Death by Hanging, The Man Who Left His Will on Film

This double feature by the adventurous Nagisa Oshima shows why his work electrified postwar Japanese cinema by radically reinventing genres and infusing them with still-shocking mixtures of eroticism, violence, and lyricism. Cited by many as among the most powerful films against capital punishment ever made, Death by Hanging is a brilliantly inventive black comedy about a Korean student who’s hanged for rape and murder but whose body refuses to die, thereby forcing panicked officials to “reconstruct” his identity and reestablish his guilt. (117 mins., 35mm) In the evening’s masterful second film, The Man Who Left His Will on Film, a young filmmaker discovers the last will and testament recorded by a student militant (and fellow member of a radical film collective) who may or may not have killed himself. The footage seems ordinary, but its very ordinariness becomes a tantalizing mystery that creates a series of provocative questions. (94 mins., 35mm)