Spoilers herein.
Here is the rare example where knowledge of the filmmaker enhances the enjoyment of the work. At least that is true for this North American.
Teshigahara was one of a now large class of intellectuals rooted in Japanese traditions but seriously exploring fusion with `western' ideas -- ideas about abstraction, narrative and perception. That class is large now, but was very small in the early sixties, the superficial intoxication with postwar, promiscuous exploration of western style having by then been abandoned.
It borrows heavily from what Teshigahara thought was the Nabokov style: pervasive symbolism, floating perspectives on reality, self-imposed confinement. The notion of `bugs' and collecting is a bow to Nabokov himself who was rather famous in butterfly circles.
(The few mazelike drawings in the title sequence almost certainly influenced Greenaway's `A Walk through H' which explores most of the same notions from the same perspective.)
I saw this first in 1965 and was awed. This film is anti-Kurosawan -- the philosophy used for the camera eye is opposite from Kurosawa's. Kurosawa's notion revolved around a wholeness. Each shot was composed as a harmonious unit -- the action of a bystander in the background was as important (more!) than that of the foreground. No such differentiation was made between foreground and background. It was all of one whole.
Teshigahara's eye is different. He makes a clear distinction between the two characters and the environment. (The villagers are part of the environment.) As much attention is given to the dynamics of each separately. Much is made of the annoyance each causes the other. Transitions between skin (usually the woman's) and the surface of the sand are not to note a symmetry, but a dis-symmetry.
This is very much in line with the famous school of icheban (flower arrangement) that Teshigahara's father founded (and which Teshigahara himself later headed). Traditional icheban has always depended on the `missing center,' the implied elements whose absence is as important as those present. This new school makes that more explicit, with radical assymetries among placed elements. What is seen is made more important by what they imply, which is a quite different matter than implication by absence. Inference by presence rather than inference by absence. Radical in that day -- and it fits in a rough way with mature notions of western narrative symbolism, where certain things represent others, especially Nabokov's notion of frangible, constructed symbolism. That means that each symbol's meaning does not come from context and culture (as many would later and popularly claim) but from the mind of the narrator existing in the mind of the reader.
Twenty years later Teshigahara made a documentary on the architect Gaudi. Gaudi is the one architect who exploits this same notion of inferred reality.
This is worth watching. And Teshigahara is worth learning about.
Here is the rare example where knowledge of the filmmaker enhances the enjoyment of the work. At least that is true for this North American.
Teshigahara was one of a now large class of intellectuals rooted in Japanese traditions but seriously exploring fusion with `western' ideas -- ideas about abstraction, narrative and perception. That class is large now, but was very small in the early sixties, the superficial intoxication with postwar, promiscuous exploration of western style having by then been abandoned.
It borrows heavily from what Teshigahara thought was the Nabokov style: pervasive symbolism, floating perspectives on reality, self-imposed confinement. The notion of `bugs' and collecting is a bow to Nabokov himself who was rather famous in butterfly circles.
(The few mazelike drawings in the title sequence almost certainly influenced Greenaway's `A Walk through H' which explores most of the same notions from the same perspective.)
I saw this first in 1965 and was awed. This film is anti-Kurosawan -- the philosophy used for the camera eye is opposite from Kurosawa's. Kurosawa's notion revolved around a wholeness. Each shot was composed as a harmonious unit -- the action of a bystander in the background was as important (more!) than that of the foreground. No such differentiation was made between foreground and background. It was all of one whole.
Teshigahara's eye is different. He makes a clear distinction between the two characters and the environment. (The villagers are part of the environment.) As much attention is given to the dynamics of each separately. Much is made of the annoyance each causes the other. Transitions between skin (usually the woman's) and the surface of the sand are not to note a symmetry, but a dis-symmetry.
This is very much in line with the famous school of icheban (flower arrangement) that Teshigahara's father founded (and which Teshigahara himself later headed). Traditional icheban has always depended on the `missing center,' the implied elements whose absence is as important as those present. This new school makes that more explicit, with radical assymetries among placed elements. What is seen is made more important by what they imply, which is a quite different matter than implication by absence. Inference by presence rather than inference by absence. Radical in that day -- and it fits in a rough way with mature notions of western narrative symbolism, where certain things represent others, especially Nabokov's notion of frangible, constructed symbolism. That means that each symbol's meaning does not come from context and culture (as many would later and popularly claim) but from the mind of the narrator existing in the mind of the reader.
Twenty years later Teshigahara made a documentary on the architect Gaudi. Gaudi is the one architect who exploits this same notion of inferred reality.
This is worth watching. And Teshigahara is worth learning about.