Hiroshi Teshigahara examines identity and more in THE FACE OF ANOTHER
CABARET CINEMA: THE FACE OF ANOTHER (TANIN NO KAO) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, August 7, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org
Kôbô Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara collaborated on five films together, including the marvelously existential Woman of the Dunes in 1964 and The Face of Another two years later. In the latter, Tatsuya Nakadai (The Human Condition, Kill!) stars as Okuyama, a man whose face has virtually disintegrated in a laboratory accident. He spends the first part of the film with his head wrapped in bandages, a la the Invisible Man, as he talks about identity, self-worth, and monsters with his wife (Machiko Kyo), who seems to be growing more and more disinterested in him. Then Okuyama visits a psychiatrist (Mikijirô Hira) who is able to create a new face for him, one that would allow him to go out in public and just become part of the madding crowd again. But his doctor begins to wonder, as does Okuyama, whether the mask has actually taken control of his life, making him as helpless as he was before. Abe’s remarkable novel is one long letter from Okuyama to his wife, filled with utterly brilliant, spectacularly detailed examinations of what defines a person and his or her value in society. Abe wrote the film’s screenplay, which tinkers with the time line and creates more situations in which Okuyama interacts with people; although that makes sense cinematically, much of Okuyama’s interior narrative, the building turmoil inside him, gets lost. Teshigahara once again uses black and white, incorporating odd cuts, zooms, and freeze frames, amid some truly groovy sets, particularly the doctor’s trippy office, and Tōru Takemitsu’s score is ominously groovy as well. As a counterpart to Okuyama, the film also follows a young woman (Miki Irie) with one side of her face severely scarred; she covers it with her hair and is not afraid to be seen in public, while Okuyama must hide behind a mask. But as Abe points out in both the book and the film, everyone hides behind a mask of one kind or another. The Face of Another is screening August 7 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Movie Masks,” being held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Becoming Another: The Power of Masks,” and will be introduced by RISK! podcast host Kevin Allison. The film series continues through August 28 with such other mask-related works as Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.
“Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So explains Andrei Tarkovsky in his 1975 semiautobiographical masterpiece, The Mirror, in which the Soviet auteur takes a literal and figurative looking glass to reflect on his life, particularly his childhood, in twentieth-century Russia. The nonlinear film, which features long, beautifully composed scenes with little or no dialogue, alternates between color and black-and-white as Tarkovsky maneuvers between three time periods, telling the fragmented and disjointed story of forty-year-old Alexei, who is never onscreen as an adult (he is only heard offscreen in voiceover by Innokenty Smoktunovsky) but is shown as a young boy (Filipp Yankovsky) and an adolescent (Ignat Daniltsev, who also plays Alexei’s son, Ignat). Margarita Terekhova portrays Alexei’s ex-wife, Natalia, as well as his mother, Maria; Tarkovsky’s own mother, Maria Vishnyakova, plays the elderly Maria (who is also called Masha and Marusya), and his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, a successful poet, reads several of his works over the gorgeous imagery that is composed, in many cases, like paintings. Incorporating archival footage of WWII, the Spanish Civil War, and the Sino-Soviet split, Tarkovsky explores family relationships as seen through the eyes of the young Alexei and Ignat, adding mystery and magic, including levitation and slow motion, to the personal, poignant tale. As with Andrei Rublev, the film begins with an odd prologue in which Ignat turns on a sepia-toned television show in which a woman uses a type of hypnosis, concentrating on the hands, to help a student speak without a stutter, as if Tarkovsky is warning the viewer about what is to follow, a deeply hypnotic film that speaks in unusual ways.
The film that gave Ozzy Osbourne’s band its name, Black Sabbath is just about everything you could want such a movie to be: cheap, exploitive, and featuring Boris Karloff, with nods to great French and Russian storytellers. (Um, sure . . . of course.) Founded in 1954 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, American International Pictures was responsible for hundreds of low-budget independent films through 1980, specializing in horror, Westerns, blaxploitation, sci-fi, biker flicks, teen delinquency, women in prison, and even beach movies. Anthology Film Archives is paying tribute to the famed studio with a three-part series that begins July 31 by focusing on auteurs who either cut their teeth with AIP or were already well established. It’s quite a list; through September 3, Anthology will be screening works by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Vincente Minnelli, Brian De Palma, and Roger Corman, who will make several appearances at the downtown movie house. Also on the roster is Italian scaremaster Mario Bava, whose Black Sabbath will be shown August 1, 4, and 8. Black Sabbath is, appropriately enough, an anthology of three short films hosted by Boris Karloff, a kind of melding of Karloff’s Thriller television series with Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. The Italian-French coproduction was significantly changed by AIP, altering the order of the films and drastically modifying one of the plots. Black Sabbath opens with “A Drop of Water,” supposedly based on a short story by Anton Chekhov. Late one night, nurse Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux) is summoned by an elderly caretaker (Milly Monti) to a stately home where a medium — sporting perhaps the most frightening face ever on a dead person, with dark, deep-set eyes and a viciously wicked smile that makes her look like an evil doll — has died during a séance. After stealing the medium’s ring off her finger, Helen is suddenly taunted by a buzzing fly and drops of water, evoking what was experienced by the killer in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who was haunted by the unending sound of a beating heart. (Perhaps not coincidentally, AIP was famous for its Poe adaptations.) The conclusion is truly chilling, with a cool little coda.
Director Julien Temple, who has made two outstanding documentaries about the Sex Pistols (The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury), turns his camera on Joe Strummer of the British punk group the Clash in The Future Is Unwritten. Temple collects remarkable home movies of Strummer, from his early days as young John Mellor, a career diplomat’s son, through his time as the leader of one of the most famous and controversial bands in the world and his death at the age of fifty from a congenital heart defect. Strummer’s friends and family gather around a campfire in Brooklyn’s Empire St.-Fulton Ferry Park and talk about Strummer’s life and career, sharing keen insight in a format that the musician loved; his campfire get-togethers came to be known as Strummerville, a place for people to assemble and discuss life, art, and anything else that came to mind. Temple adds lots of footage of the Clash in action, as well as clips from Strummer’s earlier band, the 101ers, made up of squatters fighting the power, and his last band, the Mescaleros. Temple also brings some of Strummer’s drawings to life, animating them in humorous ways. Strummer essentially narrates the film himself, as Temple includes audio excerpts from Strummer’s “Last Call” radio show and interviews he gave over the years. Temple, a close friend of Strummer’s, paints a fascinating portrait of the complex man, featuring stories from the likes of Bono, Johnny Depp, Flea, Mele Mel, Courtney Love Cobain, Martin Scorsese, Steve Jones, John Cusack, Matt Dillon, Steve Buscemi, Damien Hirst, Roland Gift, Don Letts, Mick Jones, and many others. And there’s lots of music as well, of course, including several versions of “White Riot.” The Future Is Unwritten is screening August 1 at 3:30 in the “I Was There: The Music Docs of Julien Temple” sidebar of Lincoln Center’s annual “Sound + Vision” series, which also includes The Filth and the Fury, The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77, Dave Davies: Kinkdom Come, Ray Davies: Imaginary Man, Glastonbury, Never Mind the Baubles: Christmas with the Sex Pistols, and The Liberty of Norton Folgate, with Temple on hand for various introductions and Q&As.