For an interesting mixture of Marxist politics and surrealist
film-making techniques, I recommend Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1962 “Pitfall”
(Otoshiana) that I rented from the estimable Netflix. Teshigahara is
best-known for “Woman in the Dunes”, the movie that followed his first
feature. “Pitfall” is based on a stage play by Kobo Abe, the Japanese
novelist and long-time collaborator of Teshigahara who wrote the novel
that “Woman in the Dunes” is based on. Abe was a member of the Communist
Party while Teshigahara belonged to an artist’s circle called “Night
Association” that Abe founded. Like Communists everywhere in the world
in this period, Abe was beginning to become disenchanted. The screenplay
for “Pitfall” reflects an artist in transition, while “Woman in the
Dunes”, a more fully realized work of art, reflects a post-political
outlook.
“Pitfall” not only combines class struggle politics with surrealism, it
also includes other styles and genres including a ghost story
reminiscent of “Ghost”, the Patrick Swayze/Whoopie Goldberg vehicle, a
detective story in keeping with the hard-boiled film noirs of the
post-WWII period, the French new wave, and Italian neo-realism.
Teshigahara was bursting at the seams creatively when he made his first
movie.
The main character in “Pitfall” is Otsuka (Hisashi Igawa), an itinerant
coal miner not that much different from those in China today who were
dramatized in the excellent “Mine Shaft”. He is followed from mine to
mine by his young son who is totally dependent on him after what we
assume was the death of his mother. Unlike the father and son pair in
“Bicycle Thief”, there is no love lost between the two. His father pays
little attention to the boy who trails after him mutely like a pet dog.
The father is fixed entirely on survival and his big dream is to work in
a union site.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/pitfall/
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