The Face of Another
1966 · Hiroshi Teshigahara
A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his new doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality and causing him to question his identity.
dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara · 1966
The third of Hiroshi Teshigahara's four collaborations with novelist Kōbō Abe — between Woman in the Dunes and The Man Without a Map — is the coldest and most cerebral: a science-fiction chamber piece about an engineer, played by Tatsuya Nakadai, whose face has been ruined in an industrial accident and who commissions a lifelike mask from a psychiatrist rather more interested in the experiment than the cure. Abe's question is whether a face is a possession or a self, and Teshigahara answers in images: the doctor's clinic, its glass walls etched with anatomical diagrams, disembodied ears floating in space, was conceived with avant-garde architect Arata Isozaki and remains one of the great sets of the 1960s. A parallel story follows a young woman whose face bears a keloid scar from the atomic bomb, quietly grounding the identity games in Japan's postwar disfigurement. Tōru Takemitsu supplies a Viennese waltz that lilts, recurs, and slowly curdles as the mask takes hold.
Lines of influence
- Eyes Without a Face (1960) — Direct ancestor for the surgical-face conceit: the clinical grafting of a new face onto a patient, filmed with cold documentary poise that lets surreal horror bleed through antiseptic mise-en-scène — Teshigahara inverts it by giving the patient volition over his new mask.
- Pitfall (1962) — The founding Teshigahara–Abe–Takemitsu collaboration that fused Abe's parable of dislocated identity with documentary-textured surrealism, establishing the chamber-allegory grammar The Face of Another later formalizes.
- Woman in the Dunes (1964) — Immediate predecessor from the same authorship cycle: tactile extreme close-ups of skin and matter, an entrapment fable scored by Takemitsu's dissonant sound-design, and Abe's existential-experiment structure carried straight into the clinic.
- The Blood of a Poet (1930) — Ancestor for the surreal iconography of masks, mirrors, and faces detached from selfhood — the poetic-cinema tradition of treating the human face as a plastic, removable object that Teshigahara's mask sequences echo.
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — Expressionist template for the mad-clinician-in-a-distorted-space: architecture as psychological derangement, the debt Isozaki's disorienting glass-and-anatomy clinic set pays forward into modernist design.
- Vertigo (1958) — Ancestor of the obsessive remaking of a person's face/identity, bound to a circling, waltz-like Herrmann motif — a structural rhyme with Takemitsu's recurring waltz threading Nakadai's reconstruction of self.
- Harakiri (1962) — Sibling via shared craftsmen: Tatsuya Nakadai's controlled interior performance and a Takemitsu score of biwa-scraped austerity, wedded to rigid geometric framing — the same collaborators' formalism in a different key.
- Kwaidan (1964) — Sibling in staging and sound: Takemitsu's musique-concrète scoring over openly artificial, painted studio environments — the anti-realist set-as-dreamspace strategy Isozaki's clinic shares.
- Onibaba (1964) — Japanese New Wave sibling on the mask-fused-to-face motif: the hannya mask that adheres to and disfigures its wearer, dramatizing the same terror of a disguise that consumes identity.
- Seconds (1966) — Same-year sibling: surgical rebirth into a wholly new face and life as an existential experiment, shot in James Wong Howe's warping wide-angle distortions that estrange the reconstructed self — a Western mirror of Nakadai's plot.
- Persona (1966) — Same-year sibling in the chamber-piece dissolution of identity: two faces superimposed and merged, the film's surface fracturing to expose the instability of the mask/self boundary.
- The Ruined Map (1968) — Descendant closing the Teshigahara–Abe cycle: a detective's identity dissolving into his quarry's, extending the seed's theme of a self unmoored by a borrowed face into noir architecture.
- 3 Women (1977) — Descendant of the identity-transfer chamber film: personalities bleeding and swapping between characters, carrying the Persona/Teshigahara inquiry into whether the self survives the loss of its face.
- Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) — Descendant in stylized staging: Eiko Ishioka's color-coded, overtly theatrical studio sets treat Japanese modernist space as psychological diagram — the heir to Isozaki's expressive clinical architecture.
- The Skin I Live In (2011) — Descendant of the surgical-identity lineage: a surgeon fabricating a new face and skin as an experiment in imposed selfhood, explicitly extending the Franju–Teshigahara conceit of the constructed face as prison.
- Under the Skin (2013) — Descendant treating the human face/body as a worn disguise over an alien interior, with Mica Levi's dissonant score functioning as Takemitsu's does — the sound of a self estranged from its own skin.
- Holy Motors (2012) — Descendant of the mask-and-disguise craft: a protagonist donning serial faces and identities across appointments, dramatizing the seed's suspicion that the face is a costume with no fixed wearer beneath.