Otoshiana, 1962
[The Pitfall]
Under
the cover of darkness, a visibly harried miner (Hisashi Igawa)
and his young, impassive son (Kazuo Miyahara), accompanied by another
desperate co-worker, desert their employers at an unidentified mining
village in order to strike out on their own as migrant hired laborers
away from the inhumane working conditions of (and overreaching control
exercised by) the powerful and consuming industry. Some time later,
on a desolate and barren rural province, the miner is observed subsisting
through an even more meager - and disreputable - enterprise by feigning
to prospect for coal at a worthless mine for a gullible old man in
exchange for food and lodging, as a methodical and inscrutable stranger
impeccably dressed in a crisp white suit (Kunie Tanaka), obscured
by the stone memorials of a nearby cemetery, takes a photograph of his
subject from an undetected distance. Fleeing to another town before
his ruse is uncovered, the miner eventually finds employment at another
organized mining operation, where he settles into a familiar routine
until one day when the supervisor takes him aside with the ostensibly
positive news that a larger agency wishes to personally hire him,
the earnest proof of his job offer confirmed through the miner's
photograph that accompanies the agency's unusually specific request.
However, when the miner and his son arrive at the appointed location,
they encounter a disquietingly near empty village whose sole remaining
resident, a bored, candy store proprietress (Sumie Sasaki) awaiting
her lover to send for her, explains that the town's mine had been
closed to preclude the danger of collapse and caused the area to
become abandoned as people left to seek elsewhere for employment.
Inexplicably lured into the ghost town, the unwitting miner
encounters the mysterious man in the white suit and meets his
incomprehensible, but seemingly fated, destiny.
Based on the experimental fiction of postwar novelist Kobo Abe, The
Pitfall is a haunting, spare, and elemental, yet
surreal and atmospheric portrait on alienation, spiritual bankruptcy,
and moral descent. Creating his first feature film, Hiroshi Teshigahara
combines the stark realism of his earlier short, documentary works
represented by films such as Hokusai,
a reverent overview of the works by the seminal Ukiyo-e artist,
Katsushika Hokusai; Ikebana, an
introductory film on the art, design, and aesthetics of floral composition;
and José Torres,
a two-part portrait of the humble and mild-mannered Olympic athlete and light
heavyweight boxer) with the Kafkaesque psychological nightmare of Abe's
allusive modern fiction in order to interweave states of consciousness
and subjective realities into a compelling exposition on the nature of
existence (an existential theme that is also explored in another feature,
Woman in the Dunes). Teshigahara
further expounds on existential fate through the use of doppelganger
imagery that not only interconnects the seemingly disparate lives (and
fates) of the destitute miner and the influential trade union leader
(a provocative examination of identity that Teshigahara develops in a
subsequent film that is also based on an Abe novel, The
Face of Another), but also visually
reinforces the metaphysical connection between the living and the
dead inhabitants of the literal and figurative ghost town. Note
the condemned, perpetual, empty motion articulated by the dead
townspeople that mimic their actions at the moment of death, the
evidence and validation of their corporeal existence reduced to the
Sisyphean ritual of their meaningless - and anonymous - human struggle.
Inevitably, the precariously collapsing pit serves as a dark and
ominous reflection, not of a town's descent to economic ruin, but of
the moral abyss created in the wake of greed, exploitive commerce,
and inhumanity.
© Acquarello 2003. All rights reserved.
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Hiroshi
Teshigahara crafts a spare and haunting allegory for human existence
in 
An
off-camera psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) overseeing a processed batch
of prosthetic appendages describes his fragile role of diplomatically
treating - not a patient's physical imperfection - but rather, the
psychological insecurity that underlies his seemingly superficial
malady. The curious, fragmented shot of randomly floating, artificial
body parts is subsequently reflected in an X-ray profile of a smug
and embittered burn victim named Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) as he
recounts to the quietly receptive psychiatrist his own culpability
in the fateful industrial accident that had permanently disfigured
him and now estranges him from his co-workers and family. The
clinically disembodied images are then commuted into the equally cold
and sterile Okuyama household through a dissociating, close-up shot
of a human eye that zooms out to reveal his beautiful and mannered
wife (Machiko Kyô) busily occupied in her hobby of polishing
gemstones as the acerbic and insecure Okuyama attempts to test her
affection and fidelity with vague and allusive casual remarks and
open-ended questions. Spurned by his wife after a spontaneous and
awkward attempt at intimacy, Okuyama returns to his psychiatrist and
agrees to participate in the testing of the doctor's latest experiment:
a prosthetic mask molded from the facial characteristics of a surrogate
donor. Now liberated by a sense of faceless anonymity and relieved of
personal and professional entanglements, Okuyama takes up residence at
a modest boarding house and begins to test the limits of his traceless
identity.
Hiroshi
Teshigahara's 
An
early episode in