Pitfall [1962] [Hiroshi Teshigahara]

Opening with two men and a boy fleeing in the darkness from some unseen threat, with an ominous silence punctured by wolves barking, it is clear that the film will be unpredictable in both style and content. Moving on from this we follow the man (a miner) and his son as he tries to find work, until eventually he is set up in a complex murder plot. Stalked by an unnerving, immaculately suited assassin he is soon slain brutally and left for dead, in a move reminiscent of Psycho and its quick dispatching of the main character.

Following this, the character we thought dead rises up from the ground to a standing position. The simple technique of playing a shot backwards recalls another early 60’s Japanese film, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, while there it was used as a slight character moment, here it completely reinvents the film’s narrative – melting away all we’ve seen and reforming into something much more ambitious.


Pitfall contains elements of social realism, surrealist experimentation, crime procedural, conspiracy thriller, and fantasy-tragedy. Teshigahara’s roots in documentary filmmaking and strong leftist political view provide reason for his sympathies with the struggles of miners, shown through the exploitation of the miner and his son and the two union’s confrontation. All the people in the film are selfish to some degreem, the individual selfishness of the exploitative old man hiring the men to do a mining job, the boy taking a candy from his dead father’s corpse, and the political selfishness, as seen in the ironically un-united relationship between the two unions.

Duplicity and division are chief devices in Pitfall. Cinematographically we see this through the sensual distance of Teshigahara’s camera, at once close, tracking, exploring the personal space and frame of mind of the characters, other times distanced and merely observing, displacing the individual as they get lost in the harsh world around them. The lack of structure in the films cinematography is beneficial to it's atmosphere, sumptuous compositions, guerrilla handheld movements, deep-focused long shots, erratic zooms and pans, the assortment of shots is astounding; matching the wide array of story-styles touched upon. The welding of extreme social realism (at one point real documentary footage of impoverished miners is inserted) and the surrealist imagery of ghosts left in the town, carrying on their lowly routines with no effect, and of the many dead characters inspecting their own corpses, quizzically studying the circumstances of their deaths and often probing the living, creates a fusion of misery – both in life, and forever in death. In ghost form the miner laments his hunger – something he no doubt would’ve done often in life.

Despite all these many seemingly contradictory modes and random story-strands, Pitfall holds together well. As Teshigahara’s first feature film, this as a major outlet for his artistic visions, and consequently the film is slightly untidy, structurally the film lacks a complete linking of the many elements at play, they seem to pop-up randomly without reason. For example the conspiracy hints littered throughout the murder-mystery plot seem to go nowhere. Rough around the edges it may be, Pitfall is a genuinely fascinating, thrilling, involving picture from beginning to end, possessing the visual tenacity and narrative complexity of a first-time director finding his feet and unleashing his cinematic imagination.