Pitfall (‘Otoshiana’, 1962) marks the first of the four
intriguing collaborations between director Hiroshi Teshigahara, novelist and
playwright Kobo Abe (who adapted his own novels), and the renowned composer
Toru Takemitsu. Kobo Abe’s profound existential stories overcame the
difficulties faced by literary works that tries to don the film-form, thanks largely
to Mr. Teshigahara’s magnificent ability to envision unique aesthetics for
Abe’s metaphorical and emotional expressions, combined with Mr. Takemitsu’s
dissonant and uncomfortable musical score. Although the partnership gained
global acknowledgment only with the release of Woman in the Dunes (1964) and
The Face of Another (1966), which became part of a ‘new wave’ in Japanese cinema,
Pitfall contains all the visually daring elements and pointed social critique
that were further elaborately addressed in those subsequent acclaimed works. The
film starts as a social realist tale of a poor miner, but then employs elements
of surrealism and absurdism to deliver an arresting allegory on the corrupted
authority of post-war Japan. In fact, the director himself calls his unique
aesthetic style as ‘documentary/fantasy’.
Pitfall opens at nighttime with a man (Hisashi Igawa), his little
son (Kazuo Miyahara), and the man’s friend (Kanichi Omiya) escaping from a
ramshackle camp-town. They address themselves as deserters and fear bounty
hunters might be after them. As if confirming their fears, the boy sees a man
dressed in white suit (Kunie Tanaka) observing them from a distance. The men,
however, aren’t prisoners but just exploited miners, dreading the punishment of
mining establishment. The miners do some odd jobs and are always on the move.
In one mining town, the miner is advised to visit a nearby village for a job.
With the help of a map, the miner and his son walk to the village, which they
find to be deserted, except for a female shopkeeper living there. She sells
candies and waits for the letter from her lover.
The miner realizes this was an abandoned mining camp, and
wonders why he was asked to visit the place. Before long, the man in white suit
follows the miner and starts stabbing him with a knife. The miner dies. The son
come across his father’s corpse and reacts with an unfathomable indifference.
Meanwhile, the man in the white suit approaches the shopkeeper to bestow her with
cash, and to say to the police that the killer looked like a miner with a bald
spot above his right ear.
Amongst all these mysterious happenings, the miner
himself arises; but only as a ghost, forever doomed to haunt the ghost town. Invisible
to the living, the miner’s ghost witnesses the unfolding investigation with
great frustration. The testimony of the shopkeeper misleads the investigation
and throws suspicion on two rival union officials of a mining company. The
mystery deepens and the threat of violence persists, although Teshigahara and
Abe use the twists and bloodletting to reflect on existential concerns.
Woman in the Dunes was best known for director Teshigahara
and cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa’s unique imagery of juxtaposing the
landscape of shifting sand with the body and it’s self; such that in some of
the fantastic shot compositions the naked body’s creases and folds resemble
that of the dunes. The existential questions and themes of identity Abe deals
in the novel finds a firm anchor in this particular form of visual
representation that explores the relation between body, self, and the landscape
(which naturally addresses the cultural and social concerns).
In Pitfall, Segawa
and Teshigahara seem to have first attempted those visual ideas (setting precedence)
that worked more perfectly in Woman in the Dunes, supported by the novel’s stronger
metaphorical structure. Since Pitfall’s story is a bit uneven compared to the
other two heralded adaptations of Abe’s novels, the hypnotic black-and-white
imagery easily overpowers the genre-splicing storytelling.
Unlike Woman in the Dunes, Pitfall fails a bit to strike the
right balance between allegorical and psychological/emotional concerns. Hence
the film works a lot on metaphorical level by theorizing on what the man in
white suit represents or what the boy’s apathetic stance represent and so on. But
except for the sad predicament of shopkeeper and the miner (which in itself is
mixed with elements of absurdism), there’s not much emotional investment in the
narrative. Nevertheless, there’s lot of arresting visuals here to lose
ourselves and ponder over the abstract questions of existentialism.
The visual
motif of voyeurism recurs throughout the narrative: for instance, the extreme
close-up of the shopkeeper’s sweaty body and the iconic shot of a boy peeking
through a knothole. Another recurrent visual idea is nature’s indifference to
human endeavors. While human actions advance towards a predestined fate that’s
supposed to have some meaning, the nature is portrayed as an ominous presence devoid
of meaning. I couldn’t clearly understand the meaning of the boy’s presence. He
could represent the viewers’ distanced perspective, a voyeur like us witnessing
the events with morbid curiosity.
Similar to Abe’s other works, Pitfall emphasizes both on the
universal existential themes as well as on the Japanese sociopolitical and
sociocultural realities of the time. Earlier, in the film Teshigahara infuses
news clips and footage of real mining accidents to paint a grisly picture of
the occupation. This along with the miner articulating his dream to work in a
unionized, regulated mining industry addresses the increasing western corporate
imperialism in Japanese industries, although officially those years were
considered as the boom period in post-war industrial Japan.
Therefore, the film
clearly deals with the pitfalls of rivalry and violence conceived by the new
capitalistic system of Japan to perpetually keep the workers in conflict. At the same
time, incapacitated spectral forms of the miner and shopkeeper represent the
universal themes of ill-treatment of working class and the ruthlessness of
hidden power (the three violent deaths of workers near the marshland also talks
of an existential deadlock created by the authority). Finally, Toru Takemitsu’s
creepily effective soundtrack merges well with Teshigahara’s experimentation
with form and tone.
Overall, Pitfall (97 minutes) plays with mystery and
thriller genre elements to construct a distinctly visualized existential
cinema.
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