Reinhabiting the mock-up gallows: the place of Koreans in Oshima Nagisa's films in the 1960s

Abstract

The late auteur Oshima Nagisa might be best remembered for his successful collaboration with French producers, notably for In the Realm of the Senses (1976). It was Korea, however, that he visited when overseas travel again became possible to the Japanese in 1964, an experience that continued to inform his works both on formal and thematic levels during his most prolific decade of the 1960s. Articulating the centrality of Korea in Oshima's oeuvre is important both from film historical and theoretical viewpoints. From Deep Sea Fish (screenplay, 1956) to Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968), Koreans figured not simply as characters, but as markers of the threshold of representability. This is most evident in Death by Hanging (1968), the first of the critically acclaimed ‘New Wave’ films to come out of ATG (Art Theatre Guild) and a popular reference in the political modernist discourse. That Death by Hanging was not merely about Koreans in Japan (zainichi) but an exploration of the limits of representability was observed by Stephen Heath in his seminal article ‘Narrative space’, as well as by the leading Japanese critic Yomota Inuhiko in his recent Oshima monograph. Uniting their otherwise contrasting readings is their attention to the utopian ‘other space’ that opens up in ‘impossible’ narrative space and defies the panoptic sovereign gaze. I turn to the more ambiguous spaces that are neither completely inside nor outside the sovereign gaze, but offer sites of resistance: the uncanny space haunted by the ‘presence’ of the real-life model, a Korean convict Yi Jin-u; and the theatrical space of the mock-up gallows which was incidentally built inside a disused cinema.