Heiners Filmseiten – Pitfall (en)

Pitfall (Otoshiana | おとし穴)

German title: Otoshiana (Die Fallgrube)
Francaise title: Le traquenard
Spain title: La Mina
Greek title: Ο λάκκος
Russian title: Обвал
Original title: Otoshiana | おとし穴

Alternative titles:
Kashi to kodomo | Ловушка | O lakkos | Ο λάκκος | The Pitfall

Drama – Japan
Production year: 1961
Movie length: 97 minutes

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Writer: Kôbô Abe
Cinematograph: Hiroshi Segawa
Music: Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi, Tôru Takemitsu

Movie description:

»Pitfall« represents Teshigahara’s debut as a feature filmmaker and is both an expressionistic ghost story and a scathing social critique of Japan’s post-WWII labour conditions within the mining industry. The mystery-laden plot focuses on a poor coal miner, who is murdered in front of his young son after moving to a ghost town where the local mine becomes a battleground between the two unions that run it. The miner’s ghost attempts to solve the crime and figure out the motive, all the while as mistrust permeates the community with more deaths occurring. The filmmaker’s social agenda sometimes gets in the way of a corking detective story, but he also presents a haunting, often surreal allegory of social alienation and moral bankruptcy. Hisashi Igawa lends a palpable desperation to the doomed miner, while Kunie Tanaka cuts an appropriately austere figure as the unavoidable stranger in the white suit.

Penniless miners talk in passing about labour unions. A miner and his young son go to a village in Kyushu where the miner has been told he’ll find work, but it’s a ghost town, save for one woman. The miner leaves and is followed by a man in a white suit and white gloves. A murder takes place: faked footprints, bribery and intrigue, investigations, a frame-up, and a ghost who wants to know why meet in a story of realism and the surreal. A child mutely witnesses all. Does the truth count for anything in this world or in the next? Can everything be manipulated?

Boy Actors