The The Face of Another

Mask, Maze, Minotaur

Abstract

The Face of Another (Tanin no kao, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966) was adapted for the cinema by Kôbô Abe from his own novel, published in 1964. Both the literary tale and the film deal with the loss of identity, the anomaly and the deep nature of the monster under the frame of an insensitive and alienated society. This paper will comment three brief, outstanding scenes from the film where different perspectives of the deformed main character and his wife are confronted between two very distant artistic references: Pablo Picasso´s Minotarumaquia and the ancient Jômon pottery, the oldest in Japan´s History. Picasso´´ s 1935 print, one of his finest masterpieces, can be recognized in the domestic episodes where the couple reveal a deep marriage crisis. The presence of this print goes beyond the simple representation of an emotional disagreement for becoming a sophisticated metalinguistic resource, as it shapes a subplot over the main story, complementing it under a new point of view. Okuyama´s home is defined, from this artistic confrontation, as a space of death, imposture and loss: a domestic grave and an existential maze. Moreover, we can recognize some other outstanding topics on this scene, where modern art is confronted with the primitives. Picasso's Minotauromaquia and the Japanese prehistorical pottery establish a link between the beginning and the end of the culture, illustrating the return to the origins as a way for renewing the arts. As well as Picasso turned back to the old myths and the ancient cultures for strengthen his artistic practice, Teshigahara claims for the historical roots of the Japanese people as their rightful and genuine source.