When a miner leaves his employers and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean white suit, and eventually coming face to face with his inescapable destiny. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s debut feature and first collaboration with novelist Kobo Abe, Pitfall is many things: a mysterious, unsettling ghost story, a portrait of human alienation, and a compellingly surreal critique of soulless industry, shot in elegant black and white.
Cast
| The miner/Otsuka | Hisashi Igawa |
| Man in white | Kunie Tanaka |
| The cop | Hideo Kanze |
| The son | Kazuo Miyahara |
| Shopkeeper | Sumie Sasaki |
| 2nd miner | Kanichi Omiya |
| Reporter | Kei Sato |
| Toyama | Sen Yano |
| Dead miner | Ton Shimada |
| Farmer | Shigeru Matsuo |
| Photographer | Kikuo Kaneuchi |
Credits
| Director | Hiroshi Teshigahara |
| Screenplay | Kôbô Abe |
| Producer | Tadashi Ono |
| Cinematography | Hiroshi Segawa |
| Editing | Fusako Morimichi |
| Sound | Kenji Mori and Junosuke Okuyama |
| Titles | Kiyosji Awazu |
| Artistic advisor | Masao Yamazaki |
by Peter Grilli
Jul 9, 2007
The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker, designer, flower . . .
by Howard Hampton
Jul 9, 2007
Pitfall is the kind of semiuncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector. Impressively anomalous and consistently unpredictable, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1962 first . . .
