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“Pitfall” a movie that shares many similarities with “Woman of the Dunes” and Shohei Imamura’s works, was Hiroshi Teshigahara‘s feature debut and also marked the first of four collaborations with Kobo Abe, the aforementioned included. However, unlike the others, which are based on novels by Abe, “Pitfall” was originally a television play called “Purgatory” (Rengoku). The production had its share of problems, as Teshigahara often disagreed with his film crew, and fired two assistant directors who did not wish to include the rape scene in the movie. It was distributed by the Art Theatre Guild on a limited release, in one of the first distribution efforts of the company, and was later acquired by Toho which released it in the United States in 1964.

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A miner manages to escape a mining camp he was imprisoned along with his son,...

Japan’s Hiroshi Teshigahara, who seemed on track for greatness after winning two Oscar nominations for “Woman in the Sands,” will be the subject of a San Sebastian Festival retrospective.

Nominated for best foreign-language film in 1964, and winning Teshigahara a best director Academy Award nomination a year later, “Woman in the Sands” was just Teshigahara’s second feature, a social and erotic allegory which yoked the political convictions of Teshigahara and screenwriter Kobo Abe, both members of Japan’s communist party in their youth, with Abe’s penchant for the darkly surreal.

Turning on an entomologist from Tokyo who discovers a young widow living at the bottom of an enormous sandpit on a deserted beach, it also won a Cannes Special Jury prize. Hailed as a masterpiece, and building on 1961’s “The Pitfall,” a political allegory which won Teshigahara fans, with Abe adapting his TV play, it looked like Teshigahara...

Twenty-five years after the international premiere of his graduation work “Banquet of The Beasts” in the Panorama section, and twenty-two after “Hole in the Sky”, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri is back in Berlin with the thriller “#Manhole” which celebrates its international premiere in the Berlinale Special program. In this one-man suspense drama, a relatively simple story of an unfortunate incident evolves into a film rich with unexpected twists.

“#Manhole” is screening at San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase

On the evening before his wedding day, Shunsuke (Yuto Nakajima) walks into into his own stag party he was unaware of. The mood is excellent: as congratulations pour in, so do drinks. A bit wobbly after a drink too many in a pub in Shibuya district, Shunsuke falls inside a manhole, and wakes up injured and unable to climb back to the street. To make things worse, his cellphone Gps stops working and...

Twenty-five years after the international premiere of his graduation work “Banquet of The Beasts” in the Panorama section, and twenty-two after “Hole in the Sky”, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri is back in Berlin with the thriller “#Manhole” which celebrates its international premiere in the Berlinale Special program. In this one-man suspense drama, a relatively simple story of an unfortunate incident evolves into a film rich with unexpected twists.

#Manhole is screening at Berlinale

On the evening before his wedding day, Shunsuke (Yuto Nakajima) walks into into his own stag party he was unaware of. The mood is excellent: as congratulations pour in, so do drinks. A bit wobbly after a drink too many in a pub in Shibuya district, Shunsuke falls inside a manhole, and wakes up injured and unable to climb back to the street. To make things worse, his cellphone Gps stops working and a heavy rain starts falling making his situation more insufferable.

Peter O'Toole's acting career spanned seven decades and involved hundreds of roles, a million sardonic smirks, and no small amount of liquor. On screen, O'Toole could be heroic, villainous, affable, and off-putting, sometimes all at once. In interviews, O'Toole was frank and unguarded, quick with a jibe, and unwilling to suffer fools. O'Toole and his frequent collaborator, the actor Richard Harris, have both appeared on many talk shows toward the ends of their lives to tell many, many stories of getting drunk together. 

Somewhere along the way, O'Toole garnered enough fame and clout to more or less select any project he wanted. By the time he starred in Peter Medak's "The Ruling Class" in 1972, O'Toole had already appeared in 18 feature films, including a James Bond movie. That same year, O'Toole would appear in "Under Milk Wood" and a film adaptation of "Man of La Mancha." One might say...

Masaki Kobayashi’s six-part adaptation of the book by Jumpei Gomikawa may be the most ambitious, most truthful film about the big-picture reality of war. Idealist Tatsuya Nakadai thinks he can avoid complicity in human evil by volunteering as a civilian to manage a work camp in occupied Manchuria, only to find that he’s expected to starve and torture Chinese slave laborers. Resistance leads to his conscription in a brutal boot camp, and his deployment on the Northern front as the Russians invade leads to an extended struggle to survive amid mounting horrors. There’s no escape: the ‘human condition’ is that barbarity is a given, a constant. It’s nine hours of suffering that can change one’s world view.

The Human Condition

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 480

1959-61 / B&w / 2:39 anamorphic widescreen / 575 min. / Ningen no jôken / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 8, 2021 / 59.95

Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai,...

There is much to say about Tokyo. A multi-layered metropolis with a futuristic flick; an urban tissue, moving bodies trying to catch the train in ever-busy Shinjuku station; skyscrapers as high as the solitude of protagonists lost in translation; a motionless mass of people wearing their masks in a post-Teshigahara dystopic vision of a surrealist waltz going live (think of the last scene of “The Face of Another”). Piling up her take on Tokyo is Yukiko Sode, the director of “Aristocrats”, with a subtle dive into the melodrama of high class and those below, in which Japanese capital becomes a scene for the bourgeois acts of self-indulgence and a trial for women’s agency.

On the occasion of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where the film premiered online in the Big Screen Competition, I was lucky to e-meet Sode for a short talk. We revisioned our first impressions and experiences...

By Nicholas Poly

After three massively successful collaborations in every single artistic (and not only) aspect, the collaboration led by Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe & Toru Takemitsu came to what’s meant to be its final installment. This happens while the still hot and vividly ‘redish’ summer of 1968 takes place and through the release of the not so renowned title that ‘The Man without a Map’ is. Their overall collaboration has already bloomed within a precise time frame of almost 6 years (which translates as an exact 2 year gap between every film). Abe’s novels for ‘Woman in The Dunes’, ‘The Face of Another’ and ‘The Man without A Map’ along with ‘Pitfall’s screenplay were usually published almost a year before the shooting, followed by his theatrical adaptation. As a result, Teshigahara and cinematographer Akira Uehara, along with the visionary avant–garde composer Toru Takemitsu, the crucial link between the first...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of Modern Art

“It’s All in Me” surveys black heroines onscreen.

Films by Fassbinder, Mike Leigh, and more play in a series on television films.

Metrograph

The earth is ending and there’s nothing we can do, but “Climate Crisis Parables” will send you out with some great movies.

“To Hong Kong with...

Tatsuya Nakadai, one of Japan's greatest actors who worked with several of the country's most notable filmmakers, is set to receive the lifetime achievement award at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

An icon of Japanese cinema, Nakadai's seven-decade-long career has seen him star in films that have become part of the cultural fabric in Japan and proved hugely influential internationally.

Nakadai worked with several of Japan's best-ever filmmakers, including Hiroshi Teshigahara (The Face of Another), Mikio Naruse (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs), Kihachi Okamoto (Kill! and The Sword of Doom), Hideo Gosha (Goyokin), Shirō ...

Tatsuya Nakadai, one of Japan's greatest actors who worked with several of the country's most notable filmmakers, is set to receive the lifetime achievement award at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

An icon of Japanese cinema, Nakadai's seven-decade-long career has seen him star in films that have become part of the cultural fabric in Japan and proved hugely influential internationally.

Nakadai worked with several of Japan's best-ever filmmakers, including Hiroshi Teshigahara (The Face of Another), Mikio Naruse (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs), Kihachi Okamoto (Kill! and The Sword of Doom), Hideo Gosha (Goyokin), Shirō ...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Małgorzata Szumowska's Mug (2018), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from May 28 – June 26, 2019 in Mubi's Viewfinder series.“But does he who loves someone on account of beauty really love that person? No; for the small-pox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love her no more.” A deeply humanistic conclusion regarding humanity rests in the discrepancy between one’s face and one’s personality, as French philosopher Blaise Pascal suggests, and cinema, most of all art forms, possesses the paradigm to represent and overcome it through empathy. Yet, in its tradition of swapping and changing character faces—which has a long cinema history, including The Face Behind the Mask, The Face of Another, Face/Off, and Phoenix—one film stands out with its poignant, yet light-hearted approach, colloquially calling itself Mug.

Machiko Kyo, an actress who starred in some of the most internationally acclaimed Japanese films of the postwar era, died in Tokyo on Sunday at age 95, her former studio Toho announced Tuesday. The cause of death was heart failure.

Born in Osaka in 1924 as Motoko Yano, she joined the Osaka Shochiku Girls Opera in 1936 and, using the stage name Machiko Kyo, the Daiei studio in 1949. Though viewed by studio boss Masaichi Nagata as a Japanese answer to the voluptuous Hollywood sirens of the era, she first came to attention of the world as the sexually assaulted wife of a murdered samurai in Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” (1950). The winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, the film brought not only Kyo and Kurosawa but also Japanese cinema to the attention of the West.

Kyo followed up with starring roles in Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” (1953) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “Gate of Hell...

Twarz (The Face): Polish, competition, Dir.Malgorzata Szumowska. Isa: Memento. After a horrible accident which disfigures him beyond recognition a young man from an ultra religious backwoods town undergoes a face transplant — the first successful such operation in Poland — and experiences ensuing identity issues. Even his mother can’t recognize him and the mother of his fiancée sends him packing when he knocks at the door with flowers — with a resounding “and don’t come back!”Teshigahara’s ‘Tannin. No Kao’ or ‘The Face of Another’Intriguing subject which was taken up with much more sublety and skill by Japanese director Teshigahara in 1966 (The Face of Another) but this one makes you feel so sorry for the victim that you feel like walking out. Which I did after about an hour of commiseration and realizing that Jesus wasn’t going to save this poor guy from his misery.

Japanese art filmmaking writ large by director Hiroshi Teshigahara: a strange allegorical fantasy about a man imprisoned in a sand pit, and compelled to make a primitive living with the woman who lives there. Perhaps it's about marriage... Woman in the Dunes Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 394 1964 / B&W / 1:33 full frame / 148 min. / Suna no onna / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 23, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida, Hiroko Ito Production Design Totetsu Hirakawa, Masao Yamazaki Produced by Tadashi Oono, Iichi Ichikawa Cinematography Hiroshi Segawa Film Editor Fuzako Shuzui Original Music Toru Takemitsu Written by Kobo Abe Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

In the 1960s the public interest in art cinema reached out beyond France and Italy, finally giving an opening for more exotic fare from Japan. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara earned his moment in the spotlight with 1964's Woman in the Dunes, an adaptation of a book by Kobo Abe.

What's contemporary Europe got that we ain't got? Powerful, serious filmmaking like that by Christian Petzold, starring the impressive Nina Hoss. Their sixth collaboration is a loaded narrative that takes some pretty wild narrative themes -- plastic surgery, hidden identities -- and spins them in a suspenseful new direction. Phoenix Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 809 2014 / Color / 2:39 widescreen (Super 35) / 98 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 26, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, Imogen Kogge. Cinematography Hans Fromm Film Editor Bettina Böhler Original Music Stefan Will Written by Christian Petzold, Haroun Farocki from ideas in the book Le retour des cendres by Hubert Monteilhet Produced by Florian Koerner von Gustorf, Michael Weber Directed by Christian Petzold

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

I had seen only one Christian Petzold feature before this one. 2012's Barbara is an excellent Deutsche-Millennial thriller starring Barbara Hoss as an East German doctor trying to do...