The Thick-Walled Room (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956)

Torohiko Hamada in The Thick-Walled Room

Yokota: Ko Mishima
Yamashita: Torohiko Hamada
Yoshiko: Keiko Kishi
Yamashita's Sister: Toshiko Kobayashi
Kawanishi: Kinzo Shin
Kimura: Tsutomu Shimomoto

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Kobo Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Shizuo Oosawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The resonant phrase "just following orders" hovers silently throughout Masaki Kobayashi's scathing The Thick-Walled Room. It's a portrait of postwar Japan more critical of all concerned, from the militarists who caused the war to the forces that occupied the country after it, than most of the films made by Kobayashi's contemporaries, which is why it was held from release for three years after it was made in 1953. The film focuses on the class-B and -C war criminals held prisoners by the occupying Americans -- and then by the Japanese -- for crimes they were ordered by their superior officers to commit. Meanwhile, many of those superior officers have been released and have returned to civilian life and even to important positions in business and government. The prisoners are both haunted by the things they were ordered to do and resentful of the injustice of their situation. They also remain ignorant of the way the outside world has changed. Yokota, for example, dreams of his girlfriend, Yoshiko, unaware that she has become a prostitute. The screenplay by novelist Kobo Abe is psychologically rich, and Kobayashi's direction makes the most of its subtleties.

Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962)

Hisashi Igawa in Pitfall

The Miner/Otsuka: Hisashi Igawa
The Shopkeeper: Sumie Sasaki
The Miner's Son: Kazuo Miyahara
The Man in the White Suit: Kunie Tanaka
Toyama: Sen Yano
Reporter: Kei Sato

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Screenplay: Kobo Abe
Based on a teleplay by Kobo Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Segawa
Production design: Kiyoshi Awazu
Film editing: Fusako Shuzui
Music: Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu

Hiroshi Teshigahara's first feature film, and the first in his trilogy of collaborations with writer Kobo Abe that also includes Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Face of Another (1966), is a fascinating blend of documentary realism and fantasy, a murder mystery and a ghost story. Set in the coal-mining region of Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands, it follows a miner who travels around looking for work, accompanied by his young son. He is surprised one day to be offered a job by a company he had never worked for before, hired on the basis of a photograph he didn't know had been taken of him. When he reports to the location he finds only a deserted village, whose sole resident appears to be a woman who runs a candy shop. She explains that the mine shut down after a cave-in, and that she's owed some money and is waiting there for word from a man she knows. When he sets out to look for whoever summoned him there, he is followed by a man wearing a white suit and carrying a briefcase. Unnerved by this silent follower, he begins to run, but the man at first keeps pace with him and then draws a knife from his briefcase and stabs the miner to death, then tosses the knife into the nearby marshes. Returning to the village, the man gives the shopkeeper a large amount of money and gives her detailed instructions on what to tell the police when they arrive, including a precise description of the murderer. And then the fantasy begins: The miner's ghost arises from his corpse and discovers he can't communicate with the living. Moreover, when the police and reporters arrive to the crime scene, they identify the victim as Otsuka, the head of a miners' union working nearby. Otsuka is a doppelgänger for the murdered miner. And so the complications mount, as we learn that Otsuka's union is at odds with a rival union headed by Toyama. More deaths take place and other ghosts appear, some, like the miner, filled with frustration that they can't help reveal the truth about their murders. Finally, the only living person who knows what really took place is the miner's young son, who has witnessed the various murders. But the film ends with the orphaned boy setting out on a road that extends off to the horizon, carrying his secrets into an unknown future. Hiroshi Segawa's eloquent black-and-white cinematography and the minimalist, percussive score composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi, and Toru Takemitsu -- the last-named, a frequent collaborator with Teshigahara, is credited as "sound director" -- give the film its fine, nervous edge.

Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Woman in the Dunes is an absurdist thriller: An entomologist (Eiji Okada, gathering specimens in the sand dunes along the seashore, misses his bus and asks the locals for shelter for the night. He is lodged with a widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives alone in a shack at the bottom of a pit, but in the morning discovers that he is trapped, unable to climb from the pit, and forced to stay with her and shovel sand that the villagers collect during the day and exchange for provisions. As the days pass, he tries various ways to escape, but in the end, even though he is given the means to leave, he accepts his lot and remains. Introducing the film on TCM, Ben Mankiewicz made much of the fact that since its release, there have been many efforts to determine what the film "means," as if the whole compelling drama were simply a vehicle for some sort of message. But to borrow from Archibald MacLeish's oxymoronic poem "Ars Poetica," a movie, like a poem, "should not mean / But be." Teshigahara's film is what it is: a compelling story overlaid with eroticism that, only because of the strangeness and even improbability of its setting, suggests more than it states. It works largely because of the performances of Okada and Kishida, who give their characters a compelling tension, an oscillation between tenderness and violence. The key scene takes place when, after having settled into the routine of their life together, the man pleads with the villagers to let him leave the pit for an hour each day, just to look at the sea. The villagers agree, but with a terrible condition: Wearing hideous masks, they gather at the edge of the pit to watch the man and the woman copulate. In his desperation, the man pleads with the woman to comply, and when she refuses he attempts to rape her. Teshigahara's direction, Hiroshi Segawa's cinematography, and Toru Takemitsu's music add to the horror of the scene, just as they make the entire film extraordinarily memorable, if not some kind of statement about the human condition. Kobo Abe wrote the screenplay, based on his 1962 novel.

The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)

I haven't read the novel by Kobo Abe on which the film is based, but I suspect that adherence to the source (Abe also wrote the screenplay) weakens the film, which dwells heavily on ideas about identity and morality that are more efficiently explored in literature than in cinema. The central narrative deals with Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) who, having been disfigured in an industrial accident, sees a psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) who devises an experimental mask that gives Okuyama an entirely new identity. Wearing the mask, Okuyama seduces his own wife (Machiko Kyo), who tells him that she knew who he was all along and assumed that he was trying to revive their marriage, which had been troubled since his accident. She is enraged when she learns that he was in fact testing her fidelity. But there is a secondary narrative about a beautiful young woman (Miki Irie) who bears scars along one side of her face that, it is suggested, are the result of exposure to radiation from the Nagasaki atomic bomb. In the novel, this story comes from a film seen by the characters in the main story, but Teshigahara withholds this explanation for its inclusion in the film without apparent connection to Okuyama's story. I'm not troubled by the disjunction this creates in the film, because Teshigahara and production designer Masao Yamazaki have developed a coherent symbolic style that creates an appropriate air of mystery throughout The Face of Another. The weakness lies, I think, in the dialogue, especially in the too didactic exchanges between Okuyama and the psychiatrist about the limits and potential of a mutating identity. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating, flawed film, more disturbing than most outright "horror" movies.