![]() ![]() Their protagonists possess life histories, and they do live in a world like ours. If we fail to do this, we are lost.Īnother thing about these films: they live in the border regions between realism and allegory. No matter the setting, we must construct the identity that allows us to inhabit it. They are about the mind’s need to find meaning in any situation the body is thrown into. Originally conceived by Abe as pure language, these words emerge from a savage struggle into figures.Ī little like a full body transplant, the old brain straining to assert its self from within new skin and limbs. We can add a fourth shift: from book to film text to image. Three movies, three shifts of identity: alive to dead, free to imprisoned, disfigured to restored. Based on the Abe novel of the same title, involving a chemist whose his face is mutilated in an industrial accident, and who must claim a new identity by taking on another man’s face. Based on the Abe novel of similar title, involving a man who is coerced into excavating a pit constantly filling with sand, from where he learns to love his fellow prisoner and the prospects of his life.ģ) The Face of Another. Based on Abe’s television play titled Purgatory, involving an impoverished miner who is murdered, and who then becomes a ghost that watches the humans he has left behind claim his body and life.Ģ) Woman in the Dunes. In the 1960s, the Japanese author Kōbō Abe, director Hiroshi Teshigahara, and composer Toru Takemitsu made three movies about people undergoing drastic identity transformations. You can download the issue for free here. ![]() ![]() The following essay originally appeared in issue 3.1 of The Scofield, which is dedicated to Kōbō Abe and the theme of home. ![]()
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