As The Face of One other turns 60, the Japanese New Wave director’s cinematic battlegrounds of alienation, exploitation and fractured id stay as haunting as ever.
Generally, a way of self can turn out to be a burden. The spectre of exploitation; the load of labour on somebody’s again; the impossibility of current in a sprawling, countless house. These are the emotions which might be drawn out of the protagonists of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s movies. The Japanese New Wave director, finest recognized for his 1964 masterpiece The Girl in The Dunes, has had a singular fixation ever since his 1962 debut characteristic, Pitfall: at what level does an individual cease changing into an individual? His movies typically happen throughout landscapes that threaten to swallow up his protagonists: in Pitfall, it is the mines and their seemingly countless depths; in 1966’s The Face of One other, the sprawl of the metropolis renders his characters invisible. To spend too lengthy in these locations, is to threat disappearing fully.
Generally, as in Pitfall, this occurs in the way in which that we would anticipate: by dying. Directly a ghost story and a homicide thriller about industrial strife and employee exploitation, Teshigahara’s debut tells the story of a mine employee killed by a mysterious determine clad all in white, who then goes on to border the union chief Otsuka, a determine bearing a hanging resemblance to the Miner (each are performed by Hishashi Igawa). Whereas each the economic strife of the homicide plot, and the desperation that leads the nameless Miner to the deserted city the place he meets his finish, will probably be explored with higher readability later in Teshigahara’s profession with The Face of One other, his command of house, the methods by which it dwarfs and even threatens to destroy his miniscule human figures, is on full show from the very starting. As he lies awake, ready to discover a manner out of his scenario, the Miner in Pitfall laments the concept of inevitably ending up at simply one other mine, and even being “reborn in hell,” one thing that lingers over Teshigahara’s characters. A morbid sense of invisibility grabs maintain of those males; dwelling or dying, with their very own face or another person’s, they appear to vanish into the world.
The query of survival turns into a religious one: how does the soul survive in a world the place the physique is denied freedom or company? In Pitfall, company disappears together with the spark of life, leaving the Miner to navigate a world inhabited by silent, looping spirits within the deserted city he moved to earlier than his dying. Girl within the Dunes takes these themes of countless labour and burrows into them even deeper: the entomologist Niki Jupei is trapped in a home within the dunes with an remoted younger widow. If the 2 of them don’t dig out the sand that threatens them each evening, the home will probably be buried alive. With no ladder, plainly there’s no manner again up from the dunes. All that’s left is the unforgiving nature of the weather, and the fixed labour that actually retains the 2 characters alive. The movie has a deeply elemental language, drawing emphasis to the warmth of the solar, the size of the nights, and the shifting, ominous risk of the sands whereas constantly drawing visible parallels between Jupei, the widow, and the captured bugs. These mere mortals are made tiny, inconsequential. Their lives start and finish with the labour that they don’t have any alternative however to carry out again and again, each different chance shrinking earlier than them.
Within the last act, Jupei begs to be lifted from the dunes, not in order that he may be free, however simply in order that he can see the ocean and the horizon past it, yelling up on the villagers who hold him and the Widow trapped there and insisting he gained’t attempt to escape. All he desires is thirty minutes – a quantity he rapidly reduces to twenty, after which to 10. Something exterior of the confines of the dunes disappears earlier than him to the purpose that even the opportunity of escape, and that view of the horizon, lose their lustre. There may be, he says to himself, at all times tomorrow. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, till the final syllable of recorded time.
The place Pitfall and Dunes strip away at a way of self, by dying or torturous labour, The Face of One other begins from one level of invisibility and considers what occurs when one other one is made accessible. The movie follows Okuyama, an engineer recovering from the burns brought on by an industrial accident who continues to put on bandages over his face even after the worst of it has healed. An enigmatic physician presents him a second face: a masks made to suit over his burned pores and skin, one thing that threatens to vary Okuyama from inside. There’s a pressure that emerges right here: whereas it makes him a actually nameless, faceless determine, there’s no option to transfer away from himself. His secretary instantly waves him by – as a result of who else would have a face like his? – and he describes himself as having “turn out to be a monster.” It’s when foregrounding the tactile nature and artificiality of the world surrounding Okuyama that The Face of One other involves life, and zeroing in on the masks that turns into his second face. The dissonance between his outdated self and the one dropped at the floor by a prosthetic face lies on the core of Teshigahara’s exploration of an enormous, careless metropolis unsettling the sense of self.
Given the sense of inevitability that pervades Teshigahara’s cinema, together with his characters crushed down by callous landscapes and brutal exploitation, it feels unusual to counsel that every of them comprises a flicker of hope. Even whether it is one thing that may solely be understood as an absence. By exhibiting the methods by which it may be chipped away, Teshigahara shows a deep, empathic understanding of precisely what it’s that’s being misplaced in his characters. There’s typically a want right here for one thing new, one thing totally different or higher than what at present exists. Earlier than shifting to a brand new city, the Miner in Pitfall talks about the opportunity of being reincarnated as a union man; Okuyama is pushed by the will to return to the humanity that he feels he has misplaced the accident and the invisibility of his bandages (he so typically seems to be like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man) however the darkness of those movies comes from the way in which that Teshigahara’s characters can’t grasp onto this chance, compelled as an alternative – by exploitation, by violence, by loneliness below capitalism – to see themselves disappearing, inch by inch, and second by second.
