Last night I rang in the glorious Halloween season by watching the 1966 film The Face of Another<\/em>, Hiroshi Teshigahara\u2019s adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel. This is the story of a man who suffers terrible burns all over his face in an industrial accident, who gets the chance to wear a hyper-realistic mask of someone else\u2019s face, crafted by a mad scientist. His story is interwoven with the even sadder and creepier story of a young woman with burns on only one half of her face, who tries to live with her condition even as the main character is seeking to escape his.<\/p>\n This is a really intensely directed<\/em> movie. There are startling and troubling images in almost every scene. Teshigahara manages to wring horror from a shot of a pretty woman\u2019s legs descending a staircase, as we see the sheer stockings wrinkle slightly around her ankles as if her skin is coming off. There are scary labs with giant body parts on the walls and other strange interior-decorating choices, and shots which show faces at strange angles, as when the burned man and his wife are shown in a postcoital upside-down shot; or the moment in which the scientist\u2019s face appears just beside his patient\u2019s, tilted at about a twenty-degree angle. The music is also aggressive and well-used, including German torch songs (this is a very<\/em> postwar movie) and what I think is a waltz which serves as a recurring theme.<\/p>\n Really the whole movie is shivery, and unnecessarily intelligent. Some of the bubbitzing about the meaning of masks<\/em> is shallow, but some of it is unexpectedly great, like the burned man\u2019s wife\u2019s sharp little discourse about whether women wear makeup because they\u2019re worse than men or because they\u2019re better. The wife is a \u201cstill waters run deep\u201d character in general, which I like a lot. The discussion of what we would be like in a faceless world, how our human loneliness would change, is bizarrely reminiscent of debates about the anonymity and\/or pseudonymity of the Internet, where famously nobody knows if you\u2019re a dog.<\/p>\n The final \u201ctwist\u201d is not exactly a surprise, but I don\u2019t care, because spending two hours in this movie\u2019s creepy world was a terrific and intense experience.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night I rang in the glorious Halloween season by watching the 1966 film The Face of Another, Hiroshi Teshigahara\u2019s adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel. This is the story of a man who suffers terrible burns all over his face in an industrial accident, who gets the chance to wear a hyper-realistic mask of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[119,173,72],"class_list":["post-6342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-horror","tag-i-could-pick-a-better-century-out-of-a-hat","tag-in-the-flesh"],"yoast_head":"\n