Close collaborations between filmmakers and literary figures are virtually unheard of in the West, where ego, money and power have a way of putting the kibosh on collective creative endeavors, even in indie-land. So Criterion’s release last month of three Japanese films from the mid-1960s is a true cinephile’s and bibliophile’s delight. More than just a showcase for wonderfully inventive auteur Hiroshi Teshigahara, who gets sole credit on the packaging, the movies in this box set—Pitfall (1962), Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Face of Another (1966)—represent a near-seamless blending of the director’s assured, hyper-modernist aesthetic and screenwriter-novelist-playwright Kobo Abe’s slyly funny interrogations of cosmic indifference to human toil.
Self-produced on the cheap by Teshigahara and distributed by Toho (best-known as the studio where Godzilla signs the paychecks), these films are striking in their emotional detachment. Yet while they boldly rebuke all sentimentality, they’re also palpably, even sloppily human. This dichotomy lends them a smooth-but-shaggy aura that’s a hallmark of the era in which they were made; in Face, for instance, the sleek wardrobe, minimalist production design (by Kiyoshi Awazu), and spare cinematography (by Hiroshi Segawa, who shot the other two movies as well) wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporaneous Godard movie. This effect is enhanced by a third collaborative presence in the films: experimental composer Toru Takemitsu, whose arrhythmic, hauntingly hip scores complement the outré narrative and visual conventions at play.
Thank Teshigahara for these elements (including the involvement of Takemitsu, who was a friend), but the movies are equally imbued with surrealist pot-stirrer Abe’s profound challenge to the notion of a logical universe—a stance that could be punishingly intellectual in the writer’s fiction (The Face of Another is a particularly grueling read). Happily, the more audience-attuned Teshigahara—who, appropriately enough, was the son of a renowned classical floral designer—tempered the relentlessly verbose absurdism of Abe’s tales by masterfully exposing their pulpy roots.
To that end, Pitfall, their first movie together and Teshigahara’s feature-film debut, is a bitterly ironic, Zola-esque portrayal of thwarted justice that’s also an ingeniously elliptical ghost story. Drawn by Abe from some percolating story ideas, Pitfall’s realist framework—it concerns the mysterious, possibly politically motivated murder of a miner—is undercut by the quasi-supernatural goings-on (the ghosts here are more inclined to whine than wail) and Teshigahara’s no-budget, in-camera effects. For all that, it concludes with a bravura tracking shot that’s both socially relevant and unexpectedly poignant.
All vestiges of realism were cast off for Teshigahara and Abe’s next movie, a faithful adaptation of the latter’s breakout 1960 novel The Woman in the Dunes. This mid-’60s arthouse stalwart (it won the 1964 Cannes Jury Prize and nabbed two Oscar nominations) provided a first taste of Japanese avant-garde cinema to American moviegoers more accustomed to the comparatively traditional offerings of Akira Kurosawa. Teshigahara renders the physical, moral and existential horror of Abe’s tale—in which an amateur entomologist is trapped in a pit on the edge of a dune-side village with a strangely pliant woman—with a keen eye, and ratchets up the sexual tension lurking within Abe’s book to a fever pitch.
The real gem in Criterion’s Teshigahara/Abe collection, however, and the most craftily adapted of the films, is The Face of Another, a sharp, moody exploration of the fragility of identity that also functions as a metaphorical critique of postwar Japan’s “inferiority complex” and a challenge to the notion of a controlling, omniscient deity. Indeed, if Pitfall’s God is a candy-snatching orphan—or worse, a blandly efficient bureaucrat—in Face he’s an oversexed, yo-yo-twirling idiot—or much, much worse, a self-satisfied shrink.
Unlike the sui generis Pitfall and Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another spins off from a venerable monster-movie subgenre. Films about characters with severely disfigured faces typically have a moral component; the meek watchmaker (Peter Lorre) in Robert Florey’s 1941 The Face Behind the Mask, for instance, turns criminal mastermind after being critically burned, while the philandering engineer (Barry Sullivan) in Pyro (1964) becomes a gentle but deranged carny when his mistress torches his family, home and mug. (For a particularly risible—but fun!—example of the form, you can’t do much worse than Warner Home Video’s recent DVD release of Queen of Outer Space, from 1958.) Teshigahara and Abe add a sociohistorical dimension by taking the Japanese fear of losing one’s face to its literal extreme: Okuyama, a technician whose features have been turned into a web of keloid scars by a blast of liquid oxygen, is as bereft of his senses and all perspective as he is absent a face, and it’s a condition that’s exacerbated rather than relieved once he’s equipped with a lifelike mask cast by the aforementioned psychologist.
The celluloid Face opens up the harsh, first-person interiority of Abe’s source novel considerably, largely by means of doubling its characters and intercutting a counternarrative featuring a burn-scarred young woman (which is barely an afterthought in the book) with the primary plot line. The effect of the latter is disorienting and destabilizing, as is the fact that the customary horror-flick money-shot—the revelation of Okuyama’s terrible visage—never happens (although there’s a fake-face application sequence that’s nearly as unnerving as the notorious epidermal extraction in Georges Franju’s 1960 Eyes Without a Face).
Teshigahara, Abe and Takemitsu collaborated on one more movie, 1968’s The Man Without a Map, shot in color and widescreen. Like Woman in the Dunes, it concerns a salaryman’s unexplained disappearance, but it unfortunately eluded the Criterion set, likely for copyright reasons. (Trainspotters can order it on disc from Japan’s Asmik Ace Entertainment.) As consolation, there are four shorts by Teshigahara, an informative new doc about his collaboration with Abe and a loving “video essay” (in lieu of audio commentary) on the films by Canadian critic and curator James Quandt.
Unlike most movie adaptations of literary works, which typically fail to find a spark of their own, the films in this collection are driven by rare creative tension rather than wan mimicry: the tension between their boldly philosophical themes and lovingly applied genre conventions; the tension between their protagonists and an uncomprehending, incomprehensible cosmos; and, most refreshing of all, the tension between Teshigahara’s and Abe’s disparate talents, which briefly merged to create something exotic and memorable—like warm wind on cool sand.
Three Films by Hiroshi Yeshigahara
*****
Not rated
$79.95