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Pitfall



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.

SPECIAL 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
• RSDL disc (DVD9), R2

In case anyone missed perpee's announcement in the old MoC thread, here's the official statement from DVD Times:

Due to minor technical problems and their dedication to release only the best end product Eureka Video have pushed the Teshigahara Masters of Cinema DVD releases back one month to 21st March.

DVD Beaver

Christ, what an astonishing looking film, and a gorgeous transfer to boot.

I wonder how it holds up to the Asmik Ace? The detail in those screenshots is fantastic. Looking forward to seeing Face of Another reviewed (sick of this awful VHS).

If you want to know what the film is about, check this out.

Based on the experimental fiction of postwar novelist Kobo Abe, The Pitfall is a haunting, spare, and elemental, yet surreal and atmospheric portrait on alienation, spiritual bankruptcy, and moral descent. Creating his first feature film, Hiroshi Teshigahara combines the stark realism of his earlier short, documentary works represented by films such as Hokusai, a reverent overview of the works by the seminal Ukiyo-e artist, Katsushika Hokusai; Ikebana, an introductory film on the art, design, and aesthetics of floral composition; and Jose Torres, a two-part portrait of the humble and mild-mannered Olympic athlete and light heavyweight boxer) with the Kafkaesque psychological nightmare of Abe's allusive modern fiction in order to interweave states of consciousness and subjective realities into a compelling exposition on the nature of existence (an existential theme that is also explored in another feature, Woman in the Dunes). Teshigahara further expounds on existential fate through the use of doppelganger imagery that not only interconnects the seemingly disparate lives (and fates) of the destitute miner and the influential trade union leader (a provocative examination of identity that Teshigahara develops in a subsequent film that is also based on an Abe novel, The Face of Another), but also visually reinforces the metaphysical connection between the living and the dead inhabitants of the literal and figurative ghost town. Note the condemned, perpetual, empty motion articulated by the dead townspeople that mimic their actions at the moment of death, the evidence and validation of their corporeal existence reduced to the Sisyphean ritual of their meaningless - and anonymous - human struggle. Inevitably, the precariously collapsing pit serves as a dark and ominous reflection, not of a town's descent to economic ruin, but of the moral abyss created in the wake of greed, exploitive commerce, and inhumanity.

According to the snazzy new banner on the MoC Home Page, both Pitfall and The Face of Another are out now...

Definitely out now! I got mine in a two for £30 offer from Movie Mail on Saturday! They are in my pile just below Bird People of China, Azumi and Agitator but above Cure, Pinocchio 964 and Happiness of the Katakuris (I put the ones I want to see most further down my pile of films as a kind of treat!). It may take me a while to work my way to them!

Gushing review from DVD Times. Concluding sentence:

By the looks of things Eureka are shaping up to be the UK's answer to Criterion and lets hope their line remains as impressive as the discs we've seen so far.

Watched it this morning.
Damn exquisite film, music and DVD (a jewel)
MOC are san pareil.

This is a great package for a great film. Something odd though, during the movie it lists a third audio channel that when I choose it there is no sound.

A harmless yet annoying authoring hiccup that has been corrected for the second pressing.

Amazing film, great presentation! Highly recommended!
The score is now among my favorites. Really terrific.

I don't want this thread to degenerate into mindless praise, but this was my first MoC title and it's a damn fine package. Great book, great transfer and a really terrific commentary from Tony Rayns. It's nice to hear a commentator being so conscientious about not narrating the action on screen (e.g. "Well, I think this sequence is fairly self-explanatory, so this might be a good time to talk about radical flower-arranging. . ."), but still making scene-specific observations when appropriate.

I haven't watched Face of Another yet, but there was so much information in Rayns' commentary here I'm worried about overlap!

Pitfall is another gem from MoC that upholds the company’s fundamental promise and high standards of quality. The film is bold and fascinating, with striking resemblances to Woman in the Dunes, the only other Teshigahara film I’ve seen, especially in terms of the director’s stylistic precision, sensually-attuned gaze and meticulous attention to sound. The booklet essay references Tarkovsky’s taste for Teshigahara’s work, which shares the intense physicality and sense of “sculpted time” that mark the films of the Russian master.

Tony Rayns’ commentary, excellent and engaging overall, does an especially fine job of placing the film in its aesthetic/historical context, drawing out the links to contemporary trends in Japanese art, theatre and politics. I would love to hear Rayns broaden his discussion of the rising Japanese independent cinema of the time, enlarging on Teshigahara’s relation to Oshima, Imamura, Shinoda and other Japanese New Wave directors. DVD is slowly but surely expanding the canon of Japanese films to which Westerners have access, and it would be great to obtain more insight, especially, into the fertile national cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The beautiful print, soundtrack and transfer are a pleasure to behold, as are the comely case and booklet. The airy birdsong accompanying the MoC logo is more than a clever device; it’s emblematic of the care and empathy for viewers’ sensibilities that mark the entire Masters of Cinema enterprise.

The experience of buying from Benson's, by the way, was distinctly positive. They even wrote to be sure that I had the means to play R2 discs, which no other retailer has ever bothered to ask.

(My DVD player gave up the ghost during a second run through Pitfall, so the rest of my newly arrived MoC titles will necessarily be sidelined until the purchase of a new machine. I’ll soon be cruising the “region-free player” thread for recommendations of gear with incremental zoom, macrovision-disabling, etc., and will appreciate any suggestions.)

Benson's World solicitously questioned me as to my ability to play R2 PAL DVD, back when I first ordered from them. They must have kept track of my answer -- because they haven't ever repeated their question.

;~}

The trailer included on this disc is especially interesting, including footage not appearing in the film, and providing a kind of counterpoint to it. The same is true of the film and trailer appearing on Fantoma's DVD of Masumura's "Blind Beast," made seven years later. Is it likely that Japanese directors from this period would have had a hand in crafting their own trailers?

Is it likely that Japanese directors from this period would have had a hand in crafting their own trailers?

Very likely. It´s even more interesting w/ Oshima Nagisa trailers. In one case "Koshikei / Death by Hanging" he had one of his actors (Adachi Masao, who was an experimental film-maker in his own right) create the trailer, in the second case "Tokyo senso sengo / The man who left his will on film) the scriptwriter Hara Masato was responsible for the trailer, and used the trailer for critisizing Oshima´s film in a very sharp way. The third case (Nihon shunka-ko / Treatise on Japanese Bawdy song) again, the script-writer Sasaki Mamoru did the trailer.

Only £11.99 for a short period at Sendit.com:

https://www.sendit.com/video/item/7000000098222

I had been meaning to rent this, but when I read about the Sendit.com World Cinema sale, I had to go for this blind. It sounds like everything I look for in a film and MoC is now a hallmark of excellence.

Gordon McMurphy wrote:Only £11.99 for a short period at Sendit.com:

https://www.sendit.com/video/item/7000000098222

I had been meaning to rent this, but when I read about the Sendit.com World Cinema sale, I had to go for this blind. It sounds like everything I look for in a film and MoC is now a hallmark of excellence.

I ordered it Friday along with a few other items to take advantage of their sale.

Podcast on the three UK Teshigahara releases available here:
http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/scripts/podcasts.pl
Granted, it may be a little introductory for the present virtually assembled company, but comments welcome anyway.