Thursday, January 24 2019 @ 8PM Otoshiana aka Pitfall Japan 1962 d. Hiroshi Teshigahara with Hisashi Igawa, Sumie Sasaki, Sen Yano, Hideo Kanze, Kunie Tanaka and Kei Satō. In Japanese with English subtitles. Black and white. 97 m
“Described by Teshigahara as a documentary–fantasy, the film is all the more unsettling for its matter-of-fact illogic. Typical of Abe’s other works, Pitfall also employs a pulp-fiction framework—a ghost story—but only to throw into relief both our preconceptions of the genre and the underlying truths that it unearths (in this case, literally). Antonioni had already exploited a similar approach in L’avventura (1960), which spends much of its time engaged in a futile search for a missing person. For his efforts with Pitfall, Teshigahara won the NHK Best New Director award and the film earned the rare honor—for a novice director—of being released abroad.” Dan Harper
Links: IMDB Wikipedia Cinescope
See Also: Nianchan aka My Second Brother (Imamura, 1959), Furyō shōnen aka Bad Boys (Hani, 1961), Suna no Onna aka Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara, 1964)