392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

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jwd5275
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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#176 Post by jwd5275 » Sun Oct 05, 2014 2:45 pm

jindianajonz wrote:Unless they were giving it a complete makeover with new special features, though if I recall correctly the old box was more than adequate with its features.
The one thing lacking was the fourth and final Teshigahara / Abe collaboration, The Man without a Map. It is quite possible that the rights issues have been worked out and are going to reissue the set with this film. There already is a phantom page for Kiyoshi Atsumi.

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knives
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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#177 Post by knives » Sun Oct 05, 2014 3:45 pm

They also have that film up on Hulu.

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warren oates
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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#178 Post by warren oates » Sun Oct 05, 2014 3:48 pm

Really? I can't see it.

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knives
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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#179 Post by knives » Sun Oct 05, 2014 3:54 pm

Can't either. Maybe they took it down. Hope that's the case at least.

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movielocke
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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#180 Post by movielocke » Sun Oct 05, 2014 10:09 pm

Dang. I buy an old box set every bn sale, and this was going to be the next purchase in november.

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manicsounds
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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#181 Post by manicsounds » Sun Oct 05, 2014 10:11 pm

I'm sure this is just a repackaging job like the Von Sternberg set.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#182 Post by jwd5275 » Sun Oct 05, 2014 11:06 pm

All I know is that pages for four actors from Man without a Map showed up at the same time grouped together, three of which are still phantom pages.

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movielocke
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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#183 Post by movielocke » Mon Oct 20, 2014 10:10 pm

I snapped this up in the first minutes of the flash sale last week.

Pitfall is a stunning film, particularly for a first feature.
SpoilerShow
The editing is just tremendous, I love the way the end of the film tracking shot recalls the earlier tracking shot and simultaneously suggests that the boy is symbolically the assassin or is being followed by the assassin.

I must admit that I chuckled a little bit when the business man literally stabs the laboror in the back, the action was so on the nose. But then Teshigahara and Abe start to weave everything together into an ever more complex and recursive web of unseen maneuvers that it seems less laughable and far more ominous. As a 1960s update on the great 1930s labor-screed films the film sits comfortably alongside the similar Dry Summer in my mind. Both films have an impressive class and labor consciousness and call to arms, unfortunately one that never seems to have been heeded or heard.

The deep focus compositions throughout the film were stunning and the staging within the frame, often using doubled actions by characters in the mid and far ground to craft layers of watcher and watched in ways that I found continually amazing. The film draws the viewer in with these doublings of the act of watching, suggesting we are all equally pawns in the hands of the zaibatsus that control our destiny in ways we are unable to begin to comprehend, the ghosts are left at the end seemingly more confused, still unaware of the ways in which they were all sacrificed to the altar of greed. Even the assassin is really just another pawn in the game of the businessmen running things, even though he seems to be one of them he's really nothing more than a representation of them, he looks like them, but he's ultimately nothing and is as invisible as the boy; he is as much a ghost as those people he inhumed.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#184 Post by christopher_NOBODY » Tue Oct 21, 2014 8:29 pm

I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet.

Image

Criterion posted this picture last week on their instagram page. The caption is "The magnified FACE OF ANOTHER". With this recently listed on MMM as OOP and this picture... possible blu upgrade in the near future?

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#185 Post by movielocke » Sat Oct 25, 2014 7:57 pm

Woman in the Dunes is a stone cold masterpiece. It's rich, dense and deliciously incisive while managing to be ambiguous at the same time. A subversive film, if you will. Taken in the context of Pitfall, the film seems to have a strong anti-capitalist bent, attacking the idea of being trapped in a white collar job, with work that feels and seems meaningless but with breathtaking harsh penalties if you stop shoveling. Continuing the anticapitalist approach--a wife, loved ones, family, children: these are all just tools used to keep you in your prison, they are tools used to make you a willing architect of your own imprisonment. The film feels like a dissection of society, declaring there is no escape from participating, and eventually you will be complicit in continuing and defending the structures you once warred against when first encountering them.
SpoilerShow
And women, in particular are the overlooked victims, she is trapped within the home more thoroughly than the husband, while he seems to have desires and options and dreams, she already pre-exists within the domestic arena, and cannot exist outside of it. Her only escape, is from executing her duty to the point of death and the only death that is acceptable is pregnancy and birth. Suicide is the province of a man, of her last husband, it is his privilege but duty demands she must carry on, she cannot escape by choosing her own death. She's expected to take a man with no complaints and no input, and take a new one as well and she's expected to bear his children and weather his abuses and disinterest. the entire health of society, of the town, depends upon her being assiduous in her duties, she must maintain the house with all her labor or the desert will endanger the rest of the town. It all hinges on her, the bulwark against erosion of tradition and all of its ugly oppressions and hazings--she is enslaved by the boundaries tradition puts upon her--her soul broken and chained, dutifully she plays her role.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#186 Post by movielocke » Sat Oct 25, 2014 8:18 pm

While watching The Face of Another I was mesmerized, I was thinking the film might be the most dense and philosophic and rich of the entire set. I was totally sucked and invested in the tale and its telling.

Then I suddenly jerked awake.

Somehow I had dozed off about forty five minutes in, I was startled, a bit, that I had had drifted off and whatever fleeting dreams I had seemed a logical extension of watching the film. Cursing myself for being too tired to finish a movie despite it being only 11, I turned it off and returned to it the next night.

I rewound the film and watching the footage back, most of which I remembered, I had an odd sense of deja vu which was only accentuated by the structure of the film itself as it continually doubles back on earlier sequences echoing scenes we've already seen only this time while our protagonist is wearing the face of another. Again I was sucked in, mesmerized, the incredible sound design and theatrical lighting techniques were fascinating, the sense that it was all in his own head and yet wasn't that the doctor was the patient or at least a part of the patient's fractured psyche...

And then I suddenly woke up again. Somehow, impossibly, against all my efforts I'd dozed off again. What was it about the film that made it so soporific to me? Was it because it sent my mind off on rambling tangents, the ideas whisking my attention away and my body deciding to enforce sleep if I was just sitting there thinking?

Again I returned the next night, determined to finish the film. Again I rewound it and the deja vu became even more pronounced as I saw scenes I had seen twice be doubled and repeated within the film. Finally I finished the film, and yet the ending was somehow a let down, a sudden social critique--an explosion to the macro view when the film had seemed to be dissecting the introverted micro view of the self--but that's just an illusion: self is society, as the title seems to obliquely refer to in retrospect. and now I'm left all discombobulated by the ouroborus aspects of the film, how it seems to constantly undermine the viewer and just at the moment you think you have grasped the film, the film shows you you are wrong.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#187 Post by Mr Sausage » Sat Oct 25, 2014 8:53 pm

movielocke wrote:Taken in the context of Pitfall, the film seems to have a strong anti-capitalist bent, attacking the idea of being trapped in a white collar job, with work that feels and seems meaningless but with breathtaking harsh penalties if you stop shoveling. Continuing the anticapitalist approach--a wife, loved ones, family, children: these are all just tools used to keep you in your prison, they are tools used to make you a willing architect of your own imprisonment. The film feels like a dissection of society, declaring there is no escape from participating, and eventually you will be complicit in continuing and defending the structures you once warred against when first encountering them.
Abe isn't an allegorist. His stories are too peculiar and specific to the circumstances they relate. His stories inhabit their own odd worlds rather than being narrativisations of concepts. I think the man stuck in the pit being forced to shovel out sand is simply and strangely that and nothing else.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#188 Post by knives » Sun Oct 26, 2014 2:08 am

I agree with you, but to be fair being peculiar and specific in and of itself doesn't prevent a work from being allegory or open to allegorical interpretation.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#189 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Oct 26, 2014 6:37 am

knives wrote:I agree with you, but to be fair being peculiar and specific in and of itself doesn't prevent a work from being allegory or open to allegorical interpretation.
The phrase I used was "specific to the circumstances", which is mutually exclusive with allegory, in which nothing is specific to just one circumstance. Fair enough about "peculiar," tho'.

But I think we agree that in an Abe story, a man in a hole is just a man in a hole. His literal circumstances determine his thoughts and actions. He is not a representative of a wider group. Abe's stories are fantasies that inhabit their own strange universe.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#190 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Oct 26, 2014 10:24 am

Mr Sausage wrote:Abe isn't an allegorist. His stories are too peculiar and specific to the circumstances they relate. His stories inhabit their own odd worlds rather than being narrativisations of concepts... a man in a hole is just a man in a hole. His literal circumstances determine his thoughts and actions. He is not a representative of a wider group. Abe's stories are fantasies that inhabit their own strange universe.
I don't think this is true at all. Abe was a longtime member of the Japanese Communist Party and a labor organizer, a commitment that is reflected in the work even after he chose to leave the Party due to his discomfort with the doctrines of social realism. He was much more ambivalent about being considered an "existentialist". When asked whether he perceived himself in that way, he tellingly said, "Perhaps so. I remember that when I was in High School during the war, I was a pacifist." If the writing is existentialist, it's an existentialism which was born out of his political positions and his training as a doctor in the post-war period. Many of the early works, especially the short stories, are very explicitly political allegories, that simultaneously have other valences that one could call existentialist, materialist, or what have you. Inter Ice Age 4, for example, is a beautifully strange and mysterious book about the creation, organization, and exploitation of large labor forces by national and global powers. The allegory is impossible to ignore, but that doesn't mean it's neat, unambiguous, or uncomplicated by other modes (including that of pure fantasy and the temporo-spatial play of the nouveau roman). I think this is true of almost all his work (I've read everything that's been translated, and the one exception would be The Kangaroo Notebook, which might have political associations to a Japanese reader but seems like very pure surrealism to me). The Woman in the Dunes, as a film, seems a little more removed from politics, as does the novel of The Face of Another, something I think Abe realized and was a uncomfortable with, which is why the screenplay/film of Face shifts its focus to such an enormous degree away from Okuyama's tortured psychology and towards the world he lives in, carefully cultivating a subtly stylized documentary aesthetic, obsessing over crowds, public spaces and the modern city, and adding the bomb victim's story as a parallel. Similarly, he began incorporating documentary photography into his novels and theater work around this time. He was also an increasingly important public figure as a social critic and literary theorist. A recent translation, The Frontier Within, collects some of these essays.

Abe was much too scrupulous about connecting his art to the world it appeared in for one to ever be able to say that it exists in its own universe.

The Abe you describe (the main in the hole is a man in a hole) is very close to the Robbe-Grillet described by Barthes (a tomato is a tomato), a description cherished by R-G as a beautiful idea while at the same time pointing out its fundamental inaccuracy.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#191 Post by Shrew » Sun Oct 26, 2014 10:46 am

I think the issue here is that Mr. Sausage uses allegory in its traditional sense: a specific meaning that is directly and clearly indicated within an otherwise unrelated story or image. The classical example might be personifications of vices and virtues in religious art, where a painting of an otherwise humble ordinary woman is labeled Piety or Chastity, and the meaning is transformed. Anything that does not clearly indicate a specific allegorical meaning (or is ambiguous) is a failed allegory. This isn't really common anymore, aside from political cartoons.

Under this definition, Mr. Sausage is right. I don't think Woman in the Dunes is a classical allegory, because there's clearly never any point where Abe or Teshigahara are forcing a specific allegorical message about class struggle or man in the modern day or anything. That said, I think Sausage goes a little too far is saying that there's nothing in the story but a man digging himself out of the sand. It's such an evocative image that one can't help but see it in a representation of existential crisis or alienation or entrapping gender roles. Abe might not intend any specific reading, but the story is still meant to be resonant.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#192 Post by Jack Phillips » Sun Oct 26, 2014 2:20 pm

Shrew wrote: Under this definition, Mr. Sausage is right. I don't think Woman in the Dunes is a classical allegory, because there's clearly never any point where Abe or Teshigahara are forcing a specific allegorical message about class struggle or man in the modern day or anything. That said, I think Sausage goes a little too far is saying that there's nothing in the story but a man digging himself out of the sand. It's such an evocative image that one can't help but see it in a representation of existential crisis or alienation or entrapping gender roles. Abe might not intend any specific reading, but the story is still meant to be resonant.
This sounds right. It's an approach that operates frequently in 20th Century lit/drama/film. Is Waiting for Godot an allegory? Certainly not. But it's not merely a literal story about two men waiting for a third. We're all waiting for something: fill in yours.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#193 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Oct 26, 2014 6:28 pm

Jack Phillips wrote:This sounds right. It's an approach that operates frequently in 20th Century lit/drama/film. Is Waiting for Godot an allegory? Certainly not. But it's not merely a literal story about two men waiting for a third. We're all waiting for something: fill in yours.
But my point is exactly that Abe's stories are not the "pure" existentialist texts of Beckett, but an "impure" form of that kind of literature, and that politics are an integral part of the texts themselves. Of course all of them have many valences and levels of meaning and are to a certain degree open to and expectant of the reader's own interpretation. But their political content is not accidental, and should not be treated as such, or as a crude imposition on a "strange universe".

As Shrew points out, very few modern texts are allegories in the classical or medieval sense. Modernist writers tend to use allegory in conjunction with other devices, or construct multiple conversant or contradictory allegories in parallel (resulting in a complex and structured ambiguity). This is certainly the case with Abe.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#194 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Oct 26, 2014 6:43 pm

I think people are cherry-picking some phrases of mine and my intended meaning has been lost somewhat. Regarding the man in the hole being just a man in the whole, the context for that statement is necessary:
Mr Sausage wrote:But I think we agree that in an Abe story, a man in a hole is just a man in a hole. His literal circumstances determine his thoughts and actions. He is not a representative of a wider group. Abe's stories are fantasies that inhabit their own strange universe.
I'm not arguing that the story has no wider meaning. I'm arguing that what the character thinks and does is very much the product of the singular situation he finds himself in, and that the situation is indeed singular enough to resist extrapolation into allegory. Whatever it means, this man is not us and we are not all in holes, tho' we may behave similarly if we did find ourselves in a similar predicament. It's seductive to treat odd situations symbolically or allegorically, but I think we ought to let this situation remain odd.

I'm glad someone brought up Waiting for Godot because it's an instructive contrast: Beckett's play is abstract, and I doubt anyone ever felt that the characters' speech and behaviours were only the result of the specific situation of waiting for someone. Abe's novel and Teshigahara's film are, by contrast, grounded in the specific details of this odd situation. I never once got the feeling that this world was any but its own, or that the character was reacting to something besides his immediate circumstances.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#195 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Oct 26, 2014 6:53 pm

FerdinandGriffon wrote:As Shrew points out, very few modern texts are allegories in the classical or medieval sense. Modernist writers tend to use allegory in conjunction with other devices, or construct multiple conversant or contradictory allegories in parallel (resulting in a complex and structured ambiguity). This is certainly the case with Abe.
I assume you mean post modern writers(?). I'm amenable to the idea that Abe uses post-modern allegory (tho' I don't really feel that way myself). But we can agree that Abe's work is not the kind of allegory I was responding to above, right? And that the political dimension of Abe's work is more complex and ambiguous than a straight-forward anti-capitalist polemic?

Beyond that, I think we'd just be nitpicking.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#196 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:00 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:It's seductive to treat odd situations symbolically or allegorically, but I think we ought to let this situation remain odd.
But why not do both? Why not acknowledge a situation's symbolic potential, whilst still recognizing the text's resistance to final analysis?

You said Abe wasn't an allegorist, when he is, amongst other things.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#197 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:12 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
FerdinandGriffon wrote:As Shrew points out, very few modern texts are allegories in the classical or medieval sense. Modernist writers tend to use allegory in conjunction with other devices, or construct multiple conversant or contradictory allegories in parallel (resulting in a complex and structured ambiguity). This is certainly the case with Abe.
I assume you mean post modern writers(?). I'm amenable to the idea that Abe uses post-modern allegory (tho' I don't really feel that way myself). But we can agree that Abe's work is not the kind of allegory I was responding to above, right? And that the political dimension of Abe's work is more complex and ambiguous than a straight-forward anti-capitalist polemic?

Beyond that, I think we'd just be nitpicking.
No, I didn't mean post-modernist writers. Though these classifications are external to the writing itself and up for debate. If Abe's work has to be classified I think it fits best as part of the international extension of the French nouveau roman, and at least the founding nouveau romanistes were often quite clear about their distaste for the so-called post-modern novel and their own feeling of affinity with modernism. But if you consider them post-modern then I suppose you would Abe too.

I think movielocke is a little wide of the mark and certainly only scratching the surface of this dimension of the work, but your first couple of responses were steering him away from considering the possibility of there being any political allegory in it at all.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#198 Post by knives » Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:41 pm

I would assume that a better point of comparison than Beckett is Kafka who is likewise putting ordinary people in absurd situations and having the more interpretative elements be what can be literally taken from the situation. While perhaps a critique of capitalism is in, say, The Trial it is not by metaphor but because the situation is a capitalistic situation. The way that relates to Sausage's point, I feel, is that while there may also be an anti-capitalist message here it isn't through the action of digging which might be a swell allegorical elsewhere but doesn't really fit the motivations for digging. Hell if any allegory could be taken from that action, and I don't think it fits either, it would be the gender flipped critique of the domestic that seems to be pronounced through the story. In either case any less than literal reading of the film could only make a complete sense with the text if there was a literal one to one connection going on. What is the digging like? Certainly not capitalism. Keeping the house clean though it is a certain.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#199 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:47 pm

ferdinandgriffon wrote:But why not do both? Why not acknowledge a situation's symbolic potential, whilst still recognizing the text's resistance to final analysis?
The simple answer is I am not doing both, here, because I don't think either the movie or the book are particularly symbolic.
ferdinandgriffon wrote:You said Abe wasn't an allegorist, when he is, amongst other things.
Yes, those would be our respective positions (with the caveat that I meant allegory in the traditional sense).
ferdinandgriffon wrote:No, I didn't mean post-modernist writers. Though these classifications are external to the writing itself and up for debate. If Abe's work has to be classified I think it fits best as part of the international extension of the French nouveau roman, and at least the founding nouveau romanistes were often quite clear about their distaste for the so-called post-modern novel and their own feeling of affinity with modernism. But if you consider them post-modern then I suppose you would Abe too.
Do I consider any of these writers post-modern? I was just clarifying your terms.

While terminology is up for debate, using it according to unstated private definitions can lead to confusion. I'm still not entirely sure who you're referring to when you say "Modernist writers tend to use allegory in conjunction with other devices...". Your description of that type of allegory is a-typical of writers from the modernist period and typical of post-modernists. But if you aren't talking about the post-modernists (who nevertheless do engage in that kind of allegory) and you're not talking about the writers during the modernist period, you're talking about...? I guess French writers who emerged in the 50's (of whom I've only read Robbe-Grillet and don't consider particularly modernist or post-modernist--I actually like Christine Brooke-Rose's argument that the new novel is a return to the 17th century Baroque) and who you've taken at their word about being modernists? I don't know.

Anyway, we have different conceptions of Abe (me: a daemonic fantasist who increasingly constructed private worlds; you: a complex political and social novelist who subsumed his ideas in ambiguous fantasies of a symbolic/allegoric nature) that probably shouldn't be worked out here, now. And that we mostly agree about movielocke's interpretation missing a lot.

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Re: 392-395 Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

#200 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Nov 16, 2014 6:32 pm

Apologies for flogging a horse thought dead, but this discussion has been nagging at me and I wanted to set a few things straight. Had been caught up in work and unable to post earlier.
Mr Sausage wrote:While terminology is up for debate, using it according to unstated private definitions can lead to confusion.
And what would be the "public" definition that I am somehow operating outside of? This seems like an especially suspect idea when talking about loose movements like modernism, characterized more by periods of intense stylistic diversity and experimentation than by any inherent qualities or shared intentions.
Mr Sausage wrote:Your description of that type of allegory is a-typical of writers from the modernist period and typical of post-modernists.
Really? Though the technique is certainly in the post-modern toolkit (wielded with less subtlety than it had been previously, I'd say) it didn't appear there without precedent. And I'd point to the very clear examples of this in the work of writers like Kafka ("Before the Law", "The Great Wall of China", The Trial), Capek (The Insect Play) Akutagawa (Kappa) and Tanizaki ("The Tatooer") as evidence, writers who definitely made their mark on Abe. Abe comes a bit later, in a period of transition, and was also influenced by and has even more in common with the nouveau roman, including the uncomfortable position of writing in a modernist tradition at a time when that tradition was falling out of fashion. I should point out that many of the nouveau romanistes began writing, in their mature styles, as early as the 30s, and that just because they were all brought under the same umbrella in the 50s doesn't mean one should assume the movement started then.
Mr Sausage wrote:I guess French writers who emerged in the 50's (of whom I've only read Robbe-Grillet and don't consider particularly modernist or post-modernist--I actually like Christine Brooke-Rose's argument that the new novel is a return to the 17th century Baroque) and who you've taken at their word about being modernists?
Are you sure that Brooke-Rose was arguing that about the nouveau roman movement as a whole, or just Robbe-Grillet? Though that's certainly an interesting approach to R-G, it doesn't apply at all to say, Sarraute or Pinget.
And no, I'm not simply taking the nouveau romanistes at their word. I'm considering them modernists based on the way in which their work continues and expands the investigations started by modernist writers like Proust, Beckett, and Bove, their lack of similarity with the more easily defined post-modern literature, and their productivity within a period widely considered that of late modernism.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that many of Abe's works, like The Ruined Map (novel and film) and White Morning, are totally lacking in the fantastical elements you claim are characteristic, while still being of a clear and consistent piece with the rest of his oeuvre. And that many of the fantastical features of the films of Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another should be attributed to Teshigahara, not Abe, whose original novels are presented in a much drier, essayistic and pseudo-scientific style, without recourse to the baroque visuals of the films.

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