April 18, 2001

3:15 PM

The man behind Woman in the Dunes has passed away. Filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara died on Saturday with nary a press announcement. I haven't been this pissed off about a media blackout since Sam Fuller passed on (or, to some extent, the recent death of Joey Ramone). Is the only way for an obscure artist to gain that long-neglected recognition for their works to kick the bucket? It would seem that, even then, there are no guarantees.
posted by ed (4 comments total)

...I feel the need to point out that although he was behind that film, he was working with good source material (Abe also wrote the screenplay).
posted by gluechunk at 3:50 PM on April 18, 2001

Professor Maynard Mack died recently: he was the greatest modern scholar of Alexander Pope, and an inspiration to anyone who studies the English eighteenth century. How did I find out? From Camille Paglia's Salon column: she had been taught by him at Yale. As she says, he was "one of the last of an illustrious generation of literary scholars whose like, given the present state of campus philistinism, we may never see again." And there's an irony there, in that Paglia herself seems intent on sacrificing her academic credentials on the altar of punditry.

Does it matter that there's a front page story in the papers, as well as a lovingly-written couple of paragraphs in the obits? Not really: we're remembered in our lives, not our deaths.
posted by holgate at 4:05 PM on April 18, 2001

Here's a couple of links to obits in English-language editions of the Japanese press: here
and

here


I searched and found these through Moreover's database.

Joey Ramone, fyi, had good obits in the NYTimes and Salon, as well as one on the ABCNews website.
posted by jhiggy at 8:03 PM on April 18, 2001

Gluechunk, glad you pointed to Kobe Abe, one of my most favorite writers. Here's a brief bio of him.

One of my most favorite books of his is "The Face of Another." And I used a quote from that book on a web site I did awhile back: "The most fearful of monsters is a well-known friend, slightly altered." This is one truism that rings very true to me.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 6:12 AM on April 19, 2001