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The Face of Another (Tanin No Kao) (1967) [VHS]

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Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another (1966) is his follow-up to the justly renowned Woman In the Dunes of 1964, but has failed to garner the reputation the earlier film has. This, however, is not due to any major shortcomings; on the contrary, this film is by turns disturbing, beautiful, grotesque and brilliant, a deep meditation on the implications of our markers for identity, of which our faces are perhaps the most important. A man is disfigured in an industrial accident; the doctor who treats him offers to make a lifelike mask. The masquerade of daily life is compounded if one has a face no one associates with your previously-established identity. As the doctor who provides the mask for the protagonist observes, there is the distinct danger of losing one's sense of morality if no one can trace one's deeds to an already established identity. If no one knows who you are, such basic human connection such as love and trust disappear. The adoption of another face by this exemplar of industrial society exposes just how tenuous modern man's sense of his own identity can be, and the mask functions as a metaphor not only for such obvious identity-altering changes as plastic surgery but for more nebulous forms of alteration such as designer drugs and genetic engineering. A portal on our immediate future, The Face of Another functions as a chilling warning on the subject of the malleability of "human nature".