The San Sebastián Festival is devoting its latest classic film cycle, co-organised with the Basque Film Archive in collaboration with the Japan Foundation and the Etxepare Basque Institute in the framework of the Euskadi-Japan 2023 program, to the director Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927-2001), a key figure in Japanese cinema in the 1960s thanks to a series of experimental poetic films and his extensive collaboration with the writer Kobo Abe. The only one of his films to be distributed in Spain, the acclaimed Suna no onna / Woman in the Dunes (1964), sums up that period and Teshigahara’s style really well.
At the 71st San Sebastián Festival, which will be held from the 22nd to the 30th of September, all of this relatively unknown director’s films will be screened. Two of his films have taken part in the Festival in previous years: Woman in the Dunes –in the “Ashes and Diamonds” cycle in 1985– and The Man without a Map in the “Japan in Black” retrospective organised in 2008. The cycle will be complemented by the publication of the book by Inuhiko Yomota, Avant-garde chronicles. Conversations with Hiroshi Teshigahara, translated from Japanese by Daniel Aguilar.
His first short, Hokusai, is from 1953, and his first feature film, Otoshi-ana / The Trap, from 1962. Between these two dates, Nagisa Oshima –the Festival devoted its retrospective to him in 2013–, Seijun Suzuki, Shohei Imamura, Susumu Hani, Yoshishige Yoshida and Masahiro Shinoda, representative directors in the various trends of the Japanese New Wave, had already made their first films. Teshigahara played a more incidental role in this movement and had a less of an international impact, despite winning the special jury award at Cannes for Woman in the Dunes and being nominated for the Oscar for best director and best foreign language film for this same movie. However, in one way or another he was right at the heart of the conceptual turmoil that turned Japanese cinema upside down through new subject matter and ways of filming.
He had a productive partnership with Kobo Abe, who wrote the script for The Trap and the adaptations of the three novels that Woman in the Dunes, Tanin no kao kao / The Face of Another (1966) and Moetsukita chizu / The Man Without a Map (1968) are based on, which were the filmmaker’s key works. Abe also wrote the script for Ako, an episode in the collective film La fleur de l’âge / Les adolescents (1964), four stories about adolescence filmed by Teshigahara, Jean Rouch, Michel Brault and Gian Vittorio Baldi.
His final films, Rikyu (1989) and Go-hime / The Princess Goh (1992), were historical works. He also shot films for television and constantly made short, medium-length and full-length documentaries. He made two films about the Puerto Rican boxer, José Torres, one about the Swiss sculptor and painter Jean Tinguely and a film about Tokyo in 1958. However, his best-known documentary is Antonio Gaudí (1984), an excellent approach to the figure and work of the Catalan modernist architect.
As well as being a filmmaker, Teshigahara was a master in the Japanese art of flower arrangement (ikebana). From 1980 until his death, he ran the Ikebana Sogetsu school, which had been founded by his father, and he published the book The Art of Ikebana (1997). He was married to the actress, Toshiko Kobayashi, who he only directed in one film, Sama soruja / Summer Soldiers.
San Sebastian Festival takes place Sept. 22 – 30. For more details, please visit https://www.sansebastianfestival.com/in/
