Year: 1968
Country: Japan
Director: Nagisa Ôshima
Cast: Kei Satô, Do-yun Yu, Fumio Watanabe, Hôsei Komatsu
IMDB: Link

Language : Japanese
Subtitles : English, Italian





Death by Hanging, in its continual play with fantasy and the unconscious of representation, conjoins Brechtian and Freudian thought to generate a complex image of racism, repression, and contestatory consciousness.

The premise of Death by Hanging is that a man, sentenced to death, identified only by the letter “R,” is rendered amnesiac through a failed hanging and thus unconscious of his crime. The simple remedy for the Japanese officials would be to rehang the condemned man, but according to at least some interpretations of Japanese law presented in the film, a man who has no memory cannot be legally punished, as he is neither cognizant of his crime nor able to understand its punishment. This creates a situation in which the embarrassed officials assembled must reawaken the conscious knowledge of identity, and thus the past and guilt.

Yet the film does not simply tell the story of this process. Rather, it explores contradictions in it. It is not simply a film against capital punishment, even though that is its seeming point of departure. The film is polyvalent, exploring issues and statements through their logical incompatibilities, especially when these propositions are projected to their “logical” conclusions. The film plays with if-then suppositions juxtaposed to each other in a constant challenge to a stable and conclusive center, or end point. The state’s ability to achieve justice is the question on which these suppositions pivot.

Oshima’s concern with issues of justice and the state are grounded in reference to a “real” incident, even if he addresses them in a mode that defies realism. The script is indeed inspired by an actual incident that occurred in 1958, the murder of two Japanese schoolgirls by a Korean named Ri Chin’u. This murder preoccupied the Japanese press and public. According to Sato, Ri called the newspapers, talked about how the victims had been killed, and gave details of clothing as a tease to the investigation. His taped telephone conversations were broadcast. After his arrest, he wrote a fictional story about the murders for a short story competition. He displayed no regret or wish to reform. Ri corresponded with a female journalist, a pro-Pyongyang Korean, named Bokjunan. San-ichi Shabo press published these letters as a volume entitled Crime, Death and Love. Several writers and filmmakers adapted this story, including an Ishihara Shintaro segment of a compilation film called Love of a Twenty-Year-Old. Given the way the case presented from the outset a perpetrator of a crime whose compulsions included seeking publicity, and given the mythologizing by the media that preceded the work of Oshima and his collaborators, the film flirts with romanticizing criminality, as Adam Knee suggests of this and other Oshima films.

Yet Death by Hanging does not simply present R’s crimes as “political in origin,” though at one point in the film such a statement is made. The film treats the rape not as a political act, per se, but as a displacement, in the psychoanalytic sense. Instead of acting politically and consciously, the oppressed subject acts out a displaced anger and frustration. This negation of the criminal as object of fascination. allows directly ideological questions about justice and judgment, rather than antiheroic identifications. (Maureen Turim)

[ About file ]

Name: Death By Hanging.Nagisa Ôshima.1968.BluRay.SADPANDA.mkv
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2024 16:49:53 +0200
Size: 11,732,559,010 bytes (11189.040194 MiB)

[ Magic ]

File type: Matroska data
File type: EBML file, creator matroska

[ Generic infos ]

Duration: 01:58:12 (7092.085 s)
Container: matroska
Production date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:36:49 +0200
Total tracks: 3
Track nr. 1: video (V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC) {und}
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Muxing library: libebml v1.3.4 + libmatroska v1.4.5
Writing application: mkvmerge v9.3.1 ('Mask Machine') 64bit

[ Relevant data ]

Resolution: 1920 x 1040
Width: multiple of 32
Height: multiple of 16
Average DRF: 29.88468
Standard deviation: 2.232793
Std. dev. weighted mean: 2.171622

[ Video track ]

Codec ID: V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Resolution: 1920 x 1040
Frame aspect ratio: 24:13 = 1.846154 (~1.85:1)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1:1 = 1
Display aspect ratio: 24:13 = 1.846154 (~1.85:1)
Framerate: 23.976024 fps
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Qf: 0.266338

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Weighted prediction: P slices - explicit weighted prediction
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8x8dct: Yes
Total frames: 170,040
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P-slices: 52494 ( 30.872 %) ######
B-slices: 116775 ( 68.675 %) ##############
I-slices: 771 ( 0.453 %)
SP-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)
SI-slices: 0 ( 0.000 %)

[ DRF analysis ]

average DRF: 29.88468
standard deviation: 2.232793
max DRF: 33

DRF<10: 0 ( 0.000 %)
DRF=10: 1 ( 0.001 %)
DRF=11: 2 ( 0.001 %)
DRF=12: 4 ( 0.002 %)
DRF=13: 32 ( 0.019 %)
DRF=14: 65 ( 0.038 %)
DRF=15: 124 ( 0.073 %)
DRF=16: 157 ( 0.092 %)
DRF=17: 387 ( 0.228 %)
DRF=18: 363 ( 0.213 %)
DRF=19: 400 ( 0.235 %)
DRF=20: 202 ( 0.119 %)
DRF=21: 265 ( 0.156 %)
DRF=22: 340 ( 0.200 %)
DRF=23: 635 ( 0.373 %)
DRF=24: 1295 ( 0.762 %)
DRF=25: 2431 ( 1.430 %)
DRF=26: 4763 ( 2.801 %) #
DRF=27: 8156 ( 4.797 %) #
DRF=28: 11419 ( 6.715 %) #
DRF=29: 18240 ( 10.727 %) ##
DRF=30: 35971 ( 21.154 %) ####
DRF=31: 54985 ( 32.337 %) ######
DRF=32: 28351 ( 16.673 %) ###
DRF=33: 1452 ( 0.854 %)
DRF>33: 0 ( 0.000 %)

P-slices average DRF: 29.266792
P-slices std. deviation: 2.437345
P-slices max DRF: 33

B-slices average DRF: 30.185451
B-slices std. deviation: 2.047758
B-slices max DRF: 33

I-slices average DRF: 26.399481
I-slices std. deviation: 2.840087
I-slices max DRF: 32

[ Edition entry ]

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Hidden: No
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Chapters:
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00:33:17,412-00:39:32,912: 00:33:17.412 {eng}
00:39:32,912-00:43:43,120: 00:39:32.912 {eng}
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00:59:31,026-01:04:44,297: 00:59:31.026 {eng}
01:04:44,297-01:06:52,800: 01:04:44.297 {eng}
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01:15:18,556-01:22:51,091: 01:15:18.556 {eng}
01:22:51,091-01:27:02,134: 01:22:51.091 {eng}
01:27:02,134-01:33:41,991: 01:27:02.134 {eng}
01:33:41,991-01:39:56,866: 01:33:41.991 {eng}
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01:45:55,391-01:49:01,368: 01:45:55.391 {eng}
01:49:01,368-01:54:12,054: 01:49:01.368 {eng}
01:54:12,054-01:58:12,085: 01:54:12.054 {eng}

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 29-05-2026 03:01:56