In Praise of Hiroshi Teshigahara: Surveyor of the Abyss

As The Face of Another turns 60, the Japanese New Wave director’s cinematic battlegrounds of alienation, exploitation and fractured identity remain as haunting as ever.

Sometimes, a sense of self can become a burden. The spectre of exploitation; the weight of labour on someone’s back; the impossibility of existing in a sprawling, endless space. These are the feelings that are drawn out of the protagonists of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s films. The Japanese New Wave director, best known for his 1964 masterpiece The Woman in The Dunes, has had a singular fixation ever since his 1962 debut feature, Pitfall: at what point does a person stop becoming a person? His films often take place across landscapes that threaten to swallow up his protagonists: in Pitfall, it’s the mines and their seemingly endless depths; in 1966’s The Face of Another, the sprawl of the metropolis renders his characters invisible. To spend too long in these places, is to risk disappearing entirely.

Sometimes, as in Pitfall, this happens in the way that we might expect: through death. At once a ghost story and a murder mystery about industrial strife and worker exploitation, Teshigahara’s debut tells the story of a mine worker killed by a mysterious figure clad all in white, who then goes on to frame the union leader Otsuka, a figure bearing a striking resemblance to the Miner (both are played by Hishashi Igawa). While both the industrial strife of the murder plot, and the desperation that leads the anonymous Miner to the abandoned town where he meets his end, will be explored with greater clarity later in Teshigahara’s career with The Face of Another, his command of space, the ways in which it dwarfs and even threatens to destroy his miniscule human figures, is on full display from the very beginning. As he lies awake, waiting to find a way out of his situation, the Miner in Pitfall laments the idea of inevitably ending up at just another mine, or even being “reborn in hell,” something that lingers over Teshigahara’s characters. A morbid sense of invisibility grabs hold of these men; living or dying, with their own face or someone else’s, they seem to disappear into the world. 

The question of survival becomes a spiritual one: how does the soul survive in a world where the body is denied freedom or agency? In Pitfall, agency disappears along with the spark of life, leaving the Miner to navigate a world inhabited by silent, looping spirits in the abandoned town he moved to before his death. Woman in the Dunes takes these themes of endless labour and burrows into them even deeper: the entomologist Niki Jupei is trapped in a house in the dunes with an isolated young widow. If the two of them don’t dig out the sand that threatens them every night, the house will be buried alive. Without a ladder, it seems that there’s no way back up from the dunes. All that’s left is the unforgiving nature of the elements, and the constant labour that literally keeps the two characters alive. The film has a deeply elemental language, drawing emphasis to the heat of the sun, the length of the nights, and the shifting, ominous threat of the sands while continuously drawing visual parallels between Jupei, the widow, and the captured insects. These mere mortals are made tiny, inconsequential. Their lives begin and end with the labour that they have no choice but to perform over and over again, every other possibility shrinking before them. 

In the final act, Jupei begs to be lifted from the dunes, not so that he can be free, but just so that he can see the sea and the horizon beyond it, yelling up at the villagers who keep him and the Widow trapped there and insisting he won’t try to escape. All he wants is thirty minutes – a number he quickly reduces to twenty, and then to ten. Anything outside of the confines of the dunes disappears before him to the point that even the possibility of escape, and that view of the horizon, lose their lustre. There is, he says to himself, always tomorrow. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until the last syllable of recorded time.

Where Pitfall and Dunes strip away at a sense of self, through death or torturous labour, The Face of Another begins from one point of invisibility and considers what happens when another one is made available. The film follows Okuyama, an engineer recovering from the burns caused by an industrial accident who continues to wear bandages over his face even after the worst of it has healed. An enigmatic doctor offers him a second face: a mask made to fit over his burned skin, something that threatens to change Okuyama from within. There’s a tension that emerges here: while it makes him a literally anonymous, faceless figure, there’s no way to move away from himself. His secretary immediately waves him through – because who else would have a face like his? – and he describes himself as having “become a monster.” It’s when foregrounding the tactile nature and artificiality of the world surrounding Okuyama that The Face of Another comes to life, and zeroing in on the mask that becomes his second face. The dissonance between his old self and the one brought to the surface by a prosthetic face lies at the core of Teshigahara’s exploration of a vast, careless city unsettling the sense of self.

Given the sense of inevitability that pervades Teshigahara’s cinema, with his characters beaten down by callous landscapes and brutal exploitation, it feels strange to suggest that each of them contains a flicker of hope. Even if it is something that can only be understood as an absence. By showing the ways in which it can be chipped away, Teshigahara displays a deep, empathic understanding of exactly what it is that’s being lost in his characters. There’s often a desire here for something new, something different or better than what currently exists. Before moving to a new town, the Miner in Pitfall talks about the possibility of being reincarnated as a union man; Okuyama is driven by the desire to return to the humanity that he feels he has lost the accident and the invisibility of his bandages (he so often looks like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man) but the darkness of these films comes from the way that Teshigahara’s characters can’t grasp onto this possibility, forced instead – by exploitation, by violence, by loneliness under capitalism – to see themselves disappearing, inch by inch, and moment by moment.