Three Films By Hiroshi Teshigahara (1962-1966) + Extras

Otoshiana (1962) Pitfall
Suna No Onna (1964) Woman In The Dunes
Tanin No Kao (1966) The Face Of Another
One of the most acclaimed Japanese directors of all time, Hiroshi Teshigahara distinguished himself in the sixties with a series of sinuous, atmospheric, and daring films. Teshigahara found his spiritual partner in novelist and screenwriter Kobo Abe, with whom he collaborated on these Kafkaesque portraits of identities in peril, films that captivated mainstream audiences while also touching the edges of the Japanese avant-garde. The existential ghost story Pitfall (Otoshiana), the shocking, erotic fable Woman in the Dunes (Sunna No Onna), and the sci-fi–tinged nightmare The Face of Another (Tanin No Kao), starring Tatsuya Nakadai, are among cinema’s enduring enigmas and rarest pleasures.


Hiroshi Teshigahara (勅使河原 宏) may be the paradigmatic cult status director. His advocates are fiercely devoted; the rest either don't know him or his work, dismiss him as minor, or (a small minority) seethe with disdain for what they see as his cultivated affectation. He was one of the bright lights of 1960s Japanese filmmaking, of the generation of directors coming of age after the old guard led by Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi, and his work clearly shares affinities with European filmmakers of the same period, including Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni.


This handsomely produced set of three of the director's most notable films makes his work available to a wider audience, pleasing those who have longed for these titles on DVD, and allowing the rest to make up our minds. Even if it's not quite your taste, there's no denying that this is filmmaking of a very high caliber, and all three pictures provide ample food for thought.

PITFALL (1962)

Teshigahara's debut feature is a hypnotic amalgam of genres, being part Neorealism, part ghost story, and part adventure tale in the tradition of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It is as full of menace and dread as any film noir or melodrama, and it has a hothouse, jangly sense that can make you nervous just watching it. The story begins with a pair of miners with something to hide: they're working for a local man seeking coal on his land, but clearly these two (along with the little boy of one of them) have secrets that they don't care to share.


One of the men is being cased by a natty gentleman in a white suit, and for his next job, the miner being followed is summoned to a ghost town, where we know (and he should know) that nothing good can happen. The plot is as crammed with improbable coincidences and unexpected turns as a triple feature of silent movies, and I'd be denying you much of the pleasure of the film were I to unpack them all here; suffice it to say that you can see already the director's signature concerns about the nature of identity, and the second half of the film bears more than a passing resemblance, both in theme and style, to Vertigo.


It really is kind of an extraordinary first film, combining such seemingly discordant elements as a frank sexuality with the brutal internal politics of labor unions. In terms of conventional dramatic structure, the whole thing is kind of a mess, but one of the great pleasures is watching Teshigahara toss out the Aristotelian unities in pursuit of his own very specific thematic ends. And from a Western perspective, you can see how influential a filmmaker Teshigahara has been. There are elements here of Samuel Fuller's intensity, David Lynch's cultivated eccentricity, and Terence Malick's grace.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964)

The director's next film is probably his most highly regarded one, and is surely the best litmus test for what you'll think of his body of work. It is on some level a mesmerizing accomplishment; it also brings with it lots of symbolic heft, and it's constantly being drilled into us that Something Very Important Is Going On. In this respect, Teshigahara's work is not unlike Antonioni's from the same period; thoughtful stuff that verges on drowning in its own symbolic morass.

Eiji Okada stars as a nameless amateur entomologist, whose enthusiasm for his pastime takes him to the desert to collect specimens. He is so rapturously involved in looking for bugs that he loses track of time and misses the last bus back to town, which is most unfortunate for him, because it leaves him prey for the locals, who are looking for bodies. They're neither murderous nor cannibalistic; rather, they're more cultlike or depraved, looking to save their way of life in the face of the elements, and they need labourers to do that. The entomologist is literally tossed into the pit. He's promised shelter for the night in the home of a local widow, but soon discovers that they're never going to hoist him back up, that he is to become this woman's new de facto husband.


She lives in a home buried in the desert, and as much as anything, on a simply tactile level, this is a movie about sand. They must dig it out nightly, simply to keep the desert from collapsing in on them; they take their meals under umbrellas, the only way to avoid a constant sandstorm; sand is the defining element of their lives, as they live in and around it, wash their dishes in hit, keep house with it, and the camera watches it undulate and cascade, blow and swirl and fight and caress in a manner that's close to human. It's a movie to parch your throat, as evocative of the desert as Lawrence of Arabia or The Sheltering Sky.

The bizarrely towering performance here comes from Kyoko Kishida as the nameless woman, the widow who has been tossed a new man. She is at once creepy and carnal, as dangerous as any noir femme fatale, at times as flat-out crazy as Kathy Bates in Misery, and we're constantly on the fence as to whether she's a black widow looking to suck the life out of her prey, or an object of our pity and derision. And there's an unflinching sexuality to the two of them trapped in this sand pit. It is a dynamic not unlike Swept Away, though the sexuality is coarse and almost unpleasant. It's like you can feel the sand in your pores, and the intimate scenes are the polar opposite of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling on the beach in From Here to Eternity.


The dark spectre of the village elders make this something like a Shirley Jackson story, especially as they foil the man's inevitable escape attempt. The filmmaking, though, brims with energy and tension, even if we can't help speculating about the metaphorical value of what we're watching. It becomes kind of a Where's Waldo? of symbolic intention. But even if it's one of those films that you wish came with its own Monarch Notes, there's no denying Teshigahara's technical mastery. Hiroshi Segawa was the cinematographer on all three of these features, and his contributions to Teshighara's thematic elements are extraordinary. Have at least a couple of beverages close by when you watch this one.

THE FACE OF ANOTHER (1966)

If you're uncharitably inclined toward Teshigahara in general, you'll find that the pendulum swings all the way into pretension with this one; even the director's most ardent fans would have to acknowledge that this film operates almost entirely on a symbolic and metaphorical level, in some instances, at least, to its detriment. To its credit, though, The Face of Another is the most overt announcement of the director's philosophical concerns. This is entirely a film about identity and anonymity.


Tatsuya Nakadai stars as Okuyama, a man for whom a laboratory experiment has gone horribly wrong, and whose face has been entirely disfigured by burns. We just get a glimpse, though, because he spends the first portion of the movie entirely bandaged up, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. His wife says all the right things, but seems to be horrified by his disfigurement; his employer anticipates that he will continue on the job as usual, but Okuyama knows in his soul that his life has been irreparably ruptured. He meets up, then, with a laboratory scientist experimenting with the newest plastics, and who is taken with the synthetic's increasing ability to mimic the characteristics of human flesh. Okuyama becomes his great project, and the scientist constructs for him a mask of astonishingly lifelike quality, allowing the scarred man to resume a life of urban anonymity.


It's the setup of a hokey sci-fi movie, certainly, and we get a healthy dose of philosophizing from the man in the lab, who clearly fancies himself another Henry Frankenstein. In a way it's a film with a lot of contemporary resonance, dealing with the mutability of identity, and the moral perils of science, but after a while, it starts to feel a little thin on ideas, maybe, and the mask is treated by its maker as a holy relic. The Everyman quality makes each interaction painfully fraught with Dramatic Import, even though the film asks a crucial question: is appearance everything?

There's also no denying the underlying anxiety of nuclear war in the movie. The principal subplot concerns a beautiful young woman who shows off her profile and hides the other half of her face with a Veronica Lake-style peekaboo hairdo, because she's got significant and unsightly burns and scarring on the covered half. When she alludes to her childhood in Nagasaki, it's a little too obvious for us, and we can't help but connect the dots. But the austere production design makes it compelling even if the philosophizing can seem a little sophomoric.



The three main features will all fit together on one single DVD+/-R.
Many thanks to CerealRipper for the four DVD9s.