Pitfall (Masters Of Cinema)

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Film Description

Beautifully filmed in an abandoned, postwar coal-mining town in Western Japan, Teshigahara's exotically strange debut film is part social-realist critique, part unsettling ghost fable. A wandering miner, looking for work with his young son, is killed by a mysterious assassin. As mistrust and more killings spread through the rundown mining community, ghosts of the dead appear and follow the action, unheard by the living, yet imploring them for answers.

Film Information

DVD Extras

New restored transfer; full-length audio commentary by Tony Rayns; new English subtitle translation; 16-page booklet with a new essay and reprints; Original trailer' Gallery containing rare production stills and artwork.

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Review by Nick Wrigley on 26th January 2005

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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Review by anonymous on 11th March 2005

The print is stunning. Plaudits to all involved.

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Article - "Hiroshi Teshigahara" by Nick Wrigley
Saturday 15th January 2005

Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001) is best known in the West for his second film Woman of the Dunes (1964) which was nominated for two Academy Awards and won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1964. Over the last forty years however, his other films have barely be...  View article in full

Article - "Pitfall" by Graeme Hobbs
Sunday 23rd July 2006

Pitfall is one of those rare films that captures you from the very start with its style and confidence. It begins in complete silence as we watch a man and his child doing a moonlight flit. As they soundlessly pull open a wooden door and we wonder if the TV’s ...  View article in full

Article - "The Face of Another" by Graeme Hobbs
Friday 4th August 2006

Following Woman of the Dunes, Teshigahara’s next film, again in collaboration with Kobo Abe and Toru Takemitsu was a sometimes macabre, sometimes darkly humorous investigation of the nature of identity. In it, a man whose face has been permanently scarred in an indus...  View article in full

Article - "Woman of the Dunes" by Graeme Hobbs
Friday 4th August 2006

Teshigahara’s second film, Woman of the Dunes, a Special Jury Prize winner at Cannes, and a nominee for the Best Foreign Film Award by the American Academy, is the film by which he is best known in the West. As with Pitfall and The Face of Another, it was a collabora...  View article in full

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Masters Of Cinema

Including: Abhijan (Masters Of Cinema), Asphalt (Masters Of Cinema), Assassination (Masters Of Cinema), Bellissima (Masters of Cinema), Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films 1917–1923 (Masters of Cinema), Diary Of A Lost Girl, Edvard Munch (Masters of Cinema), F For Fake, Fantastic Planet, Faust (Murnau).

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