By Lyle Sylvander (Yokohama-shi, 2001-02)

When the film Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna) was released abroad in 1964, it defied audience’s expectations. Fans of Japanese cinema had been used to a steady diet of samurai dramas (jidaigeki) and hard-boiled yakuza thrillers, interspersed with the occasional war film. The “Cinema of Alienation,” whose thematic roots lie in continental existentialism, was confined to European auteurs.

Woman in the Dunes, however, presented a metaphysical conundrum as bleak as anything conjured up by Michaelangelo Antonioni. Yet despite its critical and financial success, having won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Woman in the Dunes did not herald the arrival of a great new filmmaker. In fact, few, if any, of the director’s subsequent efforts were distributed outside of Japan. Many film fanatics, myself included, wondered, “Who exactly is Hiroshi Teshigahara”?

Thankfully, the always-reliable Criterion Collection (www.criterion.com) has succinctly answered the question with the new box set, The Films of Hiroshi Teshigahara. The set contains an extended cut (by twenty minutes) of Woman in the Dunes, Pitfall (Otoshiana, 1962), The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao, 1966), along with a fourth disc containing three early short documentaries and a short film. The final disc also includes a Criterion-produced documentary about the filmmaker.

Teshigahara was the son of Sofu Teshigahara, founder of the famous Sogetsu school of ikebana. Growing up in an artistically inclined household (his father was a maverick pottery maker and sculptor as well as flower arranger), Hiroshi studied painting and fine arts in college. Despite his classical Japanese education, Hiroshi’s paintings reflected the modernist touches of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.

Recognizing his talent, acclaimed painter Taro Okamoto introduced him to a circle of young avante-garde artists, led by novelist Kobo Abe. Like Teshigahara’s paintings, Abe’s literary work blended traditional Japanese and Western modernist devices–scholars claim they are situated somewhere between Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Franz Kafka. Recognizing their similar artistic inclinations, the two decided to collaborate on a series of films. The new medium enabled them to maximize their talents by leveraging Abe’s narrative and linguistic gifts with Teshigahara’s visual acumen. They also shared a philosophical interest in the meaning of identity and personal freedom in a world where modernity and tradition often antagonize each other. Indeed, both artists viewed such themes not just through an existential lens but as indications of Japan’s plight in the contemporary world–as a nation rushing into an industrialized capitalist economy under the umbrella of American hegemony.

The first collaboration, Pitfall, is based on a play by Abe. It tells the story of a poor miner (Hisashi Igawa) who is murdered for no apparent reason in an abandoned Kyushu mining town. Returning as a ghost, the miner tries to find out why he was murdered and uncovers a plot among competing mining unions and management. The most he can discover, however, is that he was killed due to his exact likeness to a union representative (also played by Igawa). As in Antonioni’s L’Aventura (an obvious model for this film’s structure), the plot is never fully resolved. The miner never uncovers the details of the murder plot and his curiosity is exacerbated by the killer’s (Kunie Tanaka) cryptic remark, “Everything went according to the plan.” By portraying the miner as a victim of a plan which he does not understand, Abe and Teshigahara emphasize the existential torment of the ghost. He is eternally burdened with an unanswerable question.

Pitfall contains a number of interesting visual shots–most strikingly that of the abandoned town populated by ghosts, each of whom is eternally condemned to mimic what he or she was doing at the time of death. There is an eerie ethereal quality to the film as well, foreshadowing the subsequent films. Similarly, the exploration of the doppelganger–in the murder victim’s exact resemblance to the living union member–prefigures greater exploration of this theme in later works. Abe’s script, however, is caught between the “real world” and the “ghost world.” He spends too much time with the plot of the mining unions and this aspect of the story is not fully integrated into that of the ghost story. There is too much tension among these two plot strands and Abe would have been wise to focus more on the ghost story.

Woman in the Dunes succeeds where Pitfall fails–its narrative is strictly confined to an impossibly surreal situation. Adapted from Abe’s bestselling novel, Woman tells the story of an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) who has come to a local desert to collect insect specimens. When he misses the last bus back to Tokyo, the native villagers arrange for him to stay with a widow (Kyoko Kishida), whose house lies at the bottom of a sand pit. The next morning, he discovers that he has been tricked as the ladder that lowered him is no longer there and the sand pit is too amorphous for him to climb. He has involuntarily become an assistant to the woman, who shovels sand from night until morning. The shoveling serves two purposes–first, it prevents the sand from collapsing and destroying her house; second, the sand is exchanged with the villagers for food and water. The entomologist wonders aloud if they are “shoveling to live, or living to shovel?” Unlike Albert Camus’ Sysiphus (doomed to roll a boulder up and down a hill for eternity), the apparent futility of the entomologist’s task is lessened by the necessity for survival.

Such an abstract narrative has lent itself to interpretation over the years–everything from a justification of totalitarian authority to a Taoist fable of redemption. But these interpretations are too literal. The film works extremely well on its own open-ended terms. Teshigahara fills his frame with de-familiarizing close-ups of sand, water and insects. In one particular close-up, sand and sweat form an unusually grainy fluid on the canvas of the woman’s skin. The shifting nature of the sand as it breaks away from the dunes is a recurring motif that emphasizes the never-ending chore of shoveling. The ethereal nature of identity is revealed in the entomologist’s psychological disassociation and removal from his former civilized self, a theme which will be further explored in Teshigahara and Abe’s next collaboration.

The Face of Another finds Teshigahara and Abe leaving rural Japan for the urban sprawl of Tokyo. Based on another novel by Abe, the film features a man named Okayama (Tatsuya Nakadai) who has injured his face in an industrial accident. A psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) constructs a new face and successfully transplants it on to the patient. Okayama’s new face disassociates him from his previous self and, unlike the protagonist in Woman, he re-enters society with a new identity. This newfound freedom has a negative aspect, however, as Okayama becomes psychologically isolated from his fellow man, not only in social terms but in moral terms as well. There is a subplot about a suicidal woman whose face has been scarred by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Her inability to erase the scars on her face leads to dire consequences. Teshigahara and Abe do not offer easy solutions for either character–Okayama is burdened with an isolating lack of self while the woman is burdened with the pain of the past.

Face is even more visually striking than Woman and utilizes a full arsenal of cinematic techniques. The movie is full of freeze frames, rack lighting, fast zooms, stuttered editing, jump cuts, still photographs, and edge framing. In one segment, Teshigahara even breaks the 1.33 aspect ratio and erupts into a widescreen frame. He also films many sequences in parallel succession. For instance, Okayama rents two apartments in the same building–one as a tenant with his new face and one as a tenant wrapped in bandages. Many scenes use the same camera angles and set-up, only substituting the bandaged Okayama for the un-bandaged Okayama. Abe’s script is a solid effort and he constructs a compelling story even though his dialogue for the psychiatrist is cliché-ridden (example: “Are you controlling the mask? Or is the mask controlling you?”) While not as powerful or accomplished as Woman in the Dunes, Face of Another definitely succeeds in its own right.

Unfortunately, Abe and Teshigahara collaborated only once more after Face of Another. Abe continued to write novels and founded a theatre company while Teshigahara took over the Sogetsu school. As progressive as he was, Teshigahara nevertheless adhered to the Japanese system of iemoto, according to which an artistic institution’s management continues through the bloodline. In the 1980s and early ’90s, Teshigahara returned to make three more films, including an acclaimed biography of the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. But one wonders what he might have accomplished if he had continued filmmaking with Abe throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

As usual, Criterion has supplied superbly restored prints and extensive supplemental material. Most valuable are a series of video essays (one for each film) by film scholar James Quandt. His narration is perfectly complemented by the video and he provides specific visual examples of his analysis. The fourth DVD contains one short film about a day in the life of a sixteen year old girl (Ako, 1965) and three short documentaries encompassing such subjects as the woodblock artists Hokusai (Hokusai, 1953), modern Tokyo (Tokyo 1958) and Sofu Teshigahara and his Sogetsu school (Ikebana, 1956). The last is the only one that really demonstrates the director’s talent. The others are relatively crude apprenticeship or experimental works. But these are minor quibbles in what is an exceptionally good DVD box set–ideal for both film fanatics and Japanophiles.