Pitfall was the debut feature from Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara, newly celebrated by the Criterion Collection in a superb four-disc box set. It’s what one might describe as an art film, less concerned with narrative and tying up loose ends than creating disturbing images that become etched into the viewer’s mind. But what images. Surreal ants carefully picked away from stale sweets by a female candy clerk. The skin of a frog gradually peeled off its body. A man’s spirit rising up from his body after he’s been brutally stabbed. Another man, one who shares a face with the deceased, collapsing out of the water and into a mud-soaked death as a butterfly flitters around him. Throughout, a young boy stands silently watching, captured in one memorable scene staring through a small opening in the wall as he peers at a police officer sexually attacking the candy shop woman, reproduced for the covers of both the Criterion release and an earlier edition put out by the Masters of Cinema series in the UK.

What Teshigahara and his collaborators, notably novelist and screenwriter Kobo Abe, composer Toru Takemitsu, and cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa, give the audience is an unparalleled combination of the political, procedural, supernatural and existential. Unsolved mysteries, enigmatic characters, bitter ghosts, and the problems of postwar Japan add up to a mesmerizing and hypnotic film, even if it may take multiple viewings to wrap your head around. I’ve seen it twice now and feel like there’s half a dozen viewings left before I’ll really grasp everything Teshigahara and co. were striving for. The first time I wasn’t prepared for the meandering plot and its misleading importance. By this I mean that the physical resemblance of the miner and the pit chief initially seemed like a notable development, but further viewing reveals it more as the equivalent of Hitchcock’s MacGuffin.

As I see it, the most important idea coming from the two men’s resemblance rises out of Teshigahara’s interest in identity, a theme later explored in his third feature with Abe, The Face of Another, and highlighted by Criterion’s choice of an embossed fingerprint for their box set cover. From this perspective, it’s mildly fascinating, if under-explored. The main character in Pitfall has his life ended solely because he’s mistaken for someone else, a man of importance in a petty dispute between mining organizations. At least that’s the impression the audience gets from the film. There’s no confirmation and the mysterious assassin, clad completely in white, remains a mythic question mark. Without any inclination of motive or speck of rationale, the audience is left assuming that the murderous man in white was employed to kill his initial victim’s lookalike. The only concrete evidence we have to verify this is an inconclusive piece of paper the killer removes from his victim’s body.

Pitfall is a film that largely requires the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions. We’re never left with any doubt as to Teshigahara’s political leanings (established almost immediately in the opening titles by the shot of a malnourished child’s swollen stomach), but most everything that happens in the film is either unresolved or explained with the vaguest of answers. The wordless child of the stabbed miner initially seems like an innocent, a victim of circumstance. As the film progresses, though, our sympathy wanes and his existence becomes mysterious. His ghost of a father never once laments the now-orphaned boy and we repeatedly see him as a silent observer of crimes. Why does he take the piece of candy from his dead father? Why does the only tear we see him shed come as a result of the death of the man who looks like his father, and not when he watches the ill-fated miner try to retreat from the violent stabbings of the assassin?

The film’s strange ending, showing the child running away from the village where he’s seen four people killed, provides more questions than answers. The young boy survives, along with the immaculately-attired killer, but we’ve seen nothing to make us think this is in any way a hopeful resolution. The assassin, exuding a strange charisma associated with well-dressed men, is undeniably a bad man. Had he killed only the miner, we might reluctantly sympathize with his professionalism, but the unnecessary murder of the candy woman tips the scales in favor of a more sinister characterization. By the end, the only living person who’s seen him and lived to tell was the miner’s young son. As James Quandt intuitively points out on the Criterion disc’s excellent video essay, this doesn’t bode well for the child’s future endeavors. His “escape” can be viewed with the devastating counterpoint that he really has nowhere to retreat and his life, assuming he survives, could just as easily follow the path of the assassin as the miner existence of his father.

Like the boy’s fate, much of the film is open-ended. As I mentioned earlier, we know little about the scooter-riding assassin or his motives, but the entire procedural aspect is mostly left unresolved as well. We see police inspectors in white coats and newspaper reporters investigating the initial murder, but both of these aspects are abandoned, shown little importance in relation to the deaths and ghostly incarnations. The audience knows the culprit of each murder, of course, but we see little resembling an investigation. Perhaps this is another political statement from Teshigahara, that of bureaucratic inefficiency, and it certainly adds to the film’s messy qualities of unresolved plot lines and ambiguous conclusions. Without any sort of closure, spiritual or otherwise, the audience is left just as frustrated as the characters in the film.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t achieve greatness. It does, in spite of its flaws. Teshigahara’s debut succeeds as a haunting entry into a world completely foreign to the great majority of 21st century DVD consumers. Though he directed very few fictional features in his career, the filmmaker made an undeniable impact in world cinema and became the first Japanese director nominated as Best Director at the Academy Awards for Woman in the Dunes, his follow-up to Pitfall. Personally, I find the work of Teshigahara and Shohei Imamura, both disciples of the so-called Japanese New Wave, far more interesting than more popular directors like Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Each liked to repeatedly return to the same themes, but I find more appealing and exhilarating ideas in the former two’s films.

- Masters of Cinema R2

- Criterion Collection R1

Criterion’s DVD for Pitfall has an impressively rendered picture (though windowboxed), and noticeably superior even to the MoC release. The image is strikingly clear, with intermittent specks of dirt seemingly on the lens that do nothing to inhibit the image quality. If anything, they make the film feel more real and alive in its lifelike reproduction of the grimy world faced by postwar Japanese miners struggling with conflicts both physical and political. I can’t say I like the overlaps between the two DVD outfits, but I’m glad that one is at least improving on the other. It should be pointed out, as well, that the informative Tony Rayns provides a commentary exclusive to the MoC edition, while the Criterion release, only available in the Teshigahara set, boasts the Quandt video essay. Both include a worthwhile original trailer for the film, creepy and accomplished in and of itself. Because I’m a sucker, I treasure both the MoC and the Criterion, but, if forced to choose, I’d probably pick the latter for its startling improvement in image quality. Teshigahara and Abe’s fourth and final collaboration The Man Without a Map (aka The Ruined Map) remains conspicuously absent on English-language DVD, and would have been a nice addition to the Criterion set