The greatest movie ever!

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

From my favorite movies..

An action-packed slog

Although structurally and aesthetically experimental cinema, Teshigahara's debut proper already carries all the trademarks of an assured author and although a bit rough around the edges here and there it shows a director experimenting with his craft even as he perfects it. Japanese new-wave ferried to its logical conclusion even as it takes its first baby steps.Based on a story by Kôbô Abe, PITFALL explores the myriad possibilities that emerge from the space where life and death overlap, as a poor miner is murdered under mysterious circumstances in the marshes near an old ghost town. His murderer, an alluring white-clad figure, buys off the silence of the one witness, a woman operating a candy store in the ghost town district, and disappears as mysteriously as he appeared. In the mean time the murdered man wakes up next to his corpse only to discover he's now a ghost.While THE SIXTH SENSE milked a very similar idea for maximum mainstream appeal, shock twists and shallow thrills, Teshigahara is wise to allow his material to breathe. Even though a very pragmatic subplot about two rival labour unions introduced in the end of act two detracts from the existential nature of the story, like all great storytellers Teshigahara never settles for the convenient and tidy, refuses to explain what the viewer most needs explained. Personal interpretation is very important in any work and particularly in something as haunting as this. Who is the killer? Why is he doing it? Questions left open, the character cleverly typed as a seriocomic grim reaper of sorts riding around in his moped, a manifestation that invokes notions of fate by the very nature of his acts. Is there not meaning when one is not aware of it? Teshigahara pits the dead against the dead, the living against the living and everybody against each other, ghosts quizically examining their corpses and wondering the reason of their deaths, the living deaf to their protestations and too busy being suspicious of each other. A world revolving around a discordant axis, thrown off balance and left for us to explore its geometry.Teshigahara's direction reflecting the uncertainty and disorientation of the plot as much as Toru Takemitsu's dissonant score. A POV shot of a child introduced only for the child to walk inside its own POV shot. Jarring jump cuts that send characters jumping through space. Construction works photographed in all their derelict, abandonded glory, a ghost world for the dead to haunt. Notions of hell on earth. The ghost of the murdered man complaining he's hungry as winds rise in the soundtrack. A pack of dogs ascending a steep slope like other Sissyphi. Very precise, very geometric, the work of an assured visual director.

Opening with two men and a boy fleeing in the darkness from some unseen threat, with an ominous silence punctured by wolves barking, it is clear that the film will be unpredictable in both style and content. Moving on from this we follow the man (a miner) and his son as he tries to find work, until eventually he is set up in a complex murder plot. Stalked by an unnerving, immaculately suited assassin he is soon slain brutally and left for dead, in a move reminiscent of Psycho and its quick dispatching of the main character.Following this, the character we thought dead rises up from the ground to a standing position. The simple technique of playing a shot backwards recalls another early 60's Japanese film, Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, while there it was used as a slight character moment, here it completely reinvents the film's narrative – melting away all we've seen and reforming into something much more ambitious.Pitfall contains elements of social realism, surrealist experimentation, crime procedural, conspiracy thriller, and fantasy-tragedy. Teshigahara's roots in documentary film-making and strong leftist political view provide reason for his sympathies with the struggles of miners, shown through the exploitation of the miner and his son and the two union's confrontation. Selfishness pervades the film, the individual selfishness of the exploitative old man hiring the men to do a mining job, the boy taking a candy from his dead father's corpse, and the political selfishness, as seen in the confrontation between the two unions.Duplicity and division are chief devices in Pitfall. Cinematographically we see this through the sensual distance of Teshigahara's camera, at once close, tracking, exploring the personal space and frame of mind of the characters, other times distanced and merely observing, displacing the individual as they get lost in the harsh world around them. The lack of structure in the films cinematography is a benefit, sumptuous compositions, guerrilla hand-held movements, deep-focused long shots, erratic zooms and pans, the assortment of shots is astounding; the film is simply a visual treat. The welding of extreme social realism (at one point real documentary footage of impoverished miners is inserted) and the surrealist imagery of ghosts left in the town, carrying on their lowly routines with no effect, and of the many dead characters inspecting their own corpses, quizzically studying the circumstances of their deaths and often probing the living, creates a fusion of misery – both in life, and forever in death. In ghost form the miner laments his hunger – something he no doubt would've done often in life.Despite all these many seemingly contradictory modes and random story-strands, Pitfall holds together well. As Teshigahara's first feature film, this as a major outlet for his artistic visions, and consequently the film is slightly untidy, structurally the film lacks a successful linking of the many elements at play, they seem to pop-up randomly, sometimes without reason. For example the conspiracy hints littered throughout the murder-mystery plot seem to go nowhere. Rough around the edges it may be, Pitfall is a genuinely fascinating, thrilling, involving picture from beginning to end, possessing the visual tenacity and narrative complexity of a first-time director finding his feet and unleashing his cinematic imagination.

I'll skip the synopsis and go right for the flaws. The little boy was sketched as a weak caricature. Our hero, the murdered man, was given some very weak dialog. The subplot about the divided miners' union was verbose. The confrontation between the two union heads came to an unbelievable conclusion. The man in white was not as much of a mystery as the film seems to think he is. At the end, with four principles dead, we expect them to meet at last and discuss what has happened with one another, but instead the movie watches the boy run crying down a road, and damn it, the movie isn't about the boy! -----paragraph----- The film sets up the murdered man to slowly come to realize the fact that there will be no justice for his murder and that it is better, once one has died, not to torture oneself by watching the world he has left behind. That the movie ends before he comes to this realization makes the ending very unsatisfying. Of course, the film doesn't allow him to realize as much as the viewer feels he should. Perhaps that is the greatest flaw. Or perhaps it is the fact that the two union heads fight each other to the death when at least one of them should know that it is more important for them to unite against a common enemy. Then there's the man in white. The movie seems to think he's a mystery, but it's pretty obvious that he's a representative of the mining company looking to crush the unions. The murdered man, our hero, does not realize this, nor does the movie seem to think the viewer does, but the viewer does know, and with all the murdered man has heard, by all rights he should, too. Instead, he spouts weak dialog about his murder. He recites his stilted inner monologue like a man in a stage play, and it doesn't work. Really, he's too complacent. He passively watches people talk about him. He does not put up any kind of fight to make the living world hear him. He doesn't undergo the process of accepting that he cannot interact with the living world. At the end, he's even trying to speak to a living man, even though he should have come to realize that it's impossible. And, as I said before, he hasn't made any progress toward accepting the fact that he must forget the world of the living and accept his fate. His story arc feels very unfinished. The script needed a rewrite.

A miner (Isashi Igawa) and his son travel the countryside searching for work. While on his way to an interview, the miner is visited by death in the form of a man in a white suit (Kunie Tanaka). This fascinating, surreal drama, is a blend of many genres, and was Hiroshi Teshigahara's first feature film. The setting is a ghost town where the dead amble about, carrying the pain that plagued their lives. Like the director's excellent "The Face of Another", this is concerned with the nature of identity and anonymity. It is exceptionally well photographed by Hiroshi Segawa with a striking, percussive sound mix. The film was clearly an inspiration for the Danish film that inspired the recent "The Invisible", for it traverses the same territory and focuses on a man observing an investigation into his own murder. Novelist Kobo Abe, who wrote "Pitfall", and was responsible for "The Face of Another" and "The Woman in the Dunes", was a writer of uncommon originality and intelligence, and his work here is excellent. Thought-provoking and never less than totally compelling.