations, and the films and writings at various points mark this trajectory. One can certainly term later Oshima films, particularly Death By Hanging […] Brechtian, particularly close to Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany in aspects of structuration, including its use of written intertitles and a segmented narrative modeled as a ‘learning play.’” As we discussed above, Brecht was hostile to emotional identification in theatre, and believed that a more confrontational, alienating approach would detach audiences from their tendency to empathize with characters, freeing them up to consider the contradictions of their own society from an intellectual vantage point. Oshima shows this tendency in Death By Hanging, which restricts our identification with the central character and uses a number of Brechtian techniques in a cinematic context.
According to Turim, Death By Hanging “is Oshima’s most Brechtian film, the embodiment of the blending of Brecht with elements specific to Japanese theater. […] Not only is Death By Hanging a strategic readjustment of Brechtian devices of distanciation to cinematic form, it invites specific comparison in its treatment of the hanging to that at the end of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928).” In the theatre, Brecht advised distancing devices that pushed the audience away from identification and towards intellectualization. As the chart above demonstrates, Brecht favored “reason,” “argument,” and work that turns the narrative into a mirror that the spectator looks into: “he is made to face something.”
How does it work in cinema? Watch the video commentary at right from Death By Hanging, in which I explore how Oshima applies a Brechtian approach through cinematic style, performances by the actors, and staging.
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The purpose of Death By Hanging is primarily political, and Brecht is the most useful framework for viewing Oshima’s work in this particular case. However, throughout his films, Oshima draws on other sources as well, never losing sight of what he thought was the political impact of cinema. According to Maureen Turim, “Oshima has performed acts of borrowing that we now associate with postmodernism, the piling together of fragments of thoughts and sources to reshape ideas and create stories. His aim is often to shape history, for more than most filmmakers, Oshima saw film as an activist intervention in a global culture.”
Postmodernism is something we’ll return to a bit further in our final film selections of the semester, but it is also an idea we have briefly confronted before, even if we didn’t spend a ton of time on it, in the context of Andrew Domink’s The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007). Essentially, postmodernism refers to the tendency of artists working in later artistic traditions to build their work out of pieces of other works that have come before. Death By Hanging is drawing upon Brechtian theory and a Godardian approach to its particular political issue, but he borrows from other sources as well. According to Turim, he takes from Freud, writer Franz Kafka, and other works: “Death By Hanging shares many qualities with works of the theater of the absurd. It uses laughter to the philosophical ends sought by absurdist comedy, extending the verbal and situational ironies of Brechtian theater and Kafka into a more slapstick humor of absurd actions, amplified by repetitions. What emerges is a truly unique film, whose use of cinematic expression astounds at each turn, as it blends work on distanciation with an appreciation and exploration of the unconscious not often directly found in Brecht, though sometimes implied in Brecht’s depiction of raging jealousies and greed. Death By Hanging, in its continual play with fantasy and the unconsciousness of representation, conjoins Brechtian and Freudian thought to generate a complex image of racism, repression, and contestatory consciousness.” Oshima is a borrower—we’ll see more examples of this kind of borrowing as we move forward.
Does this kind of borrowing negatively impact the film? You might just as easily ask that question about the film’s political content. Brecht’s approach denies the audience the opportunity to engage emotionally with the material, which also runs the risk of forcing them to detach from the experience entirely. The kind of alienation Brecht fosters may eventually push the audience away from the story without any kind of meaningful idea at all. However, some filmmakers have continued to work in the Brechtian tradition even today, including some we have studied. There is a strong argument to be made that both Spike Lee and Kelly Reichardt use cinematic style to create these kinds of narrative ruptures; certainly both He Got Game (1998) and Meek’s Cutoff (2010) see their narratives politically, and use style to reflect those political arguments. The ball sailing through time and space at the end of Lee’s film or the use of radically restricted point of view in Reichardt’s could both be seen through Brechtian eyes. Though examples like Death By Hanging are extreme in their reliance on Brechtian techniques, many filmmakers, including Lee and Reichardt, occasionally make use of them in less overt ways.