Pitfall (Otoshiana)

A child stuffs his pockets with candy when no-one is around, the proprietress of the shop at the abandoned Old Pit mine is dead, first bribed as a witness to the killing of a “deserter” from the mines who is a carefully-sought ringer for the head of Union No. 2 (the Old Pit faction, formed by the corporation to “divide and conquer”), the suspect is the head of Union No. 1 (New Pit), whose counterpart and rival therefore stands to gain, the two kill each other near the dead proprietress murdered as bait to them both, the assassin in white suit and hat and gloves and ultimately shoes rides off on his white motor scooter with leather briefcase in hand “exactly as planned”, ignoring the wrathful or entreating ghosts around him, the child runs down a barren dirt road amid slag piles away from the uninhabited mining town.

A play by Kobo Abe filmed by a director who has both feet most ably and most firmly on the ground he’s surveying. The proprietress is first seen using chopsticks to pluck ants from sweetmeats into a bowl of liquid, a hot job for an idle day.

Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna)

The leap of thought from working comedy in Teshigahara’s Pitfall goes, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

The hallucinations of critics persistently imagine a documentarian. Kobo Abe’s sacred horror of masks and fantasy is scouringly realized here and in Tanin no kao, but the function of realism is different in both cases. The Biblical text of Genesis for Woman in the Dunes must be understood and expressed as knowledge and not criticism, therefore it is not a parable but a record of experience that represents the whole of human progress from the first (in The Face of Another, realism is Beckett’s “grace, not cark”).

Teshigahara is a student of Keaton, His Wife’s Relations, for example. The narrative is kindred to such films as The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Groundhog Day. “I won’t die like a dog,” says the trapped entomologist as desperate as George Bailey, the line evokes Welles’ version of The Trial, the joke about having a girl in your room.

The Face of Another (Tanin no kao)

The Invisible Man is seen and mentioned. “Some monsters want to look like people, and vice versa.”

Hitler addresses the crowds at Psychiatric Ward No. 2, where vaguely military types go through the motions.

“It doesn’t matter. Men don’t have wings, no matter how high they climb, they always come down again.”

A thoughtful enterprise averse to Thoreau’s dictum about new clothes.

It begins where everything else leaves off but Les Yeux sans visage, with a disfiguring accident. After the more than significant loss of face, a psychiatrist conducts a dangerous and illicit experiment. His specialty is prosthetics that salve the mind, he fashions a lifelike mask that must be supplemented with a false beard and dark glasses but is otherwise perfect. The features are molded from the face of another paid ¥10,000.

It’s tried out at a “München” beer hall. The main project envisaged by the patient is to seduce his own wife. He is successful because she is not fooled, his despair provokes the rift that is final. One might have pretended, she says, but makeup is for women. The last scene takes place outside a theater. Nemerov has

The vacuous expressions of lovers, mourners,

children and pregnant women, people asleep,

racial and sullen and strange and sullenly at ease

as African faces or roughly featured stones

with looks eroded in the rain of time

for concertgoers while the music plays, Teshigahara pictures the strange nightmare of a Japanese playwright, Kobo Abe’s nearly-faceless audience emerging onto the street not far from Rod Serling’s doctors and nurses in “Eye of the Beholder” (“The Private World of Darkness”). Patient kills psychiatrist, now unknown and free, a man who is nobody yet part of the picture (Teshigahara’s department-store snapshots earlier on give just this image).

The mask is deployed fearlessly in its first application at the psychiatrist’s office with a handheld camera that also mirrors Mission: Impossible. A poor stooge buys a wig and beard to swell his image on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (“Wally the Beard”), Keaton’s revolving hats are shown in the rapid alternation of chinwear. The remembrancer of Sekely’s Hollow Triumph (The Scar) is remembranced, and so are the facial exercises in À bout de souffle. Borges has an Asterion like this, “My beard itches me under this mask.”

A parallel figuration, the scarred girl and her older brother, goes still further to prepare the ground for Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August. She does the laundry at Psychiatric Ward No. 2 and fears another war, he comforts her disastrously.

Antonio Gaudí

The story is, J. Paul Getty didn’t want to leave Surrey to view the copy he was building of the Villa dei Papyri for his paintings and sculptures and decorative arts, so he sent a film crew to California. You want to see Gaudí’s work for yourself, Teshigahara is your man, the master artist and logician who films what he sees and knows what there is to know about his subject.

Thorny problems are elucidated, a mass of wrought-iron on an apartment terrace is revealed to be in advance of John Chamberlain, a Baroque ornament is identified as mosaic tile in continuous abstraction which as always for Gaudí as with Sam Francis and Bram van Velde is significant natural form, grading so insensibly at times via late Michelangelo and Noguchi into the thing itself that Teshigahara films that too for admiration.

The other point is Max Ernst, Henry Moore and Guimard. The milieu is Picasso and Miró, round dances in the plaza are deprived of music in one shot (à la Russell’s Mahler) to give the form.

Available lighting is consciously made use of whatever its limitations on a given day, there is no trickery or beautifying, Teshigahara is not a Nippon TV newscrew on a junket. Frescoes of martyrs lay the scene, a village church, early architectural renderings by Gaudí. The works speak for themselves until the Sagrada Familia is supplemented with notes from an acquaintance.

Teshigahara ascertains Gaudí’s true position as one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, one who combines Wright and Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Mackintosh and Kahn in varying degrees, whose artistic purpose and fertility of invention are unstinting. The magnitude of the works is really seen and understood, the camera on its dolly is reflected in an opening door.