Hiroshi Teshigahara: The Face of Another

Mirrors of the self

“The face is the door to the soul.
When the face is closed off,
so too is the soul.
Nobody is allowed inside.”

ADAPTED FROM THE novel by Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another (1966) by Japanese New Wave film director Hiroshi Teshigahara (28th January 1927–14th April 2001) is a haunting meditation on identity, alienation and the limits of perception. At once a psychological thriller and a metaphysical enquiry, the film follows the story of a man, Okuyama (played by Tatsuya Nakadai), whose face is disfigured in an industrial accident and who, with the help of a psychiatrist, constructs a lifelike prosthetic mask to re-enter society. Yet the mask does more than conceal—it fractures, multiplies and ultimately unravels his fragile sense of self. In the tradition of Teshigahara’s earlier film Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another confronts the paradoxes of human consciousness with austere, poetic precision.

Indeed, the masked protagonist becomes both more and less himself. The more he indulges in the illusion of a separate identity, the further he spirals into estrangement. The film gently but insistently asks: is the self a stable entity or merely a social fiction held together by appearance, memory and others’ recognition? As the character attempts to live behind the mask, he is forced to confront the terrifying freedom of formlessness. What remains when all labels and classifications fall away?

Teshigahara’s visual language reinforces this enquiry. Faces are often shown in close-up, disassembled by mirrors, fragmented through glass or cast in shadows, suggesting that identity is not a fixed image but a projection, endlessly refracted by perception into an infinite regress. The sterile, modernist interiors and haunting urban landscapes provide no comfort, serving only to underscore the existential void that arises when the subject ceases to believe in its own reality. In nondual terms, this is the moment when the self begins to dissolve, when it realizes it was never a separate entity from the outset.

Hiroshi Teshigahara, The Face of Another - The Culturium — © Hiroshi Teshigahara, *The Face of Another*

“I have so many selves,
I can’t even contain them all.”

The relationship between self and other, a key theme in nondual teachings, is central to the film. The man’s wife, his psychiatrist, and even the silent girl in the parallel subplot (whose face is also marked by war) all serve as mirrors—what he sees in them is filtered through the delusion of separation. However, the deeper message of the movie is that the “other” is always oneself in disguise. True recognition arises only when the veil of duality lifts and one truly sees without projection or fear.

And yet the film offers no final resolution. Its power lies in its ambiguity, its refusal to moralize or categorize. Like Zen kōans or Advaitic riddles, it draws the viewer into a state of enquiry. Who is watching? Who wears the mask? Can anything be said to belong truly to the self? These questions are not answered but allowed to resonate, pointing toward a deeper silence well beyond thought.

In this sense, The Face of Another becomes more than a film—it functions as a looking glass in which we, too, are invited to gaze and vanish. What appears as a psychological drama is, at heart, a profound nondual parable: the one who seeks identity is already the Self, whole and indivisible, playing for a time in the dream of form. When the mask finally slips, there is no face behind it—only the boundless awareness that was never lost.

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Mirrors of the self

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