Faces of War: Japan’s Onibaba (1964) and The Face of Another (1966)
Within two years of each other, two Japanese films put a mask over a face the war had burned. Kaneto Shindō pulled a Noh demon over a widow in Onibaba, and Hiroshi Teshigahara fitted a flawless synthetic face onto a scarred engineer in The Face of Another. One mask is the oldest thing in the country’s theatre and the other is built in a laboratory, and both cover the same wound, the newest in its history. Each film asks whether the face underneath is a monster, a stranger, or the only truth a person has left.