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Treasures in the Sand

By Rowena Aquino

Criterion's latest box set, Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, has viewers sifting through sand, faces, and identities, below which are some of the jewels of 1960s Japanese art.

With a relatively short filmography, Teshigahara Hiroshi (1927-2001) still remains one of the best-kept secrets of sixties Japanese art movements. Notice I didn't say "art cinema." Teshigahara was so many other things alongside of being a director: potter, painter, calligrapher, sculptor and from the eighties on, the head director of the Sogetsu center/school of ikebana ¡V founded and maintained by his famous father Teshigahara Sofu until his death. Teshigahara's (reluctant?) acceptance to head the Sogetsu center accounts for the short list of films authored by him. But what a filmography, however erratically sustained. Among his seven feature films (he began in shorts and documentaries), those on which he collaborated with novelist Abe Kobo and composer Takemitsu Toru -- Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and Man without a Map -- represent some of the most astonishing artistic collaborative work from the sixties.

Taking Eureka's "Masters of Cinema" cue, Criterion Collection will issue this month a boxed set of three of the four Abe/Teshigahara/Takemitsu films, with a bonus DVD that includes several of Teshigahara's shorts and a new documentary that contains interviews with Donald Richie and Sato Tadao, among others. What a stark contrast from the recently issued Eclipse Series Late Ozu. Interestingly though, the two directors shared one characteristic: both stuck with the academy ratio of 1.33:1 at a time when widescreen was ecstatically adopted (Teshigahara's fourth film, The Ruined Map/Man without a Map (1968) breaks this habit, though). Each of the films is accompanied by a video essay by film programmer James Quandt, and provides substantial critical analysis at once both accessible and in-depth.

As different in tone and look as the three films may be, all are about dislocation and dis/appearance: of identity, economy, geography, relationships. They're also all very sensual, tactile confrontations of these types of dislocation. The fact that the box in which the DVDs are packaged and the enclosed booklet are marked by an image of a fingerprint is not accidental.
 

 Pitfall (Otoshiana, 1962)

Screen capture: Pitfall¡¦s entomological eye

Pitfall was Teshigahara's debut feature, and you can tell. Without any real direction, the film metamorphoses into many styles and genre conventions from one sequence to another. The very loose narrative structure is what primarily makes you wonder why you care about any of the characters or situations at a given point. Personally, it was only about half an hour into the film that my interest piqued (but even then it ebbed and flowed). By that time, what began as a neorealist narrative of the coal mining industry and the awful life conditions of the miners and their families becomes a ghost story/mystery: an unidentified man in a white suit (Tanaka Kunie) kills the main protagonist (Igawa Hisashi) as well as several others either directly or indirectly in a deserted coal mining town. In between the killings, the narrative treads on the politics of union organisation.

Screen capture: Man in white suit

Teshigahara's great visual sense is what saves the film from being simple bric-a-brac. When the miner is killed, you're truly surprised when his body suddenly rises in reverse slow motion to look at his dead body on the ground. It's almost comedic in the surrealist sense. And like Bunuel, Teshigahara invests the banal space of the abandoned town with the strange, alienating and even the marvelous. Part of this comes from the abundant shots of the minuscule and invisible. The scene that introduces the shopkeeper (Sasaki Sumie) includes quite a Surrealist touch of ants, which seems to be a part of Teshigahara's entomological eye regarding all his characters. As for the murderer in the white suit, no motivation is ever given by the film or by the killer himself, and his unassuming, salaryman-like demeanour makes him all the more alluring. I admit I haven't read Abe's play of which this is an adaptation. But it's worth noting, as Quandt shares, that most of the cast comes from the theatre. Igawa is terrific in the dual role of miner and union leader; throughout the film he maintains a pained, confused expression that could be the film's emotional anchor (though this is a bit of a stretch).
 

Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964)

Screen capture: Woman of sand

If we're still talking about emotional anchor, then Woman in the Dunes is just that in this trio of films, and not just because it is Teshigahara's most well-known in Japan and internationally (it was a Special Jury Prize winner at Cannes). This is Abe/Teshigahara/Takemitsu at their most existentially tactile. The film stands on its own from Abe's best-selling novel in Japan, but it wouldn't be what it is if Abe's and Takemitsu's hands hadn't gotten just as dirty (or sandy) as Teshigahara's in the entire production process. The environment in Pitfall seemed insular, but the one in Woman in the Dunes is downright suffocating. But things work in paradoxes: it's only when you're enclosed do you start to think about mobility and, dare we say it, freedom. (Teshigahara/Abe will pick up this theme just as profoundly in the next film, The Face of Another.) The premise is simple enough: an amateur entomologist (Okada Eiji) from Tokyo enters sand country and ends up getting classified/caught himself. He is assigned to a woman's house in a hole among the dunes to help her (Kishida Kyoko) continue to serve her village by digging up sand for construction.

Screen capture: Superimposition

The film unfolds as life in the dunes literally erodes the man's (and our) resistance to loss of identity, social standing, name, and economic wealth. It's only in the end that the man's name is revealed, though by that point it ceases to matter. That's how invested you become in these two insect-like characters who, as the man asks the woman at one point, shovel sand to live or to live to shovel sand. This is perhaps banal at its most extreme, but believe it or not, you hardly feel the almost two-and-a-half hours pass. Teshigahara's visual interpretation of Abe's novel is absolutely riveting because he makes the sand, as he himself said, as much of a character as the man and woman. Time and again you're confronted with images of sand in movement. Extreme close-ups of grains of sand and of faces/bodies covered with sand blur lines between human and natural landscapes. You almost think you're looking at photographs by Paul Strand (think of Pepper, 1932). Outside the subject of composition, Teshigahara is also audacious in his use of visual effects. Freeze frames, superimpositions the likes of which you haven't seen since Murnau or Cocteau, rapid cutting, and swish pans populate. Teshigahara's multilayered visual structures and Takemitsu's jagged soundtrack belie the seeming simplicity of the setting.
                

The Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1966)

Screen capture: The scarred woman

One of the first things that jolt you about this film is the contemporary urban setting. In the previous two films, Teshigahara kept more or less to a specific location of near non-specificity. From the insularity of space, he squeezes out in images Abe's philosophical inquiries into identity, freedom, the act of choosing, and alienation/isolation of the self, among other issues. But here, you get urban sprawl: buildings, crowds, bars. The urban city location is actually fitting because of the Jekyll and Hyde theme of leading alternate lives through different appearances. The scientific construction of a new face for an industrial accident victim Okuyama (Nakadai Tatsuya) by the risk-taking doctor/psychiatrist (Hira Mikijiro) further brings the film to sci-fi terrain. Throughout the film their relationship constantly changes from Frankenstein and his creation to doubles or co-conspirators to drinking colleagues. Visually, Teshigahara reinforces the theme of doubling through variations of scenes, visual compositions and relationships. The most explicit being the sub-narrative of a young woman (Irie Miki) whose face is scarred due to atomic radiation in Nagasaki. In fact, the way Teshigahara introduces her story continues his audacious use of visual effects begun in Pitfall. In a scene with Okuyama and his wife (Kyo Machiko), suddenly a liquid wipe breaks the scene as if it's melting. More than that, the image becomes letterboxed! (But given Okuyama's already highly interesting story, this sub-narrative comes off as weak and to a certain extent, also weakens the force of Okuyama's story.)

Screen capture: liquid wipe

But that's not all: the clinic where Okuyama gets his new face is one of the most stylised set designs next to those in Suzuki Seijun's films: glass installations, sometimes with Langer lines and Da Vinci sketches, and a lot of plastic ear molds (one of the set designers apparently had a thing for this orifice) abound filled with modern life gadgets. It's a jarring space compared to the rest of the urban space in the film. But Teshigahara doesn't necessarily tell you that one is more alienating or stranger than the other. It's the people who make these spaces different, which ironically accounts for the at times heavy-handed dialogue over whether the mask is taking over Okuyama's life or the other way around -- as if Teshigahara and company were afraid that the audience would miss these points or wouldn't think of them at all in all their existential glory.

Despite this and the unanimous critical praise heaped on Woman in the Dunes (which I wholeheartedly share), this is probably my favorite Teshigahara film. In a sense, The Face of Another is a summing up of Teshigahara's work so far: actors from the previous two join Nakadai, Irie and Kyo in cameos, and the themes of loss/ renewal of identities and disembodiment get their most literal incarnation in Okuyama's new face/mask.

Screen capture: The clinic

To sum up some more: I mentioned earlier Teshigahara's choice to stick with 1.33:1 academy ratio for all three films. Sadly, this brings me to the subject of Criterion's choice of windowboxing, or pictureboxing, all of their 1.33:1 films. Pictureboxing presents the image with a black border all around, as you can see in each of the screen captures from all three films. The so-called "usefulness" of this technique is to combat overscan on tube television sets whose display of the image can crop up to 15%-20% to make sure that the screen is full. There is quite a heated debate on this issue in numerous DVD forums, especially since Criterion did not apparently issue a formal declaration of such a decision (nor is it marked on the DVD packaging). As a result of such a policy, the transfer image loses resolution and its original intended aspect ratio. The entire Teshigahara boxed set is pictureboxed. As the argument against this practice goes, it underestimates and under-uses DVD capability of high image resolution and original ratios for the sake of watching the DVDs on tube televisions with overscan. It ignores ever developing technology in TV manufacture that would not have to deal with overscan. What follows are some pictureboxing examples in Criterion releases.

Underscanning: Crazed Fruit

The Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, 1956) DVD's opening credits are pictureboxed, while the rest of the film is underscanned (top). The Criterion release of Mizoguchi's Ugetsu suffers the same case. I guess we could be thankful that it's only the opening credits that suffered the pictureboxing. Why the distinction between credits and film is made -- and apparently this is quite an old practice -- I don't know. Criterion's Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1956) DVD is pictureboxed (below), including the opening credits. Another film of note entirely pictureboxed is Ozu's Late Spring (thankfully, the Eclipse series Late Ozu is not pictureboxed).

Pictureboxing: The Burmese Harp

You decide on your own. I admit that the Teshigahara boxed set is valuable regardless of the pictureboxing, especially because you get the intended 147 minute running time of Woman in the Dunes (which hadn't been screened until recently) and the only Region 1 DVD of Pitfall. Still, you have to wonder why, since Criterion is at the forefront of restoration/digital transfers and DVD format publication.

For an interesting introductory discussion of overscan and pictureboxing, visit: http://www.mastersofcinema.org/reviews/03lookingbeyond.htm

Date Posted: 7/13/2007