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Missing Persons

By Justin Lowe

A scene from The Face of Another, one of the films in the Pacific Film Archive’s Missing Persons series. Photo courtesy of PFA.

With a series of films based on the novels of Kobo Abe, Hiroshi Teshigahara helped forge a “New Wave” of Japanese filmmaking in a strikingly modernistic departure from the naturalistic cinema of such predecessors as Yasujiro Ozu and Masaki Kobayashi. In a rare retrospective of this creative partnership, Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive this month presents Missing Persons, a series of Abe-scripted Teshigahara films, including Pitfall, The Face of Another and the award-winning Woman in the Dunes.

Among the most significant avant-garde filmmakers to emerge in the postwar period, Teshigahara’s bold black and white style imaginatively captured Abe’s spare, unflinching prose, characteristic of the many difficult questions of national and personal identity engendered by the war. Reminiscent of the absurdist extremes of Beckett, Camus and Kafka, Teshigahara and Abe’s work represents a distinctively Japanese examination of the relationships between individuals and society.

In Pitfall (1962), Teshigahara’s first feature film and initial collaboration with Abe, the director created a “documentary fantasy” about a mysterious assassin who is gradually killing off the residents of a mining town. The helpless ghosts of deceased miners haunt the doomed town, unable to interfere with the murderer’s deadly mission. Teshigahara’s progressive use of documentary techniques demonstrated the miners’ difficult and unfair labor conditions, eerily fictionalized with traditional Japanese ghost-story elements.

A scene from Woman in the Dunes. Courtesy PFA.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) earned Teshigahara a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and two Oscar nominations for its stark assessment of human foibles. A field biologist on a research trip to the seaside misses the last bus home and is taken in by local villagers. But the townspeople entrap him with a widow living at the bottom of a pit who is condemned to shovel sand in a ceaseless attempt to protect the village from advancing dunes. The biologist’s initial struggle to escape, followed by his acceptance of his shared fate with the woman, poignantly illustrates the futility and pathos of the human condition.

With The Face of Another (1966), Abe and Teshigahara took issues of identity to their logical extreme: A man whose face is disfigured in an industrial accident seeks out an unscrupulous surgeon, who creates a perfect mask that lends the narrator complete anonymity. With the mask as the basis of a new identity, the man is able to create an entirely new life and personality, even deceiving his wife in the role of a seductive stranger. Like Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter, Abe’s script lays bare the personal terrors and social dislocations of the post-atomic age.

The Missing Persons series concludes with The Ruined Map (1968), a noirish detective tale and Teshigahara’s first color film, and Summer Soldiers (1972), a documentary about an American Vietnam War deserter seeking refuge in Japan. Teshigahara’s death in April has prompted a critical reexamination of his films, making the Pacific Film Archive retrospective particularly timely.