Pitfall

A miner looking for work moves from town to town with his small son. A silent man in a white suit follows and kills him at a sand pit. The dead man rises as a ghost and watches the investigation into his own murder; the bitterest part is that nobody can hear him. The inquiry reveals that he had a double working in the miners' union. The film is not interested in a ghost story. It is interested in the invisibility of a worker: nobody listened to him while he was alive either, and the only thing death changes is making that obvious. The reason for the killing is not personal but to split the union. The form uses real abandoned places: a coal town closed after the war, empty huts, mud and black-and-white photography. A documentary texture sits beside a ghost narrative. It is Hiroshi Teshigahara's first feature and the first of his four films with Kōbō Abe. Unlike their later collaborations, this screenplay comes not from a novel but from Abe's television play Purgatory. Who it is for: viewers who like the Japanese avant-garde and social criticism carried inside genre. Who it is not for: anyone expecting explanation. The film presents union politics without context and never defines the rules of its ghosts.