Avis des critiques

Oshima's Brechtian dramaturgy heightens the inherently ludicrous nature of the proceedings, as does the inexplicable resurrection of a dead woman who may or may not be R's sister. Altogether it amounts to one of the most bitingly political and surrealistic send-ups of capital punishment and capital obstinacy ever conceived. But, importantly, the lunacy never hamstrings the critique; rather, it potently distills and reframes the absurdity of much of what we accept at face value.

Ultimately devolving into a sodden drinking party, "Death by Hanging" is by no means perfect. The movie's first half has a conceptual lucidity that is later clouded over with ambivalence. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine a comparable American movie — Mr. Oshima's essay on race and crime would not only be provocative but also topical.

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.

If Oshima sees the death penalty in general as wrong, his understanding of the disproportionality of it truly rages at Japanese hypocrisy... Near the end of the film, which is otherwise shot in neutral grays, R walks past a Japanese flag on the wall rendered in high contrast, framing it as a blazing, white void pockmarked by a black hole. It is an obliterative image, one that uses the symbol of a nation to consume it whole, and it summarizes the film's rage and disgust better than any speech.

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.

Bravura vaudeville, through "the gate of hell" and into 1968 Japan. Nagisa Oshima kicks off with a pokerfaced parody of j'accuse polemics by taking the camera into the execution chamber and proceeds to dismantle the chamber in tandem with the mise en scène, so that the clinical image becomes a mirror of falsehood.

One of the supreme achievements by this great provocateur of Japanese cinema. Starting with this surreal premise, Oshima dutifully follows its logic until he creates a world unlike that of any other in his career... Oshima's satire here is remarkably comprehensive, touching on capital punishment, political corruption, and institutionalized racism... though what may be more astonishing is how he maintains such a high degree of formal invention throughout.

...Tthe tone hops to absurd theatrical comedy (the gallows humor in Dr. Strangelove's war room now literal) as the guards begin dangerously re-enacting R.'s crimes to jog his memory—after all, killing a man who feels no guilt would be murder! Oshima is unsubtle in his critique of Japan's persecution of Koreans, and in his questioning of whether collectively imagining crimes, villains, or justifications can make them come true.

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.

Inspired by the notorious, real-life execution of a convicted murderer named Ri Chin'u who had killed two Japanese schoolgirls in 1958 (and subsequently courted publicity for his crimes through the newspapers and the police), Death by Hanging is an ingeniously conceived, subversive, provocative, and elegantly modulated tragicomedy on intolerance, assimilation, and capital punishment.

Death by Hanging is essential Oshima, an aggressively difficult, feverishly inventive film... Character and narrative continuity, spatial and temporal logic: all are systematically undermined in Death by Hanging as Oshima scrambles together political polemic, Brechtian alienation effects, Kafkaesque parable and a surrealist assault on perception worthy of Buñuel.

All of Oshima's films deal in a challenging and committed way with specifically Japanese questions and problems. Death by Hanging is an 'absurd' comedy about the situation of Korean immigrants in Japan, centering on a state execution that goes wrong, mounted as a sort of witty Brechtian argument.