Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (Criterion)

[Mesh]

Guys, I wrote a 1000 word review of this 4-DVD set for Stop Smiling's website.  Take a look, have a read, click around some, consider picking up Stop Smiling Magazine the next time you see it.  Enjoy it and tear my work pieces if you must:

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/film_detail.html?id1=846

Pitfall (1962)
Woman in the Dunes (1964)
The Face of Another (1966)
(Criterion)

Reviewed by Judson Picco

The Criterion Collection's four-disc, one-booklet set, Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, came to me in ghostly grey-on-white, rife with plain-paper textures and so minimalist that I wondered whether it was an unfinished advance copy. But the design could not be more appropriate: the austerity of detail, along with the embossed thumbprint on the set's cover, makes a perfect shorthand for Teshigahara's film triptych of inquiries into identity and individuality.

Among several questions the set wonderfully complicates is to what extent these films can be considered the work of a discrete identity in the first place. Each is the result of a unique collaboration between blossoming filmmaker Teshigahara (who'd come to previous fame for his work in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement) and novelist Kobo Abe. World-class Japanese film scholar Donald Richie — appearing in the instructive new documentary Teshigahara and Abe included on Criterion's supplemental disc — cannot compare this creative lockstep between filmmaker and working novelist to any other partnership in film history.

Each film is markedly faithful to Abe's stage or page original, and each is shot at the traditional Hollywood aspect ratio of 1.33:1, the film stock itself a rich, deep-focus black & white. Yet Teshigahara's arresting visual arsenal (alongside Toru Takemitsu's bracing scores, featuring treated piano and glass harmonica) places his Sixties work firmly in the avant-garde. Teshigahara's first feature, Pitfall (1962), presents an existential ghost story in transit: an itinerant former coal miner is followed and surveilled by a mysterious man in white. One breathtaking hand-held sequence culminates in the miner's brutal murder by knifing, his son's witnessing of the murder, and the miner's eerie, Nosferatu-like resurrection, achieved by combining backwards footage with superimposition. Later, a superimposed ink drip spreads to the frame's edges, inviting a scene change while at once visually quoting a mushroom cloud's obliterating bloom. Ghost characters double here, sometimes peering in on their still-living doppelgangers. Paired also are the killer and the child, one a bleak agent of inscrutable design, the other a tearful orphan symbol of new Japanese modernity running a twisted path into the unknowable.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) vaulted Teshigahara briefly onto the international stage, and rightly so. Its deceptively simple narrative sees an urban entomologist's dejected struggle against, then grudging acceptance of, his imprisonment in a woman's makeshift hut at the bottom of a sand pit. Identity, as a theme, is more obliquely approached: the central characters go unnamed for most of the film; their fates are inextricably linked by the sand-clearing tasks they must perform; and by the close they've more or less switched housekeeping roles. The man's musings on escape focus on modernity's paper trail of identity. The film's dizzying multivalence ends up defying allegorical interpretation; does it pit male vs. female, urban vs. rural, insect vs. unwitting prey? Or as the man, without a hint of Zen, asks: "Do you shovel sand to live or live to shovel sand?"

Whatever the answer, I see the sand itself as carrier of the liveliest metaphors. The film's enduring cinematic thrills lie in rippling flows of the stuff made both lyrical and menacing, fissures in its smoothed surface given almost audible thunder-and-lightning crackle; Teshigahara, in one itch-inducing passage, pushes the camera to the woman's sand-speckled throat, melding Takemitsu's grating soundtrack brilliantly to that alien fleshscape. Viewer discomfort grows as insistent as the human need flaring between the principal characters. Man and woman remain fiercely individual, defined by their societies, yet bound by their desires and survival's demands, just as sand motes without their million brethren motes cease to be sand at all. Woman in the Dunes is frustrating poetry, as incomparable as films ever get.

You'd think something about these films so investigative of identity might feel, to today's audience, like the work of Philip K. Dick — and you'd be right. The Face of Another (1966), this triptych's third panel, speaks to A Scanner Darkly's concerns about masks; it also recalls Frankenstein's creator/creation fulcrum, The Exorcist's subliminal death mask and baroque medical settings, and Marcel Duchamp's sculpture, sometimes all at once. Okuyama, our protagonist, has a face horribly scarred by an industrial accident and contracts a subtly maniacal psychiatrist/physician to fashion him a mask that'll be his new face. Both doctor and patient enact quite different agendas, one to rid the world of identity and its complications, the other to test the limits of his new visage's power.

Arguably the most stage-bound of these films, The Face of Another is also the most chilling. The doctor's quarters are an ever-mutating installation of mirrors, glass panels, and medical charts punctuated by the detached body parts that are both artifice and his stock in trade. A late set-piece makes operatic the theme of identity: the masked Okuyama and his mask's creator confront each other on a modern street crowded with pedestrians each wearing their own empty, featureless mask.

A generous supplemental disc includes the documentary mentioned above, as well as four short films made prior to and during Teshigahara's exceptional run with Kobo Abe. Hokusai profiles the Japanese woodblock master while the sublime and stunning Ikebana hints at Teshigahara's radicalism in that medium, one his father Sofu's Sogetsu School of Ikebana revolutionized and Hiroshi himself retreated to after all but abandoning film after 1992. Tokyo 1958's crowded street scenes, concern for women's makeup, and masks prefigure those used so hauntingly in The Face of Another. Finally, Ako, a disjointed day-in-the-life editing experiment, features the principal actress from The Face of Another's subplot about a woman, facially scarred by the Nagasaki bomb, and her brother, who comes to a carnally transformative end better seen than described.

The name Teshigahara may not regain the stateside prominence bestowed by Woman in the Dunes during its vertiginous mid-Sixties vogue — but that's a state of affairs Criterion's set should counteract admirably. In fact, I may revisit James Quandt's excellent half-hour video essays for each film as often as I do the films themselves. They're at once reverent, illuminating and open-minded about Teshigahara's grasp and reach. Quandt announces a few of these films' weaker digressions, but he's also astute in pointing up the Teshigahara/Abe collaboration's bracing dialogue with literary and cinematic identities already etched in stone: Sartre, Kafka, Resnais, Buñuel.

[w/o horse]

There's something in the rhythm of Pitfall that I find absolutely compelling.  I like movies that don't take the cowardly way out, that don't sacrifice the feeling for the plot.  And when you deal with these subjects (death, man's place in the modern world, morality, liberty) it's easy to picture them as plot elements, thousands of years of storytelling has simplified and distorted these ideas and you begin to see what doesn't exist except as a concept in archetypal forms.  You form an image of what actually isn't concrete.  You begin to think you can identify loss because you know Miss Havisham, and you can place loss into that, and regret becomes Terry Malloy, and rage becomes Inspector Javert.  This is what a great story does:  it animates concepts.  That's art, don't get me wrong, and it can be brilliant, I think it simplifies the world but I don't think it's in any way simple.  A great story has the unbelievable capacity of infecting your own life narrative, of weaving its own themes into your everyday.  But I think it exists separately and as its own abstraction.

For the ineffable, the unidentifiable, and the unobservable (what I experience the most in my life, usually experiencing epiphany as hindsight), a greater abstraction is necessary.  I think that the modern world cannot be defined by the ways of the old, I agree with everyone who has said this (Kandinsky and Pollock spring to my mind).  And with Pitfall, perhaps the rhythm was a confluence of emotion, I felt like the film worked as a whole, like it operated for the purpose of abstractly expressing the abstract, and so I felt it, I experienced Pitfall.

The multiple plot developments are suggestions.  Any Lynch fan could identify this tactic immediately.  You give the audience some of what they want, and then you continue on with what you want (plenty of other examples of this, but I feel Lynch's mechanics are most in the style of Pitfall).  They keep you moving forward, they're interesting, and they enable great visual stimulation, but the truth of the film is outside these moments.  You really get a sense of Pitfall when you watch it the second time, because then you ride the other current running through the film, the one occurring in the texture of the film.  Reading the Criterion essays, it was the repeated mentioning of the collaborative process that formed Pitfall that appealed to me.  And when I rewatched the film I saw better how fully realized Pitfall was, how every component worked to enhance the other.  I noticed that if I didn't follow the 'plots' but followed the progression of feeling it became a different story.  Fractured, incomplete, insincere, alien, yes, but progressive, and deliberate.  By the end it hit me, the whole goddamn thing stirred me up and affected me.

That's my favorite kind of movie.  I recommend.

[Alexandro]

I downloaded Woman in the Dune and when I started watching, it had no subtitles. So instead I played some music and watched parts of the film while drinking beer and smoking pot and got hooked, really hooked by the visuals alone. So I immediately searched for a subtitled version and watched it yesterday. It's a masterpiece. Every single shot is earned, every one is beautiful.

Is not common for me to be changing positions in anticipation when I'm watching a film, but this one did it. Skin, sand and every other texture is felt to the point of wanting to touch the screen.

It works as a parable but even better, it works simply as a story well told. Slowly it wraps around you till the reality of the film is inescapable. I think I'll blind buy the complete trilogy. This guy is obviously amazing.

[SiliasRuby]

I saw 'Pitfall' today. Every once in a while, especially when you are watching a film that deals about a human's mortality, it can strangle your senses and force you to pay attention. This was a rare movie experience where I really was wondering where the story was going to go. Some o the images in this film really were quite heartbreaking and slightly disturbing. The lynchian undertones and the pace of this movie, make this film a high recommendation. W/O horse is right: this film does work as a whole and this is art at its finest. A uncomprimising, unapologetic piece of art.

[SiliasRuby]

'Woman in the Dunes' Review...Spoilers....

So, this magically distraught film starts out innocently enough but when he (our main bug collector) misses his way back home and is invited into the small village in the middle of a area filled with Sand dunes. As soon as the villagers tell him about this place you get a sense that this story isn't going to end well. The penderecki like score (penderecki, for those of you who don't remember was used by Kubrick in '2001' 'the shining' and 'eyes wide shut' doesn't help and when we are convinced that the fellow villages locked down this bug man with another woman, he feels quite captive and quite attracted to the woman who's "way down in the (sand pit) hole" with him.

Lately, I've been accostomed to the honor and dignity that japanese cinema brings to the table, even when the story's are heinous, sick, and or sad. There's quite an invigorating sensuality ingrained in this piece of film, its amazing not to be taken in by it. There's a part 30 minutes in where you go "oh man, you are fucked" and you find out how futile and useless his actions are, trying to get out.

The love scenes are creepy, the situation unbearable, the music minimalistic. Oh, man I'm happy I saw this. More happy than I seeing 'zach and miri'. This is why I live for cinema, these films.