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Excellent but underrated film

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Viewed on DVD. Cinematography = nine (9) stars; exterior set design = eight (8) stars. In his feature-film maiden voyage, Director Hiroshi Teshigahara demonstrates that he can be a master of the provocative (provocative extraordinary)---when he closes to be--with films that are filled (actually packed in this case) with incidents and shots that evoke as many interpretations as there are viewers (and likely even more with re-viewing!). What you think you see is, well, your unsettling take away. The film elicits a vague sense of dread right from the opening scenes which does not seem to go completely away! Teshigahara's principal tome is about the nastiness of capitalism (coal mine owners (who are never seen)) and the it's exploitation/enslavement of laborers (coal miners). But he also has a lot more on his mind such as: the exploitation of young itinerant coal miners by older former miners; miners who have run away only to be hunted down and captured (like military deserters); mine-owner benefits from inducing conflicts between/within miners' unions; murder mysteries involving contract killings of union leaders; ghosts (both human and canine (the latter may have been eaten by the former)); land rape by coal mining companies (represented by the bleak landscape of abandoned coal fields in Northern Kyūshū); deadly misidentification which isn't what it seems to be; how the dead might confront and try to solve the mystery of their own murders; symbolic use of white; etc. Acting is OK except for: outdoor death scenes which go on and on (and on); and the somnambulism of actress Sumie Sasaki. Exterior locations (depressing landscapes and a river with quick-sand like mud shores) and set design (a ghost town you may have seen in other films) are outstanding. Cinematography (narrow screen, black and white) uses an antique format, but nonetheless is excellent with many elaborate tracking shots and the extensive use of the deep focus photographic process. Lighting is very good except for early on when some scenes are under lit. "Music" (mostly banging on pots and pans with unusual extractions from a harpsichord?) inter grades with sound effects. The former is always cacophonous and jarring, but is quite effective as a scene booster, and, intimately, becomes rather enjoyable. Subtitles are missing for the young juvenile (who only speaks during the early scenes); but the names of all the players who have speaking parts seem to have been translated along with production department leads. Worth watching several times if only to experience ongoing changes in your perspective. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

Teshigahara's debut, at least as a feature length director of fictional films. Like his most famous work, his sophomore feature A Woman in the Dunes, Pitfall is based on the work of Japanese author Kobo Abe. While Pitfall is far less famous than A Woman in the Dunes, it is at least as good. It's been a while since I've seen Dunes, but at the moment I'd rate Pitfall higher. The story is about a man and his son who arrive in a mining camp to start a new job. The child notices a lanky man in white following them about. The father (Hisashi Igawa) notices nothing. Following orders, Igawa goes down to the beach. The man in white follows and attacks with a knife. The child hides, watching his father's murder from afar. The film is a murder mystery. It is also a ghost story, as Igawa rises from the dead and wanders the camp looking for answers to his murder. The child hides and avoids contact with the human beings around him. The film plays out as an existentialist nightmare, people wandering through empty landscapes, surrounded by distant hills of dirt and rocks, abandoned settlements and seemingly unmanned mining equipment. The film-making style is very cold, very distant, very geometrical in its compositions and editing. It's quiet and frightening. It's incredible sad. And it's one of the best films I've seen in a long time.

"Divide et impera" is an old game used by those with power against their subalterns. In "Pitfall", an employer who owns two mines has had to deal with one big union in the past. So, the employer conjures up a plan to divide his mine workers. He lays off some from one mine and doesn't layoff any at the other. The members of the one big union are supposed to come to each other's aid in solidarity when trouble with the employer erupts and this is one such occasion. However, when the miners of mine number one ask miners of mine number two for class solidarity in their strike to get lost jobs back, the miners of mine number two refuse and keep working as the employer has told them that they will not suffer layoffs. Bingo! The miners in one his mines have been pitted against the miners of his other mine, competing for what they think are a limited number of positions. The consequence is that the one big union splits into two competing unions. It's much easier for the boss to make deals with two small unions for they are weaker than one big union. Message to the employing class: divide and rule. Lesson for workers:unity.What happens though when the employer wants to get rid of even those two unions, weakened by distrust, one for the other? The answer to this question is large part of what director Hiroshi Teshigahara's "Pitfall" is about. Teshigahara wasn't alone in creating this film. To be sure, "Pitfall" was also the work of author Kôbô Abe. In fact, "Pitfall" was originally a stage play by Abe. One must keep in mind when watching this film that both men were leftists, influenced by surrealism and it shows in the direction, screenplay, choice of music and cinematography. Both men saw how the social relations of capitalist class rule kept the producers weak, poor and in wage-slavery. Both also saw the existential theme of alienation between people which is part and parcel of the the system of wage-labor. But neither of them was about to produce a piece of nihilist fiction, which is what many reviewers of this film seem to think "Pitfall" is about. Teshigahara and Abe are depicting life under the rule of Capital and showing how it works to keep workers at each others' throats. As the film opens, a father and his young boy wander a stark landscape in Kyushu, industrially pockmarked by mines and the scattered, wild remnants of a supremely indifferent Nature. This is an environment like our own, one which has suffered from the neglect of civilization's modern rulers. The father is a rootless proletarian in search of an employer and on the run because he has 'deserted'. The film's audience is never told what he has deserted from; but whatever it was, there are other workers who have deserted from it too. We know this because the father is being accompanied through part of the film by a fellow mine worker who is also on the run, a self-proclaimed 'deserter'. We also know because in one scene from a mine work-site a man is fallen upon by two other men, authorities who take him away after a scuffle. The miners who view this in a stunned, atomized silence agree: the man must have been a 'deserter'. The father's young son has been brought up as witness to the fact that authority can never be trusted. He has seen too many ordinary working people hurt in some way by people who wear the clothes and uniforms of officialdom. When he spies a man in a pristine white suit riding through the mining town on a motor scooter, the only motor vehicle around which isn't a truck, he hides.The father, his son and their companion, the other mine worker, leave one job secretly in the night and go on the road to look for another. They fear discovery as 'deserters' as their employer seems like he might be catching on. No chances can be taken. Both land a job at another mine site some distance away and it looks to be a good job too. The father has always dreamed of working for a union mine and of the better, more comfortable and secure life this would mean. This one's not bad; but one of his supervisors tells him that a new boss awaits him at another mine with an even better job and so he and his son take off on foot with a simply sketched map in hand.However, the new mine doesn't seem to exist. Instead, the father is led by the written map given to him by his former supervisor to an abandoned mining town where only one person lives, a woman who owns a candy/trinket store. The woman is as isolated and lonely as the father. She too is waiting for something, a letter from her ex-lover, a summons to a better place. In the course of their conversation, we find out that the ghost town has been abandoned because of all the mining accidents which have happened. Unsafe working conditions have their consequences. Still, the father wonders what went wrong with the directions he got from his old supervisor. He's sure that he's in the right place, the one given to him on a piece of paper by foreman of the mine he just left. The candy store owning woman suggests that he might be looking for another mine, just over the hill.Be prepared for ghosts, doubles and dastardly planned murders most foul. Be prepared to see and even hear (in a jangling musical score) a movie which will intrigue and surprise and may cause you thereafter to continually question the motives of your rulers: divide et impera.

A miner (Isashi Igawa) and his son travel the countryside searching for work. While on his way to an interview, the miner is visited by death in the form of a man in a white suit (Kunie Tanaka). This fascinating, surreal drama, is a blend of many genres, and was Hiroshi Teshigahara's first feature film. The setting is a ghost town where the dead amble about, carrying the pain that plagued their lives. Like the director's excellent "The Face of Another", this is concerned with the nature of identity and anonymity. It is exceptionally well photographed by Hiroshi Segawa with a striking, percussive sound mix. The film was clearly an inspiration for the Danish film that inspired the recent "The Invisible", for it traverses the same territory and focuses on a man observing an investigation into his own murder. Novelist Kobo Abe, who wrote "Pitfall", and was responsible for "The Face of Another" and "The Woman in the Dunes", was a writer of uncommon originality and intelligence, and his work here is excellent. Thought-provoking and never less than totally compelling.