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MovieMail's Review
The reputation of this exquisitely unsettling film has been burnished by the impossibility of seeing it for many years. Does it live up to its reputation? Without question, if you can take the very leisurely pace -- which is testing. Teshigahara's film is a starling experience, and the restored transfer and audio of this print is enhanced even further with a full-length audio commentary by Tony Rayns. A man is visually disfigured in a laboratory fire, and persuades his doctor to fashion him a lifelike mask, modelled after a complete stranger, which is totally different from his own face. But his new life does not prove to his liking: after seducing his wife, he resents her giving in to a good-looking stranger. And then his identity begins to subtly modulate. Like some unholy marriage of the Bogart film Dark Passage and Franju's Les Yeux sans Visage, the film is a unique experience. Perhaps not quite so unique, as the same director’s Pitfall (also available from Eureka) suggests that the director’s was by no means a one-hit wonder.
Gallery containing rare production stills and artwork.
Film Description
Following Woman of the Dunes, Teshigahara continued his collaboration with avant-garde playwright Kobo Abe and experimental composer Toru Takemitsu for this film about a facially disfigured man who persuades his doctor to fashion him a lifelike mask modelled on a complete stranger. He successfully seduces his own wife but then becomes angry at her falling for a handsome stranger and begins to question everything. One of cinema's most haunting explorations of identity.
Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001) is best known in the West for his second film Woman of the Dunes [Suna no onna] (1964) which was nominated for two Academy Awards and w... more >
Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001) is best known in the West for his second film Woman of the Dunes [Suna no onna] (1964) which was nominated for two Academy Awards and won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1964. Over the last forty years, his other films have barely been distributed outside of Japan – never having been released here on home video – though two are released in the UK this month.
Teshigahara’s first four films – Pitfall (1962), Woman of the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966), and The Ruined Map [The Man without a Map] (1968) – were all collaborations between Teshigahara, the novelist/playwright Kobo Abe, and experimental composer Toru Takemitsu (cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa lensed the first three). Both the BFI and Criterion are working on DVDs of Woman of the Dunes, and it is the films which bookend it, his first and third (Pitfall and The Face of Another) which are released here in February – both with glorious restored transfers, full-length Tony Rayns commentaries, and 16-page booklets.
Pitfall was filmed in an abandoned postwar coal-mining town in Western Japan and mixes devastating social satire with the ghost fable (kwaidan eiga, one of the most successful genres in Japanese cinema). It concerns a poor, unemployed mineworker and his young son who are pursued by a mysterious man in a white suit and hat. The acting is of an unusually high quality, with almost all the performers originating from various forms of Japanese theatre – Bungaku, Shingeki, or Noh. While all of Teshigahara’s films are haunting and memorable, Pitfall is his most experimental and ambitious.
The Face of Another was made following the success of Woman of the Dunes and features two big stars – Tatsuya Nakadai (Yojimbo, Kagemusha) and the great Machiko Kyo (Rashomon, Ugetsu monogatari, Floating Weeds). Nakadai plays a man whose face is badly disfigured in a work accident and opts to have the face of a stranger made into a mask so he can adopt another persona. This beautifully shot film stands alongside Franju’s Eyes without a Face (1959) and Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) as one of cinema’s most haunting explorations of identity.
Teshigahara was, along with Kenji Mizoguchi and Robert Bresson, one of Andrei Tarkovsky's favourite filmmakers. Like Tarkovsky, Teshigahara only made seven feature films during the course of his career and both directors debuted in 1962. Despite these similarities, the two are nevertheless quite different filmmakers. Teshigahara was one of a group of intellectuals rooted in Japanese tradition but committed to exploring Western ideas and synergies between the two. After directing Summer Soldiers in 1971 he retired from filmmaking for several years to work as a ceramics maker in Miyazaki Village, Fukui Prefecture. Returning to directing in the 1980s with a documentary on Antonio Gaudi’s architecture, he made two more dramatic features – Rikyu (1989) and Basara: The Princess Goh (1992) (both historical) and died in Tokyo, 14 April 2001.
Teshigahara was an extremely stylish and precise filmmaker (his father was founder of the Sogetsu Foundation, an ikebana school, which Teshigahara himself later headed). He concerned himself with ideas of perception, narrative abstractions, and making films quite unlike anybody else.
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