Eerie, unsettling, unforgettable, Teshigahara’s debut feature was filmed in an abandoned coal-mining town in western Japan, the setting as important to its ghostly tale as it is in WOMAN IN THE DUNES. Into this depopulated place comes a mysterious, silent assassin in immaculate white suit, gloves, and sunglasses who sets his deadly sights on a wandering, destitute miner looking for work. A woman who witnesses the murder is intimidated into giving false evidence to the police, thereby implicating a union boss (one of Teshigahara’s many doppelganger characters). As the town’s dead rise from the earth to question and implore the living, a sense of existential dread, of the futility of existence, turns a ghost story into devastating social critique. PITFALL was the first of Teshigahara’s many collaborations with novelist Kobe Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu, and was greatly influenced by Buñuel, particularly LOS OLVIDADOS; like that searing film (screened last summer at the Cinematheque), PITFALL suddenly slips from realism into the realm of the uncanny with apparitional ease. “An astonishing work, as riveting in its themes and style as his more famous WOMAN IN THE DUNES and FACE OF ANOTHER. . . . Enthralling from start to finish, PITFALL is the kind of potent, richly inventive and deeply committed film so typical of Japan’s counter-cultural cinema of the 1960s” (Midnight Eye).