This film, like few others have done, transcends the medium into pure unadulterated art. Every tiny minuscule detail of the movie is crafted particularly to fit the genius of Teshigahara. Nothing is left to chance and all orchestrated together to create something higher than cinema. This is the nature of how multi-faceted artist, renaissance man, and one of Japan's greatest directors Hiroshi Teshigahara operates in his insane creative process.

Exaggerations are well left behind, this film is meticulously designed to everything that the frame contains. The famous psychiatrist office for example, was completely designed, sculpted and decorated by a architect colleague of Teshigahara. The metallic sculptures of ears and modernistic setting with Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and medical graphs drawn…

The Face of Another is like no film I have seen before. Having only now seen three films from Teshigahara, I feel comfortable saying that he is one of the best filmmakers I have come across. He is a perfectionist when it comes to the look of his films. Each and every frame is utter perfection. Hiroshi Segawa, who also shot the magnificent Woman in the Dunes, meticulously works the camera, leaving no room for error. Everything from the most basic shots of our main character walking into a building to the most complex shots in the hectic doctor’s office look stunning. The set design is really something to marvel over. The set design of the doctor's office is absolutely…

Teshigahara planted seeds of identity crisis in his first two films, Pitfall and Woman in the Dunes, but it's here that he really goes all out exploring the nature of anonymity and the damaging effect it can have on the human psyche. While the two aforementioned movies are similar in the way they present an everyday man in a horrible situation, The Face of Another felt more personal to me as a lot of the issues encountered can easily be translated to real life.

So, what's in a face? It's the key to face-to-face interaction, so much is learned through expression and eye contact - is someone interested in this conversation? Are they bored? Are they amused? The Face of…

''I have so many selves I can't contain them all.''

Where on earth does one begin when describing such a deeply complex and disturbing psychological character study that takes Hiroshi Teshigahara's extravagant and eclectic style and pushes it to a new realm of delirium. Released at a time in cinema when the modernist style was being largely ignored by western audiences, The Face of Another has all but been forgotten and dismissed only to find it's voice in the age of 'The Criterion Collection'.

The plot revolves around Tatsuya Nakadai's Mr. Okuyama; a facial burn victim that lives behind a mask of bandages, fearing social rejection he agrees to be the guinea pig of an experimental Psychiatrist who has been…

A tale of the horrors of insecurity and the loss of ones self, Teshigahara's remarkable picture, complete with bewildering surrealism and magnificent imagery, excels on nearly every level. It is the tale of a man whose face is permanently scarred from an industrial accident and covers the injury with a bandage to hide it. He rolls out excessive and surprisingly deep insights into the man whose external identity is loss.

Sure each of us have our own external insecurities, but for the most part we judge ourselves based on our internal selves. But what do we judge others on? We see their external features and attributes and that is all we know. The external image is a person's key to…

The June-ar Module

The picture you see is no portrait of me,
It's too real to be shown to someone I don't know.

The Face Of Another is one of those rare films that is so completely confident in itself that it will quite happily ask lots of questions of its characters and audience yet provide almost no answers.

I love a film that has that confidence and swagger. It reminds me of David Lynch at his best. It's so completely consumed with its own vision that it's impossible for me to believe anything other than that this is EXACTLY the film that Hiroshi Teshigahara wanted it to be. That vision would only be compromised by gifting us easy answers…

GC: SP16

A book is normally a beautiful medium for internal stories. A book allows you to delve into the characters mind with ease and hear his thoughts, and sometimes others. In a way every story we read, watch, or listen to is a story about developing our, and the characters identity. Via a single, intimate perspective we gain a sense of the characters self and in return we gain a sense of ourselves. Strangely, Teshigahara creates a film that not only excels at giving the audience an intimate experience with a character but does it better than the book. The main character, Okuyama’s face is scarred with chemical burns from an accident. By opening the film with an X-Ray…

El Rostro Ajeno, dirigida por el director japonés Hiroshi Teshigahara, narra la historia de un ingeniero, el Sr. Okuyama, que a causa de un accidente pierde sus rasgos faciales. Okuyama, trastornado por los graves problemas sociales que le causa la perdida de su cara, como; problemas de relación con su esposa, atraer la atención negativa de la gente con la que se cruza y problemas de autoestima, decide transcurrir al psicólogo Hira en busca de ayuda.
La pena que siente Hira por Okuyama logra hacerlo descubrir una idea innovadora que aunque “vaya en contra de la moral científica y la ética en general” podrá dar resultados grandiosos. Una mascara. Okuyama y el Dr Hari pagan a un joven 10.000 yen…

Hiroshi Teshigahara adaptation of Kōbō Abe’s The Face of Another is an intriguing, interesting film, the third movie of an Abe work that Teshigahara made at the start of his career. The first of Teshigahara’s films I have ever seen.

The film has echoes of other films with gauze-wrapped or masked figures, faces changed or in want of change with the magic of plastic surgery. Are these reflections of other films just in my mind? Certainly they could be within the mind of another cineaste. Whether Delmer Daves Dark Passage (1947) or Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) or even perhaps John Frankenheimer’s own 1966 semi-sci-fi thriller Seconds, this film has many brethren with which it could pair.

But…