The more you find out, the deeper the mystery, and the more you suffer.In Pitfall, the world is a harsh and unforgiving place, an oppressive environment that relentlessly pursues and consumes its inhabitants, pitilessly indifferent (if not overtly mocking) toward their futile but unceasing efforts to escape. Or if not flee altogether, to at least stay far ahead enough of their pursuers to fill their guts and breath a little easier for awhile.
The creative trio of Hiroshi Teshigahara (director), Kobo Abe (writer) and Toru Takemitsu (composer) made their feature film debut in this stark, mysterious tale set in the mining region of Japan where neither cultural refinement nor lush natural beauty have found fertile soil to take root and flourish. Partly a ghost story and murder mystery, partly an expose of human corruption, cruelty and exploitation, Pitfall doesn't seem particularly intent on charming or seducing its viewers through clever plot constructions or the satisfactions offered by whodunit puzzles or spooky thrills. Indeed, its presentation is austere and off-putting almost to the point of alienation, a style very much in vogue in certain art house circles in this era of L'eclisse, Pigs and Battleships, Knife in the Water and Through a Glass Darkly and Last Year at Marienbad, just to name a few of the more intellectually invigorating, radically severe cinematic confrontations released in the early 1960s. This trailer certainly sends the message that we're in for something bizarre, edgy, avant garde... intimidating even!
The story begins as we see a father, his son and an adult male companion skulking under cover of darkness to escape from a mining camp. Worse than merely walking off the job without giving sufficient notice, the three runaways are considered deserters and outlaws, with a bounty on their head requiring them to remain incognito and survive by their wiles for as long as they can, with no serious hope that a happier future awaits them. Indeed, things could easily get worse. The father, who along with his son and friend remains nameless, recognizes that a wretched fate of dying in a mining camp, and soon, has been assigned to him, and he has no realistic hope that fleeing headlong into uncertainty holds any promise of alleviating his burden. Still, he cannot just stand still, allowing his body to be broken down by whatever powers control and exploit his destiny. So he runs, and in the process, teaches his child to do the same.
Theirs is a brutal existence as they dwell at the lowest rung on the economic ladder. Slavery is an accurate description of their status and labor, clawing baskets full of dirt from the earth that will be sifted for treasures to enrich others. The unbreakable bondage of their servitude is spelled out plainly one afternoon as they see a fellow laborer make a mad dash for freedom as he tries to leap onto a freight train, only to be apprehended and beaten by the guards who patrol the work site to apprehend would-be escapees.
In this early section of the film, Teshigahara inserts shockingly brutal documentary footage showing the corpses of dead miners and the bloated belly of a starving child, grounding viewers in the reality of social injustice before the story careens into eerie supernatural territory. To accompany the images of pain inflicted on humans by humans, images of various creatures - ants, frogs, crayfish - being pointlessly exterminated are interpolated into the scenes, jangling our nerves a bit so that the cold, unadorned scenes of murder, robbery and rape yet to come achieve their intended disturbing effect.
And for those jaded by the sad truths of calculated violence or unmoved for whatever reason by the tragedies mentioned above, the creative team behind Pitfall find other ways to weird us out. First, the freshly killed miner, victim of a menacing man in white who chases him down and silently stabs him to death, rises up from the sun-parched spot where his corpse finally fell, in a reverse motion lifted directly from Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet. Then he discovers his new existence in a ghostly limbo as he wanders the street of an abandoned boom town, save for one woman shopkeeper who strangely lingered behind only to wait for delivery of a letter from a distant but not forgotten lover. Now he sees dead people, being one himself, cursing his inability to communicate with them and wishing that his newly acquired attribute of invisibility had been granted to him when it could have been more useful to him when he was still alive.
Rather than play up the ghost story as a source of spooky thrills, it seems that Teshigahara and Abe's goal (ably augmented by Takemitsu's angular, percussive musical interjections) is to stir up the audience's discomfort so that the cynical extraction of advantage from wretched bottom-dwellers that occurs in Pitfall's third act provokes the outrage it deserves. The miner's ghost, who roams from site to site, discovering how the official account of his death only leads to more violence as it flees further from the truth, is forced to watch helplessly as the situation becomes ever more frustrating. His murder, rather than triggering a pursuit for justice, only serves as a springboard for added hostility. And not by accident either, but according to plan. Only we are never clearly told whose plan, or for what purpose. All we see is that certain loci of power shift from one person or group to another, base appetites are temporarily satisfied from time to time, paranoia increases and identities become confused. Traps are set, baited with loathsome disposable creatures that crawl in the mud and are hardly missed... plenty more where they come from. At the intended moment, a dumb passive victim will come along and step into it, taking the fateful bite. A little boy observes the various forms of carnivorous activity, watching and learning as he goes, content for now to just load his pockets full of unattended candy and run... run... run...
Next: Mamma Roma