Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara [4 Criterion DVD9s & 2 Masters of Cinema PAL DVD9s]

One of the most acclaimed Japanese directors of all time, Hiroshi Teshigahara distinguished himself in the sixties with a series of sinuous, atmospheric, and daring films. Teshigahara found his spiritual partner in novelist and screenwriter Kobo Abe, with whom he collaborated on these Kafkaesque portraits of identities in peril, films that captivated mainstream audiences while also touching the edges of the Japanese avant-garde. The existential ghost story Pitfall (Otoshiana), the shocking, erotic fable Woman in the Dunes (Sunna no onna), and the sci-fi–tinged nightmare The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) are among cinema’s enduring enigmas and rarest pleasures.

When a miner leaves his employers 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.

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Teshigahara’s debut feature, Pitfall [Otoshiana], was the first of his collaborations with novelist/playwright Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Beautifully filmed in an abandoned, postwar coal-mining town in Western Japan, it is part social-realist critique, part unsettling ghost fable. Examining themes of alienation, workers’ rights, and identity, Teshigahara and Abe’s exotically strange film evokes the cinema of Antonioni, Resnais, the writing of Kafka, Beckett, Carroll, and the French existentialists.

A wandering miner, looking for work with his young son, is pursued by a mysterious, silent assassin in a white suit and hat. As mistrust and killings spread through the barely populated, rundown mining community, ghosts of the dead appear, unheard by the living, yet imploring them for answers. Who is the man in white and why does he sow confusion?

Teshigahara coined the term “documentary fantasy” for this study of the powerless, impoverished worker in postwar Japan. Demonstrating a meticulous aesthetic — his father was an ikebana master and founder of the Sogetsu Foundation — Teshigahara’s efforts with Pitfall earned him the NHK Best New Director award and the luxury of being released abroad. Over forty years later, The Masters of Cinema Series proudly presents Pitfall for the first time in the West on home video.

Disc Features:
• Restored transfer and audio
• Exclusive full-length audio commentary by Tony Rayns
• New English subtitle translation
• 12-page booklet with an essay by David Toop
• Original trailer
• Gallery containing rare production stills and artwork

One of the sixties’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eija Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director.

A staggering work of existential science fiction, The Face of Another dissects identity with the sure hand of a surgeon. Okuyama (Yojimbo‘s Tatsuya Nakadai), after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist’s radical new experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger. As Okuyama is thus further alienated from the strange world around him, he finds himself giving in to his darker temptations. With unforgettable imagery, Teshigahara’s film explores both the limits and freedom in acquiring a new persona, and questions the notion of individuality itself.

Following Woman of the Dunes [Suna no onna] in 1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara continued his collaboration with avant-garde novelist/playwright Kobo Abe and experimental composer Toru Takemitsu for The Face of Another [Tanin no kao]. Starring Tatsuya Nakadai (Yojimbo, Kagemusha) as a man “buried alive behind eyes without a face”, the film addresses the illusive nature of identity and the agony of its absence.

A man (Nakadai) facially disfigured in a laboratory fire persuades his doctor to fashion him a lifelike mask modeled on a complete stranger — totally different from his own face. Shortly after the mask is made, he successfully seduces his own wife (Machiko Kyo) but becomes angry at her falling for a handsome stranger. Worrying about his looks, and the way the mask seems to influence his identity, he begins to question everything.

Takemitsu’s musical score is one of his best, contrasting sweet, sad melodies with eerie, experimental motifs. Alongside Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage [Eyes Without a Face], Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Whale’s Frankenstein, and Freund’s Mad Love, Teshigahara and Abe’s The Face of Another stands proud as one of cinema’s most haunting explorations of identity. The Masters of Cinema Series proudly presents the film for the first time in the West on home video.

Disc Features:
• Restored transfer and audio
• Exclusive full-length audio commentary by Tony Rayns
• New English subtitle translation
• 20-page booklet with an essay by David Toop
• Original trailer
• Gallery containing rare production stills and artwork





• Four short films by Hiroshi Teshigahara: Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako/White Morning (1963)
• A new documentary about the working relationship beween Teshigahara and Kobo Abe, including interviews with Japanese-film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato

• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by James Quandt, Howard Hampton, Audie Bock, and Peter Grilli and Max Tessier’s 1964 interview with Teshigahara
• New, restored high-definition digital transfers
• Video essays on all three films by critic and festival programmer James Quandt

DVDs:
DVD RELEASE: 2007 (Criterion) / 2005 (MoC)
STUDIO: Criterion / Eureka! Masters of Cinema
CATALOG: 392 (Criterion) / 5 & 6 (MoC)
SYSTEM: NTSC (Criterion) / PAL (MoC)
SCREEN: 1.33:1
COLOUR: Black & White
AUDIO: Japanese Dolby Digital mono
SUBTITLES: English (soft)

Extraction:
ENGINE: MacTheRipper/DVD Decrypter
DVD: 6 Full Dual-Layer DVDs
FILE EXTENSION: .ISO (Image)
FILE SIZE:Criterion = 6.82/7.67/7.44/7.38GBs / MoC = 5.53/6.85

Criterion discs ripped from DVD-Rs burnt from .ISOs from the long-retired CerealRipper.

Criterion:

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Pitfall

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Woman of the Dunes

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The Face of Another

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Masters of Cinema:

Pitfall

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The Face of Another

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