Hiroshi Teshigahara

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“He Understood That The Natural World Is Rife With Curved Forms, Not Straight Lines”

June 25, 2013 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Gaudi, background, 1904.

Gaudi, background, 1904.

As you might have noticed from the Google Doodle, today is the 161st birthday of architect Antoni Gaudi, who designed buildings that often seem to be haunting, hiding, falling, melting–like old women weeping because they’ve been exposed to the sun for too long. And some of his other work looks like a future too good to ever arrive.

From National Geographic: “The Sagrada Família has always been revered and reviled. The surrealists claimed Gaudí as one of their own, while George Orwell called the church ‘one of the most hideous buildings in the world.’ As idiosyncratic as Gaudí himself, it is a vision inspired by the architect’s religious faith and love of nature. He understood that the natural world is rife with curved forms, not straight lines. And he noticed that natural construction tends to favor sinewy materials such as wood, muscle, and tendon. With these organic models in mind, Gaudí based his buildings on a simple premise: If nature is the work of God, and if architectural forms are derived from nature, then the best way to honor God is to design buildings based on his work.”

Here’s the “Casa Batlló” section from Antonio Gaudí, an almost wordless 1985 cine-essay by Hiroshi Teshigahara, who made several genius films, including this one.

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Classic DVD: Woman In The Dunes (1964)

March 11, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

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A faithful telling of Kobo Abe’s novel about a Tokyo teacher and bug collector who is kidnapped by an entire village while vacationing in the desert, this Sisyphean drama by Hiroshi Teshigahara is the best kind of parable, one marked by nuance, ambivalence and immense strangeness.

An entomologist who is about to be squashed, Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada) sojourns to the desert to try to locate a rare type of tiger beetle, hoping his accomplishment will get his name listed in a field guide. A world-weary soul who is worn by city life, the educator is only too happy to accept a stranger’s offer to lodge him with a local. As several villagers lower him into a sand pit with a rope ladder, Jumpei has no idea that he is descending into an arranged marriage with the woman (Kyôko Kishida) who inhabits the hut.

The woman must spend hours every day digging her house out from under sand drifts or it will collapse and a chain reaction will claim every home in the very interdependent village. She needs help with the chore since her husband recently died, so the neighbors decided to “trap” her a new husband. Soon realizing that the rope ladder will not be making a return appearance but unwilling to accept his fate, Jumpei hatches a succession of plots aimed at escaping from the pit. As each hope dries up, he increasingly unleashes his frustrations on the woman. But as the months progress, he begins to wonder whether the hopelessness of his new life is better than the frustration of his old one.

Of course, Jumpei doesn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. He will be made to sacrifice self for the greater good, to conform to the collective will to help ensure the survival of the community, to become one more fungible grain on the desert floor. He will all but disappear into the swarm. “If it wanted to,” the displaced man says with alarm, “the sand could swallow up cities…even entire countries.” It does all the time.•

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: The Face Of Another (1966)

August 17, 2010 in Film | Permalink

A success in Japan, "The Face of Another" was a critical and commercial flop in the U.S.

The Face of Another isn’t director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s greatest film–that’s Woman in the Dunes–but it may have more great things stuffed into it than any of his other works. Existential, grotesque and stunningly bizarre, the movie uses some of the best set design in the history of cinema to tell its story about a horribly scarred Japanese man who gets a new face–and a raft of new identity issues.

Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) was horribly burned about his face in a work-related fire and hides his angry visage behind a mummy’s roll of bandages. His appearance makes society and even his own wife recoil, and he wishes he could become invisible. But his unorthodox psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) has an idea: He will meticulously design a mask for Okuyama and the injured man will have a fresh beginning. The mask is ultimately incredibly lifelike and the burned man is able to pass in society, but Okuyama is bothered by looking like a third person that isn’t his old self or even the scarred one. And the shrink is something of a Doctor Frankenstein, caring more for his creation than his patient’s well-being.

The director is asking a host of questions about identity and whether all knowledge–even self-knowledge–is more relational than inherent. Some of the probing is trite, but there are numerous thorny questions to digest long after the film is over, especially in a world where people routinely alter their appearance with plastic surgery and face transplants actually exist. But what makes the movie incredible is the way Teshigahara utilizes design to communicate. For instance, the doctor’s office (which is the work of architect Arata Isozaki) is a mixture of baroque and modernist touches that speaks directly to the outré world Okuyama has walked into. And the psychiatrist who works in that office is less a doctor than an artist obsessed with the way the mind works–much like Teshigahara himself. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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