Pitfall: Teshigahara's Ghost-Miner Mystery

Pitfall (1962) opens like a documentary about the destitute end of Japan’s coal industry, and it keeps looking like one for a while — an itinerant miner and his small son trudging through slag and mud and abandoned works, taking casual labour, sleeping rough, moving on when the pit closes or the wages fail. The film’s texture is dust, exhaustion and geography. Nothing about the first fifteen minutes prepares you for the fact that this is a ghost story.

I got to it backwards, as most people do, having found Woman in the Dunes first and gone looking for what came before. What came before turned out to be Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature, the first of four collaborations with Kōbō Abe, with Tōru Takemitsu scoring — the whole apparatus already assembled and already strange, two years ahead of the film that made them famous.

The film’s opening move

The miner is murdered. That is not a spoiler; it happens early, in daylight, in the open, and the film’s entire structure depends on you knowing it.

A man in a white suit on a motorbike has been following him. The killing is executed with a total absence of ceremony — no build, no music sting, no motive offered. Hisashi Igawa plays the miner, and Teshigahara stages his death the way you would stage an industrial accident, which is to say as something that simply happens to a body in a landscape.

And then the miner gets up and watches.

The ghost cannot touch anything, cannot be heard, cannot intervene. He can only follow the investigation into his own death, in the company of other ghosts who are all in the same condition, all baffled, all shouting at people who do not turn round. It is one of the great structural ideas in Japanese cinema and it arrives in a first feature.

Why the ghost logic works

Ghost films usually break in one direction: the dead get powers. They move objects, they appear in mirrors, they push the plot. That converts them into agents and destroys the thing that made them frightening, which is helplessness.

Teshigahara’s ghosts have nothing. They are exactly as impotent as the living miner was — which is the argument, and it lands because the film spent its first act establishing precisely how impotent that was. He could not choose his work. He could not choose his wage. He could not stay anywhere. Death changes his situation less than you would expect, and that continuity is the coldest joke Abe ever wrote.

The visual method makes it work. Teshigahara shoots the ghosts in the same light, the same lens, the same flat documentary grey as the living. No dissolves, no glow, no double exposure. A dead man stands in the frame beside a policeman and the composition treats them identically. Because the film has established a rigorous documentary grammar, the supernatural arrives as a fact rather than an effect, and you accept it the way you accepted the slag heaps.

Takemitsu’s score is aggressive here in a way it never is in the later films — percussion, prepared instruments, sounds with no obvious source. It is the only element that acknowledges something is wrong.

There is a second mechanic that deserves naming, because it is the source of most of the film’s dread. Teshigahara gives the ghosts a compulsion: they return to the site of their death and re-examine it, endlessly, looking for the detail that would explain why it happened to them. They interview each other. They reconstruct. They are running an investigation in parallel with the police, using better evidence, and it is worth exactly as much — which is to say nothing, because the findings cannot leave the room. Watching a dead man perform diligent detective work he can never file is funnier and bleaker than any horror set piece the film could have staged instead.

The politics underneath

What the investigation uncovers is a union dispute. Two rival mining unions, two leaders, an organiser and a splitter, and a killing designed to be blamed on one of them so the other is destroyed. The dead miner’s face resembled one of the union men, which is the whole reason he was selected. He is a man murdered for looking like somebody else — a labour dispute’s disposable prop.

Abe was writing this at the tail of an era of genuine industrial violence in Japanese coal, and the film’s fury about it is legible in every frame. The pits are closing. The unions are fighting each other over the corpse of an industry. And the men at the bottom, the ones with no local, no ticket, no address, are the material both sides use.

The single witness to the murder is a woman running a shop in the near-deserted village — Sumie Sasaki plays her — and what happens to her testimony is the film’s second brutal argument about who gets believed.

The landscape does a great deal of the argument, too. Teshigahara shot in real Kyushu coal country, in the actual ruins of an industry mid-collapse: pit heads standing over nothing, company housing with the roofs going, a village emptied of everyone with the means to leave. He gets those locations for free and they carry a weight no set could. When the ghosts congregate there, the place already looks posthumous. The film’s supernatural element and its documentary element turn out to be describing the same condition, which is the joke at the centre of everything Abe wrote.

The ancestor

Everyone files this next to Rashomon on the strength of nationality and a contested killing, and that reading is thin. Rashomon is about competing accounts. Pitfall has no competing accounts; the audience knows exactly what happened from minute twelve, and the horror is watching institutions fail to arrive at a fact that is simply lying there.

The real ancestor is the American film noir of the late 1940s, specifically the dead-narrator picture. Sunset Boulevard has a corpse telling the story; D.O.A. has a man reporting his own murder. Teshigahara takes that gimmick, strips the wit out of it, and makes it literal — the narrator is standing in the room, and nobody can hear him. Cross it with the semi-documentary police procedural of the same era, the kind of thing that produced He Walked by Night, and Pitfall’s method is fully accounted for: procedural realism, a dead man’s point of view, and a system that will not deliver.

The other useful cross-reference is Kuroneko — Japanese ghost cinema at its most formally beautiful — because the contrast is instructive. Shindō’s dead have power. Teshigahara’s have witness, and nothing else.

The case against

It is a first feature and it shows in places. The film’s mid-section, where the union plot has to be explained, sags into diagram; Abe’s fondness for making the argument explicit is already present and already a liability. The doppelgänger conceit is a large coincidence to carry, and the film knows it, which is why it hurries past.

The child is a problem the film never solves. The miner’s son survives, watching, silent, and Teshigahara clearly intends him as the film’s conscience — the living witness to match the dead one. He is used more as a device than as a person, and the last movement leans on him heavily.

And the pace is uneven in a way the later films are not. Woman in the Dunes is relentless by design. Pitfall stops and starts.

The verdict

The most underrated Japanese film of the early sixties, and the essential first stop in the Teshigahara–Abe sequence — watch it before Woman in the Dunes and before The Face of Another and the whole partnership snaps into focus, because everything the pair went on to do is here in rough form: the man trapped by an economic arrangement, the landscape photographed as an antagonist, the refusal of resolution.

It is also, at a shade over ninety minutes, the most immediately watchable thing either man made. The murder happens fast, the ghost logic is instantly legible, and the last act has real dread in it. The boutique restorations of the collaborations have kept it available for years, usually packaged with the other three, which is exactly how it should be seen.

Spoilers below

Nobody finds out.

That is the ending, and it is why the film is remembered by the people who have seen it and by very few others. The investigation goes nowhere. The union plot proceeds. The man in the white suit collects his fee from an employer whose face we barely see, and the film’s most chilling scene is a transaction between a killer and a client conducted with the manners of a business lunch.

The witness is silenced. The ghosts accumulate — the miner, the witness, the union man — and they gather in the abandoned village, a crowd of the dead standing in the mud, arguing about a murder none of them can report, while the living walk through them on their way somewhere else. Teshigahara holds that image. It is the whole film: a queue of people with the truth and no mouth.

The boy runs. The last images follow him across the slag, alone, into precisely the life his father had — no name, no ticket, no address, walking towards the next pit.

And the man in white rides away. He is never named, never explained, never caught. Abe’s refusal there is the hardest thing in the picture, because a mystery that identifies its killer at least concedes that identification is possible. Pitfall says the machinery does not want to know, and it constructed a landscape in which not knowing is the natural outcome. Made in 1962, in a country with closing pits and fighting unions and a great many men on the road, it plays now like a documentary that happened to have a ghost in it.