Cinema was just one of the art-forms mastered by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Yet his mastery of flower arranging (or ikebana), painting, calligraphy and ceramics informed his film-making and gave his work a visual texture that enhanced the immediacy of its subject matter. The extended run of his best-known picture, Woman Of The Dunes (1964), at the National Film Theatre is accompanied by a retrospective of his short, but consistently intriguing feature career that confirms him as one of the foremost talents in Japanese cinema history.
Having completed a series of acclaimed shorts, Teshigahara made his feature debut with Pitfall (1964), one of four pictures on which he collaborated with novelist Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu. Abe's source novel was an experimental existentialist exploration of the moral and economic repercussions of commercial avarice and Teshigahara fashioned a style he called `documentary fantasy' to capture the social decay of a mining village literally on the verge of collapse.
He would return to the themes of this ghost story-cum-political parable in both Woman Of The Dunes - for which he became the first Asian director to be nominated for an Academy Award - and The Face Of Another (1966, pictured). Whereas miner Hisashi Igawa closely resembled a union leader in Pitfall, burn victim Tatsuya Nakadai receives a new face in this disconcerting study of identity and social status, which bears comparison with both Frankenstein and Georges Franju's stylised 1959 classic, Eyes Without A Face.
The descent of Nakadai's arrogant industrialist into bitterness and violence after his wife Machiko Kyō rejects and then unwittingly betrays him is pure melodrama. But through his dispassionate depiction of the human body and his audacious approach to film grammar, Teshigahara exposes the limitations of science and presents a terrifying picture of our physical and psychological fragility.
Shot in colour and CinemaScope, The Ruined Map (1968) marked a distinct stylistic change from Teshigahara's earlier work. But it continued to harp on the ideas of identity and duplicity, as Tokyo detective Shintaro Katsu gradually comes to realise that his life is beginning to resemble that of the missing man he's been hired to track down. He then changed tack again with Summer Soldiers (1972), a raw docudramatic look at the American deserters who had sought sanctuary in Japan away from the terrors of Vietnam. Employing a non-professional cast and reportage visuals, this is less a pacifist tract than a contrast of cultural attitudes that questions emerging notions of a global village.
Excepting the documentary portrait Antoni Gaudi (1984), Teshigahara worked outside cinema for much of the next 17 years. His comeback, Rikyu (1989), proved to be his final feature. But it marked another stylistic departure, as he adopted a strict formal and contemplative approach to the life of Sen-no Rikyu, the 16th-century Buddhist monk who is credited with devising the celebrated tea ceremony.
The relationship between the disciplined Rentaro Mikuni and ruthless warlord Tsutomu Yamazaki compels on a human level. But Teshigahara is also keen to point out that military glory is temporary, whereas artistic achievement has a permanence that benefits all civilisation. It would be nice to think that the work of this unheralded genius, who died in 2001, will endure in a world ever more enslaved by transience
