Three Reasons: The Man Without a Map from For Criterion Consideration on Vimeo.
I can't recall exactly when I first saw Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, but it had a profound impact on my cinematic upbringing. It was most likely on 16mm or third generation bootleg VHS, and even looking past the grainy transfer and static I could see a beautifully crafted film, the likes of which I had never seen before. I immediately sought out Kobo Abe's original novel and any related material I could lay my hands on. The film also opened my ears to the music of Toru Takemitsu, the composer responsible for damn near every Japanese film made in the 60s. These three auteurs would ultimately become the holy trinity in Japanese film history, not to mention equally excellent in their own respective fields. So when Criterion announced a Teshigahara box set, I was ecstatic. Up until that point the other films were not available in the US, and I was anxious to see more. Once I had that gorgeous box in my hands I soon found that Pitfall and The Face of Another were equally great; the set boasted delicious array of supplements, including Teshigahara's short films on Hokusai and his father's avant-garde Sogetsu School for Ikebana (the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement).
But I also found one glaring omission; the fourth film in their unfortunately short-lived collaboration, The Man Without a Map.
Based on Abe's novel The Ruined Map, The Man Without a Map would be the final collaboration between Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu. What separates it from the other three films is that it was shot in color and CinemaScope, which was somewhat of a surprise considering they had held out in favor of black-and-white long after the studios had shifted production to color. Critic and film programmer James Quandt makes only a passing remark in his Criterion essay on Face of Another in regards to Man Without a Map; he describes how Teshigahara's adherence to traditional ratio and black-and-white film emphasized the arrangement of mise-en-scène, utilizing a strict visual design undoubtedly inherited from his training in ikebana, but the choice to use color and Scope reveals a "discomfort with both." It has also been argued elsewhere that this film ultimately is inferior to the team's preceding films, perhaps due in part to the decision to adopt the CinemaScope fad. While I agree this film may not be on par with the first three, Teshigahara's use of CinemaScope superbly enhances his stylistic determination. As my Three Reasons hopefully exhibits, nearly every frame of this film is calculated and arranged beautifully, and at the same time provides the perfect visual equivalent to Abe's existential themes.
On paper, the plot sounds simple enough: A detective is hired to find a missing person named Nemuro. A series of seemingly meaningless clues are thrown at him wherever he goes, characters float in and out of his way as he desperately tries to make sense of why anyone would just disappear without cause or reason. Even as evidence is laid out (or manufactured?), our detective searches for a deeper meaning until finally he begins to question his own identity. Therein lie the common threads linking all the Teshigahara-Abe-Takemistu films; identity, alienation, existence. Who am I? This is not my beautiful wife. Why am I in this pit? What the hell is going on? In every film, characters struggle with these problems, but in the end there are no solutions. In regard to Abe's narrative influence, Man Without a Map falls perfectly within the sensibilities of the other films. But its source, The Ruined Map, is straightforward compared to other Abe novels. Having the protagonist be a detective instead of an amateur entomologist is a helluva lot more accessible. The film benefits from this device as the audience tries to find meaning in the seemingly random events that our detective finds himself involved in. Fans of film noir will enjoy the playful subversion of the hard-boiled detective and femme fatale archetypes, and there's a surprising dream sequence that will throw viewers off if they don't pay attention to certain visual cues. This film was released years before Robert Altman's 1973 film of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely,, but just like Elliot Gould's mumbling Philip Marlowe, our detective has a fondness for cats.
I'll admit, I'm tempted to just scold Criterion for not trying harder to include the film in the first place. It is the final piece in an amazing body of work. To exclude it would be a travesty. Travesty, I say! But Criterion did an amazing job with what they had, even without Man Without a Map. At this point the movie remains unavailable outside Japan, and there doesn't seem to be much acknowledgment of its existence in the West. And since there is no Mayor of Movies to write angry letters to, we just have to wait for Criterion to correct the matter once the Teshigahara box gets Blu-graded.
Robert Nishimura is a Japan-based filmmaker, artist, and freelance designer. His designs can be found at Primolandia Productions. His non-commercial video work is at For Criterion Consideration. You can follow him on Twitter here. To watch other videos in his "Three Reasons" series, click here.
Most of the 
On the off chance that some readers haven’t seen the email sent to subscribers, I thought I’d reprint that first. It reads as follows:
My readers at Edward Copeland on Film know that I have primary progressive multiple sclerosis, and that because of a greedy and inattentive doctor, a bedsore no one noticed soon enough, and an understaffed, incompetent hospital, I ended up bedridden more than three years ago. As a result, I’m on Social Security Disability (for which I’ve never received a cost-of-living increase, though the assholes making six-figure salaries in Congress made sure to give themselves one each year) and what little savings I had (including my 401k) are quickly dwindling away. My sole expenses are health and medical related, Netflix and lottery tickets if the jackpot tops $50 million.
Several times when I have used the streaming option, the movie or program I’m watching has stopped and had to rebuffer as if I’m on an old dial-up connection instead of my cable company’s WiFi. It did it once when a movie only had 10 minutes left to go. It took 30 minutes on the phone with Netflix and a fix that involved starting some other program to get the movie going again. Stress aggravates the symptoms of M.S., so you want me to sign up for a streaming option full of kinks that doesn’t work all the time that I’d be forced to watch on a small screen with inferior sound?
should I do with all these laserdiscs?) and upgrades happen constantly (Consider Facebook’s motto: “If it’s not broke, break it”) and if you are unfortunate enough not to be able to buy each new one, your equipment becomes obsolete. What all of you wizards fail to realize is that this country still hasn’t recovered from the deep economic hole that Wall Street and the last administration dug and that the average American still hasn’t emerged from the mounds of dirt that we were covered by in the process, so you’re really pricing yourself out of existence. If it comes down to a choice between the DVD only plan, the streaming only plan or having enough money to fill your gas tank to get to your job (if you are lucky enough to have one) so you can pay your bills, Netflix will be the one who loses in the end. I see your corporation is being 
Derek’s visits with Peter are pretty much defined by his fear of what—not even who, perhaps—lives in that horribly still, staring body. Even Stiles’ goofball fears of being gay if he does this or does that are not, I’m certain, about an actual fear of queerness, but a fear of forcibly turning into something else against his will. I already trust show creator Jess Davis to feel certain we’ll find out why Stiles is so frightened.
Shortly after Say Anything’s release, a female fan approached Cusack at a bar and asked him, “Are you Lloyd?” His answer was, “On a good day.” Cusack himself had once told an interviewer that he “felt close to Lloyd” in Say Anything. Adding, “only I’m not as good as him. Whatever part of me is romantic and optimistic, I reached into that to play Lloyd. Of course, now it’s all gone. Now I’m just bitter.” I myself would later learn, it wasn’t about one or the other: real versus fake, onscreen versus offscreen. Lloyd Dobler versus John Cusack. It was about doubling. Using one person to be another person, so that you could be more and less of yourself. A hybrid. An ideal. In 
Even years later, when 
As viewers, we often have one foot in a film and one foot in reality, so when it comes to the stars we love, we look to the fiction or we look for a way out of it depending on which outcome is better. This adds a new layer to the cinematic fold. “We can note a number of levels at which the actor-subject is constituted as an instance exterior to its appearance in form,” DeCordova writes, and “each is predicated on the knowledge…that the people whose image appears on film have an existence outside of that image.” Perhaps Grifter’s director 
After a short-con goes wrong in The Grifters, Roy ends up in the hospital with internal bleeding. Myra Langtry (Annette Bening), Roy’s long-con girlfriend, comes to visit Roy, who’s been posing as a matchbook salesman, and asks him what he really sells for a living? Although maimed and bound to a wheelchair Roy manages to muster up enough swagger to answer “self-confidence.” A euphemism, “confidence” (con-man) or “confidence trickster,” meaning to fool a person by gaining their confidence, is the original definition of grifter. In order to hoodwink people and maintain their anonymity, grifters, also called drifters, never stay in one place, in the same way that “good” actors are expected not to inhabit the same character twice. For both grifters (especially short-con ones) and actors, identity is a swindle; a temporary role you wander through and occupy quixotically without ever settling down into anything or anyone. Perhaps this definition of acting is also the antithesis of Method acting, where one lives (or claims to) firmly or fully in a role in order to “become” something else.
But while when it comes to Hollywood, screen performances and actors are designed to be remembered, grifters and grifts are not: “You couldn’t disguise yourself, naturally,” writes Jim Thompson in The Grifters, “It was more a matter of not doing anything. Or avoiding any mannerism, any expression, any tone or pattern of speech, any posture or gesture or walk—anything that might be remembered.” Thompson’s conspectus of grifters can be likened to a naturalistic style of acting—the kind of acting you don’t see. The kind that doesn’t leave an impression. That passes for real. That tricks you into believing. In her book Choking on Marlon Brando, film critic Antonia Quirke echoes Thompson description of grifters, “Actors always like to think that acting is about giving. But a great actor knows that it’s about concealing. Great actors are people with something to conceal.”
In Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) acting is presented intertextually and the diegetic and non-diegetic come together. Cinematic references, allusions, and stars litter the film both as distinct Hollywood types and interrelated parts that comprise the “identity-producing apparatus” of Hollywood. The Player film features over sixty cameo appearances by Hollywood actors, producers, and directors, who appear extraneously as actors/directors/producers playing “themselves,” or principally as fictional characters embedded in The Player’s diegetic fiction. However, stars do not appear gratuitously to simply boost the celebrity count of the film, but rather to depict an intricate system of representation and to illustrate how that system operates as a complex web of onstage and offstage life. DeCordova points out that the “star’s identity does not exist within the individual star (the way we might, however naively, believe our identities exist within us), but rather in the connections between and associations among a wide variety of texts—films, interviews, publicity photos, etc.” These connections and associations are literally the subject and mise en scène of The Player.
In a 2008 episode of Talk Theatre In Chicago, Joyce Piven, co-founder and Artistic Director Emeritus of 
At the end of War, Inc, Hauser also uses a pointed instrument to stab and kill a man. In this case, the murder is witnessed by Natalie, Hauser’s love interest, as well as Hauser’s long lost daughter, the Central Asian pop star Yonica Babyyeah. Only this time, when Hauser, realizes that Natalie and Yonica have witnessed his savagery, he doesn’t bother to interject with, “It’s not me.” Instead, he looks utterly dejected. For Hauser it is simply too late for such disavowals. Both Martin and Hauser have blood on their hands and blood on their mouths. Blood coming out of them. Both men wound and are wounded. Both are no longer themselves. When Lloyd, the kickboxer, gets knocked out at the sight of Diane while training in the ring, Lloyd is wounded and bleeding around the nose and mouth. He is bleeding when Diane asks him to take her back. Bleeding when they kiss. Martin is bleeding when Debi sees him. Hauser is bleeding when Natalie and Yanica see him. As Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “These marks, these wounds are so many points.” The painter Caravaggio says something similar in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio: “In the wound, the question is answered” (See the clip from 4:43-5:30).
Both Martin and Hauser are looking for a way back to the moral center and “warrior optimism” that Lloyd personifies in Say Anything. In both Grosse Pointe Blank and War, Inc., Cusack delves into Lloyd’s shadow side, his alter ego, telling Total Film, “Like all actors, I really just reveal my shadow every time I work. And the shadow is all the pain, shame, anger, and rage; the creativity and sexuality.” Similarly, on Charlie Rose, Cusack explains that he wanted to make Grosse Pointe Blank because Martin “is a fertile character to get into American dream mythology.” So too, of course, is celebrity, as well as Cusack’s own contribution to and stake in American dream mythology. Thus, if Lloyd is the male ideal, perhaps Martin and Hauser are prologues—or even aftermaths—to Lloyd; a paragon that’s led astray in Grosse Pointe Blank and War, Inc, the way that the 80s can be read as a backlash to the political and social idealism of the 60s and 70s, which shaped Cusack’s own progressive upbringing in Evanston, Illinois.
As a film, The Grifters, a color noir, gorges on American history by expressing it synchronically, and therefore not at all. History is medley, pastiche: “You had the women in forties dresses,” says Cusack on the movie’s audio track, “and we were driving cars from the seventies, and I was in eighties suits doing my grift at a Bennigans.” Even the movie’s DVD image (now over twenty years old) with the unspecified date surrounding Roger Ebert’s assertion that The Grifters is “One Of The Year’s Top 10 Movies!—” invokes a strange mixture of anachronism, simultaneity, and temporal suspension. I would argue that Frears’ and Westlake’s omission of Roberg’s story and Roy’s treatment of her is an attempt to save-face—primarily Roy’s (a victim of a shocking Oedipal dénouement, which complicates the film and saves it from being mere pastiche) and Cusack’s, a beloved romantic icon, for the anti-Semitism and nihilistic interiority that Roy displays in the novel versus the film, showcases a much more unpardonable and unsavory cruelty:
In a review of Must Love Dogs (2005) one critic scoffed, “Cusack is playing Cusack as he always does. You know what I’m talking about.” Another chimed in with a similar complaint, “The problem with John Cusack is he has no range. He always plays one role: himself.” But while it’s one thing to accuse someone of bad acting, it’s another to equate what they do onscreen—however badly—with authenticity; that is, to assume that the flaw lies in a consistently intrusive verisimilitude that doesn’t belong in cinematic space or in a fiction, and that the viewer can never actually verify when it comes to the star. Moreover, that a lack of range or acting ability is rooted in the failure to break with the “real” self. And yet Cusack’s implicit and explicit use of subjectivity in his acting—his acknowledgement that the choice to act, to play someone, to compose a self, and most importantly, to draw a connection and create a continuum between the onscreen and offscreen selves—has made his screen presence uniquely significant.
Others, including Kirk himself sometimes, choose to present the situation quite differently. Words like “abduction” and “male rape” are bandied about, not just in the press but in the courtroom. Depending on which tabloid you read (say, the Daily Express or the Daily Mirror), you might follow the story as “The Mormon Sex in Chains Case” or “The Case of the Manacled Mormon.” One yellow journalist, who is quite fond of the eye-catching S&M connotations of the phrase “spread-eagled,” admits that Joyce would probably say rope was used, but that “chains” is much better for headlines. (As he and others use these sensationalistic terms, they are splashed across the screen in screaming headline fonts: “OBSESSED”; “CHAINED!”; “SPREAD EAGLED”; “DOWN SLAVE!”; “GUILT”…) That Kirk was physically attached to a bed for sexual purposes seems to be something everyone can agree upon. But was he a willing participant? Joyce says he admitted in court that the sex was “more consensual” the third time than it was the first.
“Tabloid” has everything a fascinatingly salacious story requires and more — not just the kinky sex and layers of intrigue to keep you guessing about who’s lying and who’s telling whose version of the truth, but the humor, smarts, skill and sizzle to make it all irresistibly enthralling. Just because it has so much fun being naughty, though, doesn’t mean it’s nothing more than lightweight entertainment. 
One of the theses of “Standard Operating Procedure” is that cameras not only recorded atrocities and abuses at Abu Grahib prison, but that some of the acts would not have happened if it weren’t for the presence of those cameras. Morris’s 
The mixed metaphor of stepping into the spotlight and being under the microscope aptly captures the dichotomous nature of Joyce’s situation: she is (whether she likes it or not) exposed in public, every detail of her past and present selves subjected to intense examination. At a certain point, the press finds she fits neatly into the age-old madonna-whore template: In the Daily Mirror she’s a slutty Eve, the fallen temptress who seduced and corrupted Kirk; in the Daily Express, she’s the saintly Christian martyr, an almost virginal (except for Kirk) victim of love, misunderstood by a hypocritical, dirty-minded society. As several observers note, somewhere in-between, maybe, is the truth. 
Of the three women at the center of Love Crimes of Kabul, the most sympathetic is the 18-year-old girl Sabereh. She was turned into the authorities by her father when he discovered her kissing a 17-year-old boy in a closet. Since the boy isn’t an adult, he ís put in the children’s jail. The tragedy of her case stems from a doctor’s medical examination, which proves that her claims that they didn’t have sex are true; the exam indicates Sabereh’s virginity remains intact. However, she’s still incarcerated, awaiting trial for the crimes of falling in love and possibly committing sodomy. As one of the women officials who run the prison says, “Women are given too much freedom.” She later adds that “Anal sex is worse than adultery.” It doesn’t matter that the girl’s father lied about what he saw. Surprisingly, though, Sabereh keeps a rather cheery outlook, because not only does she know she’s in the right, she loves the boy and hopes the legal problems will lead to their marriage. It seems that most of these cases — which end up with hearings in two courts, Family and Criminal — often get resolved by having the accused parties wed. The second woman, Kareema, 20, starts the documentary much like Sabereh in terms of giddiness and lovesickness for her man, but the transformation of her character truly powers the film and is one of the main reasons it’s so engaging.
Kareema’s relationship with Firuz started, according to her, when he started chasing her, but she found him cute, and before long they were sneaking off for trysts. Kareema wanted Firuz to marry her but he wasn’t interested, partly due to her character in general, but mostly due to pressure from his parents, who disapproved of such a relationship since they belong to the Pashtun tribe and Kareema is a member of the Hazara tribe. “Everyone should stick to their own people,” Firuz’s mother says. As a result, Kareema turned herself in to the authorities for having premarital sex,. That act also sent Firuz to jail, en route to forced marraige marriage. Interviewed in Kabul’s Men Prison, Firuz admits he wishes he never met her. His father paints a picture where Kareema was the pursuer, sneaking into Firuz’s bedroom at night to seduce him. “No one in her tribe wanted her. Sheís not worth what she wants,” Firuz’s father complains during negotiations on what sort of payment Firuz’s family will make to Kareema’s in order to marry her. Things grow more complicated during her prison stay as Kareema discovers she’s pregnant; when it becomes clear Firuz isn’t in love with her, she becomes obsessed with making money from the deal. As much as Firuz’s family hates her, Kareema’s own seems just as ashamed of their daughter’s actions. Just reading a dry description of the tale makes the tragedy and sadness of it come through, but watching the documentary, Kareema turns into such a piece of work that you’re too dumbstruck watching her actions to feel sorry for her. She argues in court for Firuz to give her $30,000 before the marriage in case he ever wants to divorce her. After the court-forced wedding, as Firuz sits unhappily next to Kareema, she spitefully says, “This son of a bitch still hasn’t learned his lesson. You thought I was kidding? You thought you’d get away with it?” Her transformation even takes on physical attributes; granted that’s due to the pregnancy, but it makes sense that the smiling, lovestruck young woman of the beginning should also look different as she turns into the grasping shrew of the later stages of the film.
The documentary’s third major subject is Aleema, 23, a divorced woman who lives at home again with her parents. When her abusive living arrangement becomes too much, Aleema flees, taking refuge with a woman named Zia. As becomes the case with all these charges and trials, business deals end up at the core of everything. Zia tries to sell Aleema to an undercover cop, who arrests both women. Sharing the same cell at the jail, Zia and Aleema fight over Aleema’s marital future. A furious Zia demands that Aleema marry her son to make up for the imprisonment, but Aleema refuses because she knows Zia can’t afford the dowry she feels she deserves, and knows her son can’t provide the lifestyle she covets. Aleema thinks Zia wants her for her son because she can get her cheap because of her “shame.” No details really are provided about what happened to Aleema’s first marriage, though when Kareema demands her money from Fariz in Family Court a title card informs us that “Under Sharia Law, in the event of divorce, a woman has the right to money from her husband to make it difficult to divorce.” At one point, a social worker visits Aleema and says, “A bad husband is better than no husband.” Zia gets advice as well, hers coming from the female head of the jail who reminds her of an old saying, “”Keep away from broken walls and harlot women.”
Originally collaborating on anti-Nazi propaganda for producer 
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If there was one moment in which single-handedly culminates The Archers' style, their sympathy of their characters' moral dilemmas, and their unique understanding of the limitless possibilities of cinema, it must be the the 15-minute dance montage in The Red Shoes. With a complete disregard for realism, it could stand alone as its own short film. With Vicki Page (
While many of these films merely lift the plot of the Archers' many masterpieces, it is a rarity in which a filmmaker embodies the magic and deft understanding of the dreamscapes of time and space. But there is hope; 
As I write this it’s been a month, a small eternity in social media time, since “Born This Way” (or ‘BTW’ for short) dropped. I find myself trying to solve this mystery of whys. As in: Why does Born This Way affect me so personally? Why are its effects are so damned prolix? Why it’s so freakin’ hard to put words to this experience? Why does every answer raise five more questions? Sure, you can shrug off Born This Way as gold-standard song craft, encompassing New Order-y electro, queered Springsteen, post-Sparks chamber pop and more, as an ADHD generation’s Sgt. Pepper's. But the problem with Lady Gaga as a critical subject is that there’s no journalistic preset for responsibly covering a recording artist and performance artist, video director, chatty talk show guest, fashionista, radical queer activist and hug-giving populist. Since there’s no ‘right way,’ intuition tells me to err on the side of excited overkill, and be as subjective as fact-telling allows.
Anyway—midway through BTW I felt trapped between crying and laughing with a lump in my throat, and feeling as though if I heard much more I’d simply lose my shit, and that if I didn’t hear more I’d be really pissed. I took to Facebook, to Twitter, to my blog. I had to talk about this…this…event. Were other people spazzing out like this? What did “like this” even mean? There was spazzing to spare. This was, after all, the week Gaga eclipsed 10 million Twitter followers. OMGs flew into the cybersphere at record rates.
Even the album-track lark that is “The Queen” combines pealing synth church bells, Brill Building idiom, Darlene Love-ing vocals, and hip-switching Shindig! beat with 
See, there is no cult of Gaga. Oh, fans do get obsessed (cough, cough). But there is no creepy text, no Fountainhead for the Poker-Faced. There’s nothing for fans to follow beyond Gaga’s repeated insistence that BTW is about fans seizing their right to be metaphorically reborn and reborn again until they get it right, or as the great Brit wit Stephen Fry, himself a passionately out and proud adult Monster, put it, to “find out who you are and be it.” But actually doing that is hard work, day in, day out. And that’s where Lady Gaga — in her Tweets, lyrics, Facebook reminders, multi-lingual talk show appearances, by her sheer, relentless, media-piercing, atmospheric Gaganess — most vividly earns her keep. It’s by being a best-case-scenario reflective surface for her fans’ dreams. 
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