Planning │ Deep Focus Editorial Department
Editor │ Wan Sang Ho
compere:
Black Dog: Japanese movie lover
Guests
Hayashi: Japanese film lover and second-hand bookstore clerk
Kelp Island: Film fan, publisher editor
Pear Bing: Master of Film and Television Studies, University of Westminster, UK, Japanese film enthusiast
Song Remote: Japanese film lover
Black Dog:
Hello everyone! I'm Black Dog, the host of the roundtable on "Hanging Death", and my first question is, do you think this movie is a turning point in the chronicle of Nagisa Oshima?' Or what is its place in all of Oshima Nagisa's films?
Stills from "Hanging Death"
hayashi：
Hanging Death occupies a rather prominent place in Aoshima Nagisa's series of works that gaze at others and break the myth of Japan's single nation, and I may not see it as a "turning point" but more like a phased climax. This stage was marked by Waterloo in Amakusa Shiro Shijsei, after which Nagisa Oshima moved to television production, filming "The Forgotten Imperial Army" and "Monument to Youth" featuring disabled North Korean soldiers, and "The Diary of Lee Yun-fuk", featuring korean children living in abject poverty. "Hanging Death" can be seen as a summary of the Korean problem in the compilation of Oshima's works.
Kelp Island:
Maybe "Hanging Death" is a clear turning point for ATG, but it is difficult for me to define "Hanging Death" as a twist on Oshima's work, it is related to the topic of "Japanese Spring Song Examination", and the formal degree of completion is very high, unlike the exploratory work at the beginning of a certain stage of Oshima Nagisa. More like a work of the middle period of Oshima entering the mature stage, it is the climax of the mid-period (60-72) depiction of "group portraits of lesions in post-war Japan". However, I am curious about the division of Nagisa Oshima's creative stage.
Stills from "Japanese Spring Song Kao"
Pear ice:
Hello everyone, it is an honor to participate in this round table, please give us a lot of advice. First of all, in terms of production methods, "Hanging Death" is ATG's first "10 million yen ultra-low budget drama film", in which the creation agency and ATG each contributed half to complete the filming of this film, under the stimulation of this extremely low budget, most of the film's shots were filmed in the "execution room", in such a small space, the dialogue and behavior of the characters became the key to promoting the development of the plot, from this point of view, I think this film is an innovation and self-challenge of Nagisa Oshima.
In terms of the content of the film, I think this film can be discussed together with the previous work "The Devil of the Day" (1966) and "Japanese Spring Song Examination" (1967) as a "trilogy", which reflect an evolutionary process of Oshima Nagisa's thought, and the unresolved problems in the previous work are once again explored in the later works, for example, the thinking of "sexual crimes" in "Hanging Death Sentence" (1968) is actually an extension of the issue in "Japanese Spring Song Examination", from this point of view, I think "Hanging Death Sentence" is "Hanging Death Sentence" It is a masterpiece of Nagisa Oshima.
Song Remote:
Indeed, "Hanging Death" is more like a summary of Nagisa Oshima's concerns about the problems of Koreans in Japan. In The Cruel Tale of Youth, filmed in 1960, the protagonist watches a newsreel about the April student movement in Seoul in a movie theater, and the fall of Syngman Rhee's regime in the same year is difficult for Nagisa Oshima, who is in the whirlpool of the Japanese student movement, not to be touched. In the subsequent "Graveyard of the Sun", oppressed Korean laborers appeared, and in 1964 he personally went to Korea for two months to observe the country up close a year before Japan and South Korea formally concluded diplomatic relations. This attention has continued after "Hanging Death", such as the father of a disabled soldier in "The Teenager", as if it were a remnant of "The Forgotten Imperial Army".
Eun Eun, there is a spring song in the "Japanese Spring Song Examination" that is also associated with "Korean comfort women", and Hayashi has translated it.
Kelp island is talking about "Mantetsu Minor", yes, it is a spring song written in the tone of a North Korean comfort woman broker. If necessary, you can put the relevant materials up for your reference.
https://www.douban.com/note/568308325/
Speaking of music, in the chapter "R Tries to Be R" in "Hanging Death", that is, in the scene reproduction in the narrow room, the doctor played by Rokuhiro Toura even sang a revolutionary song in Korean praising Kim Il-sung in Korean in order to awaken R's memory, which together with poverty, roughness, barbarism and the movements they tried to perform constitute the Japanese people's inherent perception of Koreans in Japan, and even in contemporary Korean images in Japan.
Choi Yoo-il's "Blood and Bone", Wellbore Kazuyuki's "Invincible Youth" and Xing Dingxun's "GO! Although the films themselves are of good quality, they can be part of mass culture and arouse wide repercussions among the audience, also because the image of "violence" conforms to the imagination of the general Japanese people. In addition, although there is a suspicion of partial generalization, in "Ah, Wilderness" until the near future tokyo, Liang Yijun is still a clumsy and clumsy appearance of drawing life from violence, and even continues the character of Shuji Terayama more than half a century ago.
Well, for the division of creative stages proposed by Teacher Hai, I also happen to have a rougher division of my own: before shochiku and after shochiku. When Nagisa Oshima worked in Shochiku, his works emphasized the existence of the oppressed and the emotionally repressed, and after Shochiku, he gradually stepped out of the Japanese community and began to create the role of the "other" to examine the community. In addition, I think it is interesting that in a series of works, Nagisa Oshima's expression of the "sun" symbol, and there are also many elements of the sun in "Hanging Death".
The first time I noticed the position of "The Sun" in Oshima's work was because of The Sun's Graveyard. Of course, not only because of the title, but in this group portrait work with a very chaotic editing, all the "sunsets" are filmed very timeless, beautiful, and sad, and the soundtrack is also very colorful. The slums at the bottom and the fraud and crime inside are the cemeteries of the seemingly glorious sun, and the sun in the west overlaps with Japan, which did not set sail after the war. At the end of the film, the slum is burned down, and the protagonist stands in the ruins and says a sentence that is "exactly the same as the day of the final battle", which impressed me deeply, as if Japan was in a continuous sinking and had never been salvaged.
Later is "Japanese Spring Song Examination", black sun flag, I very much like "Spring Song Examination" set the time in winter, the opening of the snow snow makes the whole film very calm, and the whole film of "Sun's Graveyard" is "sweaty, stuffy, primitive anger", everyone is disheveled and tired of running, "Japanese Spring Song Examination" is a more precipitated intention, and the tone of the whole film is actually more depressed. The black sun flags during the march against the "Founding Day" echoed very much with the black uniforms and white streets of the students. This is Oshima's transition from sunset to black sun, from the simple post-war Japanese class structure and the anger at the bottom to the more distant reflection of "Japanese imperialism".
After that, it was "Hanging Death", the sun flag covered by the brothers and sisters, black and white film, and the color contrast was very ritualistic. I think it's an overwhelming "delay in colonization." The symbolization of the "sun" is undoubtedly an important tool for Oshima when talking about "Japan".
"Sun" is almost synonymous with "Japan." Ichikawa Kun's "Tokyo Olympics" and Imamura Shohei's "Desire of the Gods" both open with the sun, and the beginning of "Japanese Spring Song Examination" is also dripping the shape of the Japanese flag with blood, not to mention that "Sun Thief" even directly uses the title to joke. In "Hanging Death", while officials are busy playing R's family in a narrow room plastered with newspapers, the prosecutor outside the window examines the situation in the house with no expression, and behind him is the "Sun Pill", where the power of the state and its spokesmen are pervasive and not angry.
For Japan, the sun is a natural totem, and Nagisa Oshima's films are constantly emphasizing it and giving it new meanings throughout. Nagisa Oshima himself has said that the sun in his mind originally symbolized a certain cruel environment and the desire of people to try to survive under the reflection of sunlight. The sun in Graveyard of the Sun is one of these. The anti-American marches and student movements in the Japanese context are very similar to the sun— either asahi or sunset — or the general ambiguous sun.
Then there's the Black Sun, the invention of Nagisa Oshima. The seasonal setting mentioned on Kelp Reminds me of the scene of four boys in black uniforms walking on a snowy playground discussing the exam room girls, and the camera overlooks four moving black dots in the air, and the whole picture is a huge black sun flag. In addition, the first appearance of the black sun flag seems to be in the procession against the restoration of the "Era Festival" and renamed "National Founding Day", and the object of criticism it points to is self-evident.
There are two things I struck about the sun (the sun flag, I should say) in Hanging. The first is the sun flag hanging behind the execution ceremony, which is above all others and symbolizes the attitude of the state subject toward a North Korean. All the officials in the audience did not forget to add "This is just my personal opinion" after expressing their opinions, because the main body of the state was looking down on this room. Of all the witnesses to the execution, only the priest insisted from beginning to end on a different position than the others, because he was not responsible for the country, but for God.
There are too many angles that the sun flag on R and his sister can be interpreted. My own understanding is that after R's amnesia, the crime of R and the restoration of R's life that others did for R is this sun flag that emphasizes R's identity as a Korean in Japan, this flag is the only coordinate that the film's fictional amnesiac R can rely on, and it is also the prototype of the real R, the atmosphere of the times that the Japanese Korean Lee Zhenyu felt when he was imprisoned. In this atmosphere, the hazy estrangement between R and his own crime is pulled away and transformed into the bright undertone of the sun. R became an accomplice to his own execution.
The black dog mentions this point is very interesting, Oshima Nagisa's images are full of symbols, war songs and spring songs are symbols of the young people's revolution, and the repeated appearance of the sun and the sun flag also shows his emphasis and thinking on the subject of "the state". We can see the ubiquitous sun flag in The Boy (1969), heralding a ubiquitous power and order that is cruel, like the blazing sun, and people can only survive under its illumination.
It can be said that "the sun" and "sun flag" symbolize the country in the image of Nagisa Oshima, and at the end of "Hanging Death", R is sentenced to "acquittal", he opens the door, but the glare of sunlight outside makes him unbearable, and the prosecutor sees this and says: "Do you know why you stopped?" The place you want to go to now is the country, and the place where you stand is also the country. You say you can't see the country, but you're feeling it now. The state is in your heart, and as long as you have the state in your heart, you will confess your sins. This passage brilliantly reflects the meaning of "sun" in Oshima Nagisa's world, and I am deeply impressed, and the glare of the sun marks the resurrection of "nation".
Agree that "Hanging Death" is a summary of Oshima's concerns about the North Koreans. But this summary is not the end, I think of the North Koreans appearing again in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence". Back to the main topic, this is a huge work, what do you think of the themes that Nagisa Oshima mentions in this movie (including the death penalty and the state, rape, etc.)? Including the summary of the "Koreans in Japan" just mentioned, can we talk about it in detail in conjunction with the movie?
The prototype of the film, the Komatsugawa Incident, is itself highly topical. The suspect, Lee Chun-woo, is gifted and has excellent grades, loves literature, especially Dostoevsky, and also has a habit of theft, killing people and even informing the police and the media. The plight of the teenager R, whom he incarnates in the film, symbolizes the fate of all Koreans in Japan. On the one hand, they questioned the legality of the executions and tried to question the colonial war responsibilities and the right to revenge self-enforcement on behalf of the entire ethnic group, on the other hand, they were living in a foreign country, and they were deeply prejudiced and had to be bound and punished by local laws. The dramatic tension of the film is reflected in the violent conflict between these two identities. It's naïve for them to awaken the killing intent through role-playing/scene reenactment, because those thoughts are absolutely imaginary, even if they are not finally implemented. In the end, R was not able to get out of the execution chamber, but was sentenced to a second sentence in the conspiracy of layers of bureaucrats and spectators. The government is indifferent, the civilian population is full of discrimination, history is difficult to face up to and even liquidated, Oshima Nagisa is worried about whether these foreigners have no way out but to go home.
And "rape", which is the center of the case, is quite an intriguing metaphor. In Another of Oshima's works, The Devil of the Day, Hidesuke, who was banished by a revolutionary organization, becomes a ghostly rapist and declares war on society through violent sex. From Freud onwards, to Marcuse's politicization of sexuality, desire itself has taken on a broader dimension. In addition, like incest, infidelity, sex addiction, and even human beasts, you can hardly see lust within the moral code in Nagisa Oshima's other films. Tending to articulate sex as the most microscopic power relationship, it is not difficult to understand why he made such a highly allegorical work as "Ritual".
First of all, I want to talk about how this film encompasses so many themes, and when I first look at it, I think the amount of information is really too much, in addition to the rich character dialogue, there are various scenes that blur the boundary between imagination and reality. The film began in the form of a "pseudo-documentary", the prison is a blind spot of modern people's imagination, the director took this detail to introduce the process of the death penalty, showing an order established by law and morality, so that the audience had a sense of solemnity; however, when the trembling criminal R failed to "successfully die", the film changed its "serious" temperament and quickly transformed into a "farce" that integrated absurdity and black humor, which had a strong ironic significance, which greatly stimulated the audience's subject thinking.
In order to awaken R's memory, the officials tried to "reconstruct reality" by playing on the scene, and this "reconstruction" was completely based on secular standards, a reproduction of the black and white words on the judgment book, and the performance of the officials was a manifestation of the oppression of Koreans in Japan by Japanese society, and through this "reconstruction of reality", the audience could also understand R's life, which I think is a very wonderful shooting method of killing two birds with one stone. We can get a glimpse of the state of existence of the Koreans in Japan, which is an extremely closed state of mind that led to the emergence of R's extreme utopianism.
Through this Brecht-style dramatic approach, Nagisa Oshima triggers a deeper understanding of the Koreans in Japan, and in the eyes of the average person, the prototype of R, Lee Jin-woo, is a fierce and ruthless psychopath, who killed two people and called the newspaper office with a slight pride to show off, and even laughed and said to the police when he was arrested, "Finally here", a character that is difficult for ordinary people to understand. But in "Hanging Death Sentence", Oshima Nagisa has the intention to restore the real inner world of this character, especially in the second half of the film, various surreal scenes show Lee Zhenyu's imagination, of which the dialogue with the woman is excerpted from the correspondence between Lee Jin-woo and the North Korean female journalist Park Shou-nam after he was imprisoned, full of self-analysis and criticism, which can be seen that Oshima Nagisa attaches great importance to this character, and these "simple" dialogues and the vulgar chats of officials form a strong contrast, this kind of excavation of national identity is unprecedented.
"Hanging Death" is loaded with complex problem domains in a highly condensed form, and I can only write two that I feel more about myself.
One is that the death penalty = war, the barbarism of the by-product in the process of modernity. The death penalty is the result of individual agreements to transfer their respective powers to the public power of the state, and its perpetrators are not "victims" of crimes, but "public powers", and the target is the "perpetrators". This agreement of power is very "modern" and very "civilized", but in essence what Foucault called "disciplinary punishment", the savagery attached to modernity.
Oshima has been shooting "Crime" since his debut film "Street of Love and Hope", and he has hardly done anything without crime. But the crimes in his films are often not the choices of the perpetrators, but "structural products", that is, the products of oppression under various social realities, which are the inevitable result of the operation of the Behemoth of Japan, which is very much in line with Oshima's "leftist" position. (But I don't think all crimes can be dissolved with such structural reasons, and I think Oshima's purpose is to remind everyone of the complexity behind criminal acts.) But this structural crime is finally purged by the public power, that is, the social structure creates evil and then transforms itself into evil.
In the second half of "Hanging Death", a paragraph from the Minister of Education is very telling, "After this day's chaos, I saw clearly one thing, the death penalty is also for the country, the war is also for the country, in short, it is for the country, the death penalty and war are the same." This question is closely intertwined with the problem of "Koreans in Japan", colonialism during the war is the product of the modernization of "Great Japanese imperialism", and the execution of this criminal after the war is also part of his civilizational logic.
The second is "Why am I?" And why do I suffer for this me? "I really like the investigation of "identity" in this work. The result of R's first hanging was not death, but zeroing out "identity", completely forgetting who he was, and he was liberated. After zeroing, it can also be said to be a "death" in the social sense, and the other begins to construct an identity for it.
First, the executioner read out the trial book, counted his guilt, and kept telling him, "You are a North Korean, you killed two women." Here's a detail where R asks," what are North Koreans?" The police officer said, "I was born in Japan, I am Japanese, your parents are in North Korea, you are Korean, heck, this is too complicated, I can't understand, anyway, you are Korean." Then it was the appearance of his sister, and the minister of education excitedly said, "Yes, with a sister you can determine his identity", that is, to determine the concept through relationships, to confirm himself through the other. They try to awaken his social identity, and also his memory, to make him become that social him again, thus practicing "murder."
But his sister was equally aggressive in his construction of identity. It seems that this conversation was the correspondence between the criminal and a reporter in the real event " Komatsukawa Incident " . My sister said, "If you touch my skin, you are touching the history of the Korean nation for thousands of years." I think this sentence is too heavy to awaken R's nationalist identity, and the subtitle of the last transition reads "For all R becomes R", I can't stand this heaviness.
Behind the ironic absurdity of this work there is a heavy undertone. In the process of recovering "identity", R is forced to repeat the process of committing a crime, and discovers that this repetition is impossible, which reminds me of the above sentence, which is also a question from Foucault, "Why am I?" And why do we suffer for the sake of this me", to what extent do we grasp our "self-awareness"? Somehow, in a very politicized work, I was touched by this dimension, and I felt that Oshima's call for "personal independent will" was hidden in it.
Speaking of "separation", I would like to talk about the characteristics of "Hanging Death" as the starting point of ATG's local 10 million yen plan. Ten million yen movies are inextricably linked to modern Japanese drama that has been active since the late 1960s. The "Diary of a Thief in Shinjuku" also directly features the appearance of The Tang Shilang Condition Troupe, and the credits of the golden ATG movies often appear as small theater participants. Because of the problem of funds and shooting time, experimental films borrowed a lot from the "art of immediacy" such as theater. The form of "Hanging Death" is really very "theater". Except for the middle outdoor section, the front and back chamber plays are very "stage art". The opening paragraph of narration, from the appearance of the building to the color of the curtains, reminds me of the scene description in the script of the play. The transition of the chapter is very much like the split of the drama.
The reinterpretation of R's behavior constructs a scene of watching a play-within-a-play. At the end of the sentence, the narrator "Hard prosecutors, hard commissioners... Also hard to watch this movie of you", a very popular dissociation effect in the theater. The film is based on real events, and the sense of distance created by this technique and the performance of the actors make the whole film full of humor, while achieving absurd irony, and the rhythm is very comfortable. At the same time, the "ethical situation" brought about by this sense of form is very important, similar to the practice of ethics when discussing problems, often delineating extreme conditions (in fact, the setting of amnesia is quite extreme), which makes the issues that Oshima wants to discuss bring a distinct "scalability" and makes the film more ambitious.
The sum of what you have talked about is quite comprehensive, and I will just add one point here. The story of "Hanging Death" has a prototype, the Komatsugawa Incident in 1958, when there was extensive and heated discussion in Japan about whether the death penalty was too heavy and the Identity of suspect Lee Jin-woo as a Korean. One of the purposes of Nagisa Oshima's ten-year sharpening of a sword is to evoke the audience's memory. In fact, this is also a general feature of Oshima Nagisa's films, evoking memories and using the history of the country to assassinate reality.
In Death Row, Nagisa Oshima once again uses the distancing effect (the previous "Night and Fog in Japan" was a bold attempt). The distancing effect of "Hanging Death" is more comfortable and purposeful. The opening chapter introduces the execution chamber and the people present, and at the end, praises the executioners and witnesses one by one, as well as the audience in front of the screen. R loses his memory in the film, and the audience is forced to retrieve it while watching. This is both a large-scale trial of Japanese identity and a deep reflection on the concept of "memory" in social, ethnic, and historical contexts.
I would also like to add a few words. Privately, the film attempted to examine the Japanese by showing stereotypes of Koreans, and officials attempted to recreate R's family environment in the hope of exploring his motives for crime, and in the process Japanese stereotypes of Koreans appeared in large numbers: rough, barbaric, pre-modern, hero worship. R's state has always been a cold-eyed spectator— as a state of "blankness" after his amnesia, which like a background board makes other people's stains more distinct. And in the right to interrogate, what it wants to express is also inverted from what it shows on the surface.
It seems that the Japanese are interrogating R-Koreans, but in fact R is interrogating the Japanese: in act III, "R acknowledges the existence of R as an other", R, as an interrogated person, instead asks the official what is Korean, what is rape, what is lust, what is family - his blank state after losing his memory strikes the boundary of the Japanese unconscious. This is also a manifestation of Nagisa Oshima's later theme of "The Other-Community".
If you look at R, or from the perspective of Lee Jin-woo, the suspect in the Komatsukawa incident, you will find that this contradiction is quite natural. R is imagined as a symbol, and he is actually first and foremost likely just a person, just like The Real Lee Jin-woo. Lee Hadh-woo once written a novel based on the cases he had committed called The Wicked Man ("悪い奴"), which was almost his autobiography and therefore the best way to recognize his identity. But how many people noticed the autobiography before his Korean identity?
R after losing his memory can be seen as a 〇 (zero) dressed as a person, or as a 〇 (closed loop) that has lost the opportunity to communicate with the outside world (Japanese society), which is the real situation that Li Zhenyu faces. So one of the spectacles of "Hanging Death" is that the executioners did their best to reconstruct R's motives for committing the crime from the perspective of R's Korean identity (in order to use it as a conclusion that the official wanted to see, and the official needed an ideal reason to execute R to show the position of some kind of national subject), but R tried to recall the personal experiences and emotions of the private novel, and the two sides finally reached a deformed unity.
As Kelp said, I also really like the identity issue in this movie. In this movie, in order to make R admit that he is R, in a way it can be said that it is the premise of the execution, "R は朝鮮人として弁明される", R's identity is confirmed by his sister from the kinship, but at this time R is not aware of his national identity, which is related to "how can a person become himself?" How was his identity determined? ”
Although the sister tried to awaken the memory of the same origin in R's heart through the body-hand, R denied that her actions were North Korea's retaliation against Japan. I think that this is a return to the "Japanese Spring Song Kao" to some extent, trying to contrast R with Araki Ichiro, the Korean nationalist remarks in the mouth of the sister in "Hanging Death" and the riding nation-state in "The Japanese Spring Song Kao". R does not feel like the R in his sister's mouth, Araki Ichiro also ignored the riding nation-state, and the interesting thing here is that R as a symbol is clearly a symbol of the whole of Korea, and although there is a clear opposition between Koreans and Japanese people in the whole movie, R is in a state of expressionlessness from beginning to end, and he ignores the symbol he carries. Moreover, the relationship between sexual fantasies and real actions in "Japanese Spring Song Examination" is also reflected in "Hanging Death Sentence", I don't know what you think?
To explain what sexual fantasies are like in "Japanese Spring Song Kao", it is necessary to link the relevant performances in Nagisa Oshima's other two works. One is "Night and Fog in Japan," in which Nagisa Oshima asks the students who participate in the parade a sharp question: "Is singing and dancing revolutionary?" The other is The Diary of a Thief in Shinjuku, where the ultimate goal of the film is to have successful sex between Torio and Umeko, and when this successful sex is complete, the screen switches to the student who threw stones in front of Shinjuku Station. Sex in Nagisa Oshima's films is often both a way of venting energy and an excuse when energy is not released, and the two are superficial.
The sexual fantasies in "Japanese Spring Song Kao" are similar to a kind of anxiety of "what should be done but do not know what to do", and it is also a compromise of "not knowing what to do and indulging in sound and color". The problem that the passionate war song cannot solve, nor can the playful spring song solve. Therefore, whether it is spring songs or sex, it is more about the anxiety and nothingness of students. Except when the song "Full Iron Minor" sounded, Ichiro Araki (is it the name of the protagonist?). Only then did he notice the meaning of the lyrics, but it was destined to be temporary.
R's sexual fantasies in "Hanging Death" are expressed in the form of simulations and explanations, with comprehensive steps and details. In fact, this is precisely the most impossible form of sex or sexual fantasy. It is very private and absolutely cannot be reproduced (even by myself). In other words, R's sexual fantasies and the resulting crimes may be due to his status as a Japanese Korean, but it cannot be proven to be because of his identity as a Japanese Korean. Hanging death repeats the process of proof to illustrate the impossibility of such proof.
This is a more complicated question, and I tried to answer it, and both films discuss the issue of freedom of imagination, which is expressed in absurd ways. The protagonists of "Japanese Spring Song Kao" are high school students who have no concern for the rebellion, for whom sex is purely a catharsis of desire, not a higher form, in their daily world, sex is overwhelming, sex completely blinds its other characteristics, and becomes the master of the flesh.
The four of them blindly incite "sexual desire" and fantasize about various fragments, but from the film we can see that these "amazing" personal desires or imaginations cannot go beyond the scope of the school (modern order) and cannot lead to substantive changes in society. In the > of the < hanging, the imagination has a richer contrast: the officials are people who do not need imagination, they are pragmatic, they are the state apparatus, the prosecutor and the chief of the security department in the film are bent on putting R on death, they have a firm sense of rights, so they do not see the awakened girl, but the chattering minister of education is bent on awakening R's memory, he puts himself in R's position, so he not only sees the girl, but also kills her "with his own hands", this contrast shows the "imagination". In fact, it is the mediation of "rights consciousness", and the farther away from the "center of power", the richer the imagination, which is a very unique insight. In addition, the film also compares the imagination of R (criminals) and executioners, the two are very different, the former is humane, the latter is extremely despicable and vulgar, but in reality the former is painfully suppressed by the latter, forming a huge contrast, which makes me think of the phrase "In order not to be destroyed by society, they only have to self-destruct", and the reality is full of sad despair.
The "lack of imagination" of officials mentioned by Pear Zi can also be understood as a collective forgetting of the Korean nation and colonial history at the government level. In fact, after the actual incident, Ooka Seisei, Shuji Terayama, Kenzaburo Oe and others all published works on this theme, and many cultural circles also took this as an opportunity to try to arouse the attention of the whole society to the Koreans in Japan, and more specifically, including calling for a commutation of Li Zhenyu's sentence. However, Nagisa Oshima himself did not join this "aftermath" act, but went to seek the root cause of the problem. And in 1968, spurred on by another incident involving The Elder Kim Inuyasha involving Koreans in Japan, nearly a decade of reflection was finally put into film.
In fact, he was never the standard-bearer of the revolution, to be precise, the vanguard of the mass movement. The protagonists in "The Cruel Tale of Youth" are indifferent to the anti-security parade, "Night and Fog in Japan" directly exposes the contradictions within the student movement, while in "Japanese Spring Song Examination", four high school students will only talk about their sexual fantasies in the face of a huge team. The reason why the "mass movement" mentioned above cannot be equated with "revolution" is that it is difficult for us to understand the situation when the so-called "revolution" is fully rolled out and then evolves into "everyday". Through the "Japanese Spring Song Examination", we can see the colorful Tokyo after the Olympics, the old soldiers who sang military songs to remember the common prosperity of Greater East Asia, and the left-wing march against the "Epoch Festival". Everyone wants to rebuild their post-war national identity, but they also have their own ghosts, and the revolution is destined to be the most subtle voice.
As for the "Theory of National Conquest on Horseback" in "Spring Song Kao", the end paragraph of the film is actually an imaginary theater crime, reflecting Oshima's consistent metaphor and sense of ceremony. This hypothesis implies that today's Japan is actually a country that was formed by merging with submissive indigenous peoples after foreign invasions, and that post-war Japan was in such a mixed state of "conquering and being conquered". On the other hand, the hypothesis has fundamentally shattered Japan's mono-ethnic myth, and even the imperial system, which emphasizes "one lineage of all generations," is decided by the Americans to survive. But from any point of view, this is the rhetoric of the ruling class. So Oshima chooses to fight with filthy, dirty, and lowly spring songs, which in turn rely on the instinctive behavior of high school boys.
Through the most vulgar but most vital common people's culture to establish the identity of the national state. Let me exaggerate, although this is very different from Yukio Mishima's "Emperor of Culture", but it is the same as the same destination. Oshima himself, in his eulogy for Mishima, also expressed his inexplicable pursuit of aesthetic perfection, but in the face of various imports to fill the spiritual vacuum, they invariably chose the blood of their own country that has been flowing for thousands of years.
There may be some discrepancies with the black dog problem, but I tried to write my own thoughts on the "sex" in the film "Japanese Spring Song Kao".
The "sex" of young people in Oshima's mid-period works is not as simple and simple as the "sex = liberation" of the contemporary New Left movement. In his not-yet-very-mature pan-sun film The Cruel Tale of Youth, he questions the liberating significance of the "sexual impulse" in the postwar democratic emancipation. In "Japanese Spring Song Examination", it is even more obvious, and one of the scenes is that the students are holding a folk song concert and the Beijing foursome goes to stir up trouble. The political ballads of the 1960s were inseparable from the American hippies and the anti-Vietnam War movement, the slogan "Make Love, Don't Fight" had an astonishing presence, and "sex, politics and freedom" were deeply tied to the student movement of the time. At the same time, the anti-security movement and the anti-war Japanese student movement could not escape this context in a sense, and I remembered that Kumachi and Ka's "Ghost Animal Banquet" was a cult discussion of the "sex and politics" issues in the Red Army group. Under this premise, Oshima's wisdom and sobriety are revealed. In the scene, students talk about guitars and sing folk songs, while the four-person group sings spring songs and shouts "We raped you" on the other.
Stills from The Cruel Tale of Youth
The tension generated by this antagonism was very interesting in the theme of "sex and politics" at the time, he abandoned the self-evident bondage between "sexual liberation and post-war democracy", and the "spring song", which has long been his attitude towards "sex", is more fundamental, purer, and even more evil. The imagery of "sexual fantasy" in this film also fully presents such a texture.
Thanks to Kelp Island ~ Your view of the spring song has given me a new understanding of nagisa Oshima's "sex". In my opinion, just as mr. Chunge in the film interprets the spring song as a symbol of the general public, it really embodies their "evil" in addition to simplicity, and this unspoken evil just happens to be in opposition to the ideas preached by ideology, and it uses evil to break the illusion of beauty.
In the sexual fantasy and reality mentioned at the end of the film, R's words leave the impression that his imagination overflows the boundary and causes sexual fantasy to become reality, in which case it is easy to think of the question "Do we have the right to free sexual fantasy?" In this film, the death penalty is not so much about judging R's homicide as it is about judging the root cause of R's homicidal behavior: sexual fantasies. (Of course, the attitude of the trial from the death penalty is not the attitude of Nagisa Oshima, I think in this movie, Nagisa Oshima is positive about the freedom of sexual fantasies))
I would like to ask you that in addition to the aspects mentioned in the question, do you have a favorite place in the small details of this movie? I personally like the handwritten subtitles of Nagisa Oshima in this movie, and in my opinion, Nagisa Oshima's handwriting, which is the word "human", leaps out of the mechanical news font that can be seen everywhere in daily life, and successfully achieves alienation.
Speaking of the mechanical indifference of the state and the warmth of man, I also think of the question of "how and when was my sister seen" in the scene "R は朝鮮人としてされる". One by one, the officials of the execution ground saw the sister one after the other, could it be regarded as a kind of human attachment? It is said that in the original script, the prosecutor had a sentence "See! The line suggests that he saw his sister, but Nagisa Oshima deleted it in order to strengthen his image as an inhuman country.
By the way, can you pick out 5 of all of Oshima Nagisa's works to make a top 5 ranking according to your own preferences? My personal ranking is: 1. "Sensory World" 2. "Hanging Death" 3. "Ritual" 4. "Teenager" 5. "Night and Fog in Japan"
Regarding the little point of "Hanging Death", I myself like two places. One is the interior composition of the whole film, which even reminds me many times of "Last Year in Marion." Not the latter's completely regular, unrealistic symmetry created by the building, but the sense of simplicity produced by the geometry of the set in black and white color conditions. Various squares (monitoring windows, stairs, foot pedals for hanging) and circles (sun flags, the shape of ropes for hangings), etc.
This kind of non-routine artificial treatment has always been my orientation, and I found that the cover of the 4-volume "Oshima Nagisa Works" of the "Modern Thought Trend News Agency" is the rope circle of "Hanging Death", which is particularly happy. The second scene is when R is playing herself in the middle of the section, and the "sister" says what show she wants to see (like?). R pretended to take the family on the tram, he described the warm scene in words, the crowd imitated the appearance of the car, a fantasy of "warmth", a kind of false "warmth" in the play, I liked the absurdity and tenderness in this scene. Personal TOP5: 1. "Ritual", 2. "Hanging Death", 3. "Teenager", 4. "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", 5. "Sensory World"
I like the mode of dialogue with the audience constructed by the director in this film the most, I think this kind of technique that encourages the audience to actively participate in the discussion, but also sets a certain sense of distance, is very rare in the drama film, many traditional drama films pursue "empathy", that is, let the audience empathize, enter the play, and resonate with the characters. I don't see this tendency in "Hanging death", the language of the film is neutral and clear, the director invites the audience to act as a "bystander", and throws the audience a question at the beginning: "Do you oppose the abolition of the death penalty?" Surveys show that 71% of people oppose the abolition of the death penalty, have these people seen the death penalty field? Ever seen a death sentence executed? ”
This allows the audience to quickly "sit in" into the state, for which I agree with the film scholar Dana Polan's evaluation of the film, he pointed out, "The sense of distance felt by the audience does not only exist in the narrative sense, but also in the impact of values when watching the film." In the film, officials gradually understand the difficulty of understanding a person (officials' interpretation of R is full of worldly prejudices), and the audience gradually understands the difficulty of understanding a film (in a sense, only mainstream films can be understood by the public), and Nagisa Oshima intersperses so many documentary techniques in a drama film, which is subversive. ”
At the end of the film, R is still executed, but the moment the official presses the button, R disappears, and the rope is empty, as if to hint at the nothingness of the trial, and at this time, the official is next to him: "Warden, today is hard, you have done a good job." Minister of Education, you too. Chief Security, you too. You are too, you are too, you are too... You're watching this movie too! "What a blow to the depths of the soul! Nagisa Oshima is a director I admire very much, and my personal TOP5 is: 1. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence 2. "Hanging Death" 3. Ritual 4. The Cruel Tale of Youth 5. The World of The Senses
Regarding "Hanging Death Sentence", in addition to the complexity of the subject matter of the work itself, I really like its overall sense of stage. As mentioned before, the film first cuts in the form of a documentary, and then turns to the style of absurd drama. In fact, although only the priest is always out of place for the audience, there is no doubt that everyone is doing their duty and insisting on the creed of their profession. Nagisa Oshima uses a large number of long shots to present the stage space, followed by the embodiment of the play-in-play and imagination, and the "invisible sister" played by Akiko Oyama to fill in the gaps between different time and space is even more amazing, this aesthetic derived from the infinite is undoubtedly born from the drama, but it can almost summarize the essence of ATG.
Nagisa Oshima
Nagisa Oshima is my favorite Japanese director. As one of the few authors who can navigate between "the politics of cinema" and "political cinema", he has repeatedly made amazing attempts at the image level on the one hand, and on the other hand, he has constantly spoken about the tide of the times. At the same time, these "testimonies of the times" will not be reduced to ordinary news records or unilateral propaganda and agitation, but can always keep a distance from the center of the whirlpool, look at it coldly, and ponder the deep logic hidden under the group carnival. If I had to pick my favorite five films, the first would be "Night and Fog in Japan" and "The Devil of the Day", which is diametrically opposed to its style, followed by the aesthetically radical "Secret Story of the Tokyo War" and "Hanging death", and the career summary work "Ritual".
Well, I also like the "disappearance" mentioned by pears. Finally, R disappears into the rope, and at this time he escapes from the realm of the state and the law, and is no longer in the trial. After his disappearance, all that was visible was the remainder of the rope ring, the unencumberable thing that allowed the wind to pass through. From another point of view, instead of discussing where R Yi went, it is better to say that R became a rope when it disappeared, staying on the scene forever, and those prejudices imposed on him will strangle the next R, someone whose name has been erased or even needed to be known.
If you watch "Hanging Death" from the perspective of actress centrism, you will find out how outstanding Akiko Koyama's performance is. Among the spouses of Shochiku New Wave Miyoshi (and both are regular heroines in their respective works), Akiko Koyama is the least famous, far inferior to Okada Jasmine and Iwashita Shima. But each of Akiko Oyama's roles is quite a test of the actor's understanding of the role.
The role of Sister R in "Hanging Death" is not only a representative of a special group of North Korean women in this movie, but also becomes the most emotional character in the audience because of her blood relationship with R. The angular face and voice of the hill naturally give her an isolated temperament, and can even be said to be an "alienated" temperament. She is very good at using this temperament, and the understanding of the role reflected in her performance clearly shows that she has not abused this temperament. My personal TOP 5 is:1. "Japanese Spring Song Examination";2. 3. The Secret History of the Tokyo War After the War; "Sister of Summer"; 4. 5. Rituals; "Hanging Death Sentence"
Thank you all for your wonderful statement. I think this round table is really wonderful, it is itself an experience of shuttling imagination and reality like "Hanging Death". It's a pity that I didn't come to talk to you about other places worth discovering because of the time problem, but I believe that this is also the place for the audience to explore next.
Deep Focus DeepFocus is the signed author of today's headlines