#393: TESHIGAHARA, Hiroshi: Pitfall (1962)
THREE FILMS BY HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA {Spine #392} OOP
TESHIGAHARA, Hiroshi (Japan)
Pitfall [1962]
Spine #393
DVD
OOP
DVD
OOP
When a miner leaves his employer and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face-to-face with his inescapable destiny. Hiroshi Teshigahara's debut feature and first collaboration with novelist Kobo Abe, Pitfall is many things: a mysterious, unsettling ghost story, a portrait of human alienation, and a compellingly surreal critique of soulless industry, shot in elegant black and white.
97 minutes
Black & White
Black & White
Monaural
in Japanese
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2007
Director/Writer
Story by Kôbô Abe.
Hiroshi Teshigahara was 35 when he directed Pitfall.
Other Teshigahara films in the Collection:
#394: Woman In The Dunes (1964)
#395: The Face Of Another (1966)
#425: Antonio Gaudi (1984)
The Film
Other Teshigahara films in the Collection:
#394: Woman In The Dunes (1964)
#395: The Face Of Another (1966)
#425: Antonio Gaudi (1984)
The Film
The cover image (above) tells it all. A creepy shot of a closed eye peering through an opening in a knot of wood. In the next shot, we see it is the boy (Kazuo Miyahara) peeping in on the cop (Hideo Kanze) and the shopkeeper (Sumie Sasaki) …
A true collaboration between the writer, director, and composer (Tōru Takemitsu), Pitfall is everything you might expect from a debut feature worked on by three such high-minded intellectuals. The budget may have demanded that the film be shot in black-and-white, but the fantastic chiaroscuro is the result of careful planning and execution.
Hisashi Igawa (157 IMDb credits) is fantastic in this doppelgänger role; and Kunie Tanaka equally good as the bad guy.
Not a bad debut for one of Japan’s most important directors.
Film Rating (0-60):
The Booklet
Sixty-eight page booklet featuring essays by Peter Grilli and Howard Hampton; interview with Teshigahara by Max Tessier.
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The ExtrasThe Booklet
Sixty-eight page booklet featuring essays by Peter Grilli and Howard Hampton; interview with Teshigahara by Max Tessier.
Grilli:
“Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a harsh terrain, still devastated by nuclear holocaust and by the fire bombings that had reduced most Japanese cities to ashes. The world in which Abe, Teshigahara, and Takemitsu came of age as expressive artists was not one for which they had been prepared by their forebears or by any social legacy … it seems hardly surprising that the compelling themes of Japanese artists of the day were those of alienation, the search for identity, and the struggle for survival in a wasted landscape — or that their styles and languages of expression should have been so austere, desiccated, and severe.”
Hampton:
“Every few minutes, Pitfall seems to morph into or back out of a new movie — shades of underclass struggle (abrupt newsreel inserts of starving, deformed children and striking miners, the occasional sharp note of leftist requiem), hearty folk con game (a couple of scamming miners scrounging food by pretending to dig for coal on the hopeless property of an ‘old hick’ farmer), modernist paranoia (cool Mr. White Suit lurking in the telephoto distance, then slipping into close-up range for the kill), haunted tract housing (an actual ghost town), or the whole broad-daylight netherworld that encompasses them all. In its intently compacted landfill of a mise-en-scène, Pitfall nicely avoids any easy, rational categorization as foregone tragedy or even brackish bombed-out absurdism. ‘Being invisible might have been useful when I was alive,’ the miner’s thick specter moans obliviously, ‘but this is unbearable.’”
Tessier interview:
Tessier: “In Pitfall there was still a lot of social content but already treated in a ‘different’ manner, in a rather fantastic tone. How did you decide to translate the specific style of Kobo Abe into cinematic terms?”
Teshigahara: “I wanted to express the decline of the coal industry and the reality of it in a different context, using images more than dialogue, contrary to the practice of the ‘progressives’ of the time.”
Commentary
None.
Video essay
On the film by critic and festival programmer James Quandt.
A fine appraisal of Teshigahara’s work, in general.
Theatrical trailer
A fine appraisal of Teshigahara’s work, in general.
Theatrical trailer
Japanese trailers are so much more innovative than Hollywood’s. Some images are shown in negative, including one not seen in the actual film …
Extras Rating (0-40):
Extras Rating (0-40):
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