Sep. 06, 2006 - Issue #568: Sex in the City
Japanese director paints a surreal portrait in film
Its Kafka-meets-Hitchcock premise is that a man from Tokyo, collecting insects in a remote seaside area, misses his bus and stays with a woman whose house is in a sandpit, only to realize he’s being left there as her substitute husband and co-labourer in shovelling out the sand that falls on them little by little each day. Though a little fragmented and coldly aesthetic at times, Teshigahara’s second film is understandably famous: its mixture of surreal fable, Greek myth and poetic eroticism make it eerily compelling.
What Metro Cinema’s showcase of three other Teshigahara films makes clear, though, is that although the man’s filmography is short, he should be better known than he is.
From his first film, Teshigahara’s work evinces a gritty, avant-garde style and a masterful sense of story pacing and concision, opening up a vein of surreal suspense that would be tapped by contemporaries such as the late Shomei Imamura (The Eel) or successors like Takashi Miike (Audition). That film is Pitfall (1962), and its nearly soundless noir-ish opening offers a man (Hisashi Igawa) fleeing through dark streets with his son, then meeting up with a partner and walking off down railway tracks.
In the film’s first half-hour, there’s a sense of tension waiting to burst out from behind the next scene. Teshigahara mixes shots of the man, a wandering miner who’s scraping and scheming to get by, with documentary footage of mine work, startling in its immediacy. Some shots seem handheld, and they are more raw and energetic than the polished, stately shots of Woman in the Dunes. And watch for the scene where the miner is suddenly stalked by a man in a white suit through the scrub of a desolate abandoned mining area. In this thrilling sequence of tracking and panning shots, capped by a brilliant cut, the film takes a dark turn.
The deaths in Pitfall are savage and torturously drawn-out, and the son, left behind, silently witnesses them all. In its characters’ aching searches for meaning in death, in its use of spirits and in its look at labour rights and the collective will of unions, Teshigahara’s debut is a fascinating melding of old and new in its whodunit look at Japan’s post-Hiroshima, industrializing society. Even as Teshigahara moved further from realism after Pitfall, he maintained his collaboration with writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu, whose discordant notes stray into the films’ most disquieting moments. And The Face of Another (1966) offers plenty of disquieting moments.
The tale of facially scarred Mr Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai), who adopts a latex mask in order to live a different life, it moves from Pitfall’s ghost doubles and doppelgangers into a world of spectral X-rays, split siblings, cast models and second selves.
It’s in part a surreal re-imagining of the Pygmalion myth, but the film is too stagey and narrowly inward-looking, with Abe’s musings on individualism and identity often falling flat.
Teshigahara’s shortcomings glimmer through here, too, with the primitive sexual politics of Woman in the Dunes even more obvious here, where once again women bear the brunt of bitter, vengeful masculinity.
Teshigahara throws in super-impositions, freeze frames and some startling close-ups, yet the mixture of existentialism and murder doesn’t quite work here. The ending offers a melancholy view of relationships as mutually assumed masquerades and a striking vision of a world teeming with faceless people, but the overall impression that The Face of Another leaves behind is of a slightly ponderous, overly aesthetic style that falls slack without a rich, tight story fleshing it out.
Another artist, though, provides the story for the third film in Metro’s showcase. Antonio Gaudí (1984) is Teshigahara’s stately, sumptuous look at the famous Spanish architect (d1926), whose strange fusion with the earthly and the unearthly clearly appeals to the surreal, avant-garde director.
Takemitsu’s brilliant score, and the passersby of Barcelona—strolling, playing or working among Gaudí’s many creations—provide the backing chorus to the main voice, pealed out by the Catalan architect’s buildings themselves.
There are almost no words, and Junichi Segawa’s principal photography simply runs slowly along the walls, arches, vaulting and mosaic tiles of Gaudí’s structures. Strange mask-like sculptures, an oddly bulging and undulating apartment block, ceilings that look like the ornate underbelly of another being ... Gaudí’s work, like parts of Teshigahara’s films, is full of an almost erotic warmth, an unreal, warped, vitally alive yet alien sensibility. Stone and even iron seem organic, dangerously alive.
The architect’s askew visions conjure up odd, impossible associations, from termite mounds and Moorish parapets to Cronenberg imaginings and fantasy-film sets. Gaudí’s fantastic, baroque constructions culminate in the Sagrada Familia, likely the most gorgeous building in the world. Teshigahara’s film spends its last 15 minutes lovingly exploring the intricate stone friezes and entrancingly bizarre steeples of the church (the donation-only, post-Spanish Civil War reconstruction will be finished in 2008 thanks to a flood of money from Japanese tourists).
Teshigahara’s quietly reverential documentary of the architect suggests that he thinks of Gaudí as a sort of cross-artistic mentor. Even so, the freshness, energy and expert eye so clearly in evidence in the Japanese director’s films make his work, too, well worth the visit. V
Fri, Sep 8 - Mon, Sep 11
Three Films from Hiroshi Teshigahara
Metro Cinema, $8
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.
