When my mom was 27 she dated a boy in NYC who was obsessed with Japan. He was in finance but was doing graduate work in Japanese so that he could continue his banking in Japan for work. When they dated, he would take her out to sushi dinners and then to Japanese films — well before most of the West was eating sashimi.
My mother was so moved by the Hiroshi Teshigahara masterpiece, Suna No Onna (Woman in the Dunes), that she has been looking to see the movie again as the film was burnt indelibly into her memory. Mom found the DVD on Netflix and moved it to the top of her queue and it arrived yesterday and we watched it together last night.
The film is visually stunning. The psychology of the film reminds me a little of nihilism and existentialism but has obviously influenced modern film-making. The same sort of desperation, struggle, frustration, aggression, resignation are used again and again in shows that are suspenseful and surreal — productions such as television’s Lost — films that are often obtuse, dense, and open for interpretation.
This is a brilliant movie, especially since if you spend some time with the academic film critique — the Video Essay by James Quandt — that is available on the Criterion Collection DVD, which I highly recommend since it is a complete version and not the version that was screened in the US, missing 20 minutes.
Woman in the Dunes From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, also translated as Woman of the Dunes) is a novel by Kobo Abe and a film based on the novel directed by Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara. The novel was published in 1962, and the film was released in 1964. Kobo Abe also wrote the screenplay for the film version.
The surreal, and at times absurd, nature of Woman in the Dunes has drawn many comparisons to such major existentialist works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Aside from its intriguing premise, this film is notable for the life that Teshigahara brings to the ever shifting sand, which almost becomes a character in its own right.
Synopsis
An entomologist named Niki Junpei (played in the film by Eiji Okada) is on an expedition to collect insects in an area of sand dunes. When he misses the last bus back, a group of locals suggest he stays the night in their village. They send him down a rope-ladder to a house at the bottom of a sandpit, where a young widow (played by Kyoko Kishida) lives alone. She has been tasked by the villagers with digging sand to be sold to the cities, mostly under the table (sand with salt should not be used for construction purposes), and with preventing the sands from destroying the house (if her house succumbs to the desert then the other houses in the village will be threatened).
When Junpei tries to leave the next morning he finds the ladder removed. The villagers inform him that he must help the widow in her endless task of digging sand. Junpei initially tries to escape, upon failing he takes the widow captive, but is forced to release her when the house almost collapses after several days of sand build up outside.
Junpei eventually becomes the widow’s lover and resigns himself to his fate. Through his persistent effort on trapping a crow for messenger, he discovers a way to draw water from the damp sand at night. He thus becomes absorbed in the task of perfecting his technology and adapts to his “trapped” life. The focus of the film shifts to the way in which the couple cope with the oppressiveness of their condition, and the power of their physical attraction in spite of – or possibly because of – their situation.
At the end of the film Junpei gets his chance to escape, but he chooses to prolong his stay in the dune, in part because the woman is already pregnant with his child. A report after seven years declaring him missing is then shown hanging from a wall, written by the police and signed by his mother Shino.
Awards
The film adaptation of Woman in the Dunes won the Special Jury Prize at the 1964 Cannes film festival and, somewhat unusually for an avant-garde film, was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in the same year (losing out to Italian film Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow). In 1965 Teshigahara was nominated for the Best Director Oscar (finishing behind Robert Wise for The Sound of Music).
Woman in the Dunes
Hiroshi Teshigahara
| Film Info | Cast & Credits |
Synopsis
One of the sixties’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eija Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director.
Film Info
1964
147 minutes
Black and White
1.33:1
Dolby Digital Mono 1.0
Not Anamorphic
Japanese
Release Info
Catalog Number: CC1702D
ISBN: 1-934121-42-8
UPC:
