Tanin no kao

With his face disfigured in an accident and covered with bandages, businessman Okuyama pulls away from his wife and from society, which he has come to distrust. After a deceptively realistic mask from his doctor provides Okuyama with a new face, he begins to lead a double life with a new identity. But his inability to communicate with others remains, sending him into a deep personal crisis. His feelings of profound isolation find their visual counterpart in a subtly surreal setting, in doublings and in fragmented, distorted image sequences.

Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001) was more than just a filmmaker. He was also active in many other areas of the arts, taking over his father’s famous Ikebana school after the elder Teshigahara’s death. Although he made his first films around the same time as those of Japan’s Nouvelle Vague, they were created independently through his self-founded production company. Of the four films he made in the 1960s in close collaboration with writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu, we are screening two that deal with fundamental questions of human existence: the alienation and loneliness of the modern individual.