Hiroshi Teshigahara

The novelist Kōbō Abe wrote the books and the scripts for Teshigahara's best-known films, and each one traps a modern man in a riddle. An entomologist on holiday is taken captive by villagers in Woman in the Dunes and made to live with a woman whose task in life is shovelling sand. A businessman scarred in a laboratory explosion is given a lifelike mask in The Face of Another. In The Man Without a Map, a detective hired to find a missing husband gathers clues that contradict each other.

Signature

• Kōbō Abe novels, scripted by Abe himself.
• Identity lost or swapped (The Face of Another, The Man Without a Map).
• Texture filmed up close: sand, skin, sweat.
• Scores by Toru Takemitsu.