HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA and the revival of a myth at the SSIFF 2023

The filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927-2001) has been the subject of  the largest retrospective of his work in Europe to date at the latest edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Almost all of his filmography has been brought together with the intent of recovering a figure, with whom we identify the legacy of a filmography, which contributes to the universal cinema history. Thanks to the collaboration of the Basque Filmoteca and the Japan Foundation, the Festival has been able to publish into Spanish the conversations of Inuhiko Yomota with Teshigahara. The film historian, critic, poet and novelist followed the filmmaker for years, becoming overtime a unique witness. Initially published in Japanese in 1989, the book brings together interviews and essential documentation in order to provide first-hand information about the life and work of this filmmaker. The current updated version of the text and its edition has been done by Quim Casas, in whose introduction he warns that the lack of information in Spain on Teshigahara is no greater than that which he experienced in his own country.

With a controversial interdisciplinary career, in which the filmmaker makes the leap from painting to cinema after his receiving formal training in Fine Arts, the moving image becomes the focus of his vocation. But as the son of Sofu, the famous Ikebana master and founder of the Sogetsu–ryu school, he should be in charge of an inheritance that neither can he erase nor make disappear from his life. The discovery of the moving image and its early interest for the cinema in the dark post-War environment facilitated the seduction that was exerted on him and his permanent research to transmit what he considered to be important to say or narrate. In fact, the attraction that his filmography arouses today is not very different from the one that inspire other probably better known filmmakers of his generation as well as some writers who, like him, have lived the trauma of the war.

Teshigahara is one of the representatives of the Noveru Vagu, the New Wave of the Japanese Cinema, that reunites those filmmakers, whose narratives were known in the West as the origin of a new cinema. Moreover, their contribution was not limited to Japanese cinema but also to the cinema made in the West and admired by them. I am referring to Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013), the director of The Cruel Story of the Youth (1960) and In the Realm of the Senses (1976), or Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), preceded by Yasuhiro Ozu (1903-1963) with the Tokyo Story (1956) and Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) with The Seven Samurais (1957). This period coincides with the identification of Asian cinema with the Japanese cinema, which became known in Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, there is much to be discovered about this new wave and it is not easy to view the materials that bring us into contact with the world of all these filmmakers, whose experience and vital life circumstances were very much determined by the history of their country and the period in which they lived. Teshigahara is perhaps one of the most experimental and independent of those filmmakers, whose personal vision encounters more obstacles, also in relation to what his  father expected of him. The filmography of this director is spread out over seven fictional feature films and documentaries, in the form of shorts, medium and feature lengths, as well as his participation in some collective projects. His first work was Hokusai (1953), followed by Ikebana (1957), which he dedicated to his father and whose script he also wrote, along with The Scupltures of Sofu (1962), because he never stopped admiring him. Despite of initially not wanting to follow in his footsteps, upon his death in 1979, followed by the death of his sole sister, he was obligated to assume the responsibility of taking in charge the Sogetsu Ikebana School that his father had founded. Referring to his father, he said that, in any of his exhibitions, the set-up was such that for him all the elements, including the human figures, were part of the same picture if we think of life as a landscape.

The Woman of Sand (1964) was his second feature film, after The Trap (1962), and so far the only film by him that was screened in Spain, but which makes an impact even today. Poetry of the sand and the desert, an image of the shared solitude shared by the protagonist, a widowed women, who also forms part of this strange setting surrounding her house, and the entomologist who finds refuge in his lair without properly understanding exactly why the sand floods the house and the immediate surroundings. While she remains indifferent, he tries to get out of there fearing being buried between the dunes. He tries to obsessively scale the sand wall in vain that gets higher each time due to the sandstorm raging in the house, which only she knows how to get out of. She holds him back and the sand holds her back. But, he is there to examine a class of insects of that place. Kobo Abe (1924-1993) wrote the script of that film and is the author of the novel of the same name that was published in 1962, a decade after publishing his first book, Poems of an Unknown Poet (1947), where he compiled the verses of the writer who refused to dedicate himself to medicine like his father. Teshigahara reminisces that he got to know Abe on the ground floor of a Fine Arts Museum in the Veno Park. He wanted to create a transversal and interdisciplinary group. Together, they worked on four films apart from The Woman of Sand, whose script Abe wrote, The Trap (1962), The Strange Face (1966) and The Man Without a Map (1968).

The rescue of this cinema master has been possible thanks to the interest of the programmers of the festival of the San Sebastian International Film Festival and in particular to José Luis Rebordinos, its director. In fact, had there not been any interest, it would not have been possible to gather the entire filmography of the filmmaker as screened at the festival. Teshigahara belongs to the post-war generation and to a country after the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to the economic recovery together with the international projection of its cultural identity. Through the new wave literature, cinema and visual arts, the writers, visual artists and filmmakers contributed decisively to the reconstruction of this identity, without ever losing sight of either the tradition or the origins. From 1970 onwards, Teshigahara started shooting documentaries like Summer Soldier (1972), during the Vietnam War. It is about a deserter from the American army who seeks refuge in Japan. His relationship with the visual arts runs through his entire career as a filmmaker, most of all, due to the influence his father exerted on him and the necessity to continue in the Ikebana School that he founded. But also, given his own interest for artists like Tingueli and his dynamic sculptures, and for Gaudí. His trips to Barcelona were dedicated to Gaudi’s architecture and Modernism in general. The documentary he made about the architect and that lasts more than an hour aims to show the experimental and independent character of his work. He admired Gaudí, whom he sees as a poet of inhabiting in the context of the Catalan Modernism. His journeys to Barcelona reveal the knowledge of the architect’s work that he seems to have studied rigorously in order to communicate the artistic and aesthetic value of a universal architectural style, by the extent of its representativeness. This documentary shot on 16mm brings together his knowledge of Gaudí with figures such as Luis Buñuel, Picasso and Goya, for him the icons of a way of doing and feeling in their respective periods and generations, although for different reasons, which in turn attached him to our country.

In the press release that took place in San Sebastian for the presentation of Inuhiko Tomoka’s book about Teshigahara, where the author has recorded the conversations he kept with the filmmaker, we were able to understand the weight of his father’s influence. Some of the darkest periods of Teshigahara’s life from 1972 onwards, when he eclipsed himself and nobody knew what he was doing, nor which way he was going were discussed. This happened without any apparent justification from his side, because he must have needed to somehow get out of conflict or think on what had to be done. His father revolutionalized Ikebana and it depended on him to do something similar with cinema. Maybe he felt this way, and this induced him to disappear at times in order to find his place. Even if he had refused the idea of keeping his father’s the inheritance, he could not get rid of the compromise of its conservation. Amongst others innovations, his father invented nudist ikebana by combining tradition and modernity, and probably Teshigahara, understanding that the floral arrangements characteristic of this art were not so far from the visual arts, he felt obliged to imitate him by applying his contribution to the renewal of the cinematographic language.