Pitfall

PITFALL   ****

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1962

IDEA:  A miner finds himself ensnared in a bizarre corporate conspiracy after he deserts his job with young son in tow.

BLURB:  A social-realist critique, ghost story, political allegory, paranoid thriller, police procedural, and existentialist koan; Pitfall’s piebald mix of genres brilliantly reflect and refract the splintered identity of postwar Japan. Teshigahara and Abe don’t so much fuse these idioms as have them generate and absorb each other like an ouroboros, the film accruing ever stranger and more surprising resonances as they cycle through its shape-shifting form. What results is a prismatic parable of a country reckoning with the effects – psychological, economic, philosophical – of the historical catastrophe and transformations that have radically reconfigured its sense of self. Pitfall conjures phantoms and cryptic echoes, aural and temporal disjunctions, to depict this dissociated self as split between a lost past and a virtual, tenuous future. Its endless narrative and aesthetic doublings suggest a body without center, one that has been defiled and fragmented by modern capitalism. While this violence can be understood as a consequence of the economic colonization of Japan by the West, the film doesn’t posit some mythical preindustrial idyll before the fall. Instead, it uses its recursive structure to comment on a history that keeps repeating, companies replacing emperors and shoguns in a legacy of peremptory authority. But can imperialism or capitalism be avoided, and can one even exist as a subject, never mind a social subject, outside of the bounds of such systems? Through the enigmatic modernity embodied by the Man in White, the film conflates these systems with a kind of cosmic inevitability. To live is to be subject and object, to be bound up in regimes that implicate us as constituents and witnesses of history, thrown into a world we can often hardly fathom. Pitfall ties these existential conditions to a noirish fatalism, but the thought it provokes is, like the film, invigorating and inexhaustible.