Woman Of The Dunes (Suna No Onna)
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Woman Of The Dunes is a bizarre yet compelling mid-60s thriller from the late Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara. Echoing the menacing absurdity of Roman Polanski's Knife In The Water and Cul-De-Sac, the film is set in a remote desert region of Japan, where a visiting entymologist (Eiji Okada) finds himself stranded at the bottom of a giant sandpit. There he must assist a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) in shovelling away the sand that every day threatens to engulf her primitive home.
Working in tandem with his regular collaborators writer Kôbô Abe and composer Tôru Takemitsu, who contributed the threatening score, Teshigahara imbues this fable with a nightmarish quality. An educated, 'civilised' person is removed from his familiar surroundings, and without explanation is confined to a enclosed space. Cut off from the wider world, he must carry out endlessly repetitive and demanding physical labour. As he asks of his new companion: "Are you living to clear sand or are you clearing sand to live?" The allegorical dimension of this material is hard to ignore, with Samuel Beckett's idea of life as a "meaningless dream" vividly evoked by the pair's ordeal.
Initially the scientist is full of brash confidence, showing off his knowledge and disparaging his female companion. After his attempts to escape the pit falter, though, he becomes sexually attracted to this diligent, fatalistic woman. But can their relationship withstand his cravings for freedom?
Teshigahara's creative background was in Japan's avant-garde arts scene, and there's a powerful expressiveness to the film's black-and-white cinematography. Form and content merge: the style reflects the oppressiveness and disorientation experienced by its characters. And, thanks in part to the fine performances of Okada and Kishida, the film suggests how human qualities of resilience, invention, and spirit can help counter the pointlessness of existence.
Review from : BBCi Tom Dawson 25 June 2004
Hiroshi Teshigahara crafts a spare and haunting allegory for human existence in Woman in the Dunes. An entomologist (Eija Okada) on holiday from Tokyo has come to a remote desert in order to study and collect specimens from the local insect population. As he momentarily rests on the sand dunes, he ponders a fundamental existential question: does a person's recognized achievements validate his existence? Is the value of his life measured by the number of certificates and awards he has received in his lifetime?
For the entomologist, the answer is clearly reflected in his latest quest for an unclassified beetle that, if found, would be named after him in all the scientific journals. After lapsing into a daydream, he is awakened with the news that the last bus has left for the day, and the villagers arrange for him to stay with a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives at the bottom of a sand dune. Soon, fragments of the woman's odd existence begin to surface: the pervasive contamination of sand throughout the house, the economy of food and water, the shoveling of the sand from dusk to dawn.
She reveals the tragic details of her life - her husband and child buried under the crushing weight of the shifting sand - and alludes to his extended stay as her permanent company. The following morning, his attempt to leave the dunes is thwarted when he realizes that the rope ladder he had used to descend to the woman's house had been retracted, and the sand formations are too amorphous to climb.
Eventually, the cyclic, seemingly mindless ritual is laid out before him: the shoveled sand is exchanged for provisions; the sand is hauled away at night and sold in the black market for construction; to stop shoveling would bury the house, and the adjacent house becomes at risk.
Given an eternal task similar to the mythical Sisyphus, the entomologist asks the woman: "Are you living to shovel, or shoveling to live?" Resigned to an existence of displacing sand that will invariably be re-deposited by the following morning, can his life have existential meaning beyond deferring the inevitable cascading of the sand? In the barren landscape of the shifting dunes, is there a redemptive purpose in performing the monotonous, uncomplicated task? Or is the meaning of life reserved for only those who pursue the artificial, created cerebral exercises of modern civilization?
Review from: Strictly Film School © Acquarello 2000. All rights reserved
b. January 28, 1927, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
d. April 14, 2001, Tokyo, Japan
Hiroshi Teshigahara was only incidentally a filmmaker. For decades recognized for his work in various classical Japanese art forms, he was a master and a modern trailblazer all at once. Son of the founder and grand master (Iemoto) of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana (more moribundly known as flower-arranging), he turned to film as an extension of his aesthetic explorations in other media. A graduate of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, he was a painter and sculptor, designed gardens and tea rooms, directed operas and Noh plays for the stage. And he made 21 films, most of them short documentaries on subjects as varied as Hokusai and Hispanic boxers. But he is widely known only for the eight feature-length films he made over a period of 30 years, films as unique in form and function as anything else in his creative life-except that they use the most immediate and direct medium for the communication of ideas in the same arresting way.
Always within close reach of the avant-garde, one of whom he of course counted himself, Teshigahara had shown canny judgement in his choice of collaborators when he turned to feature films in 1962. The writer Kobo Abe (1924-1993) had been sending shivers of recognition down the spines of Japanese literati ever since he had won the famed Akutagawa Prize for his novel The Crime of S. Karuma in 1951. His masterpiece, The Woman in the Dunes, was published in 1960 and won the Yomiuri Prize. Teshigahara longed to film it, but decided, for his first feature effort, to film an original script that Abe had prepared called The Pitfall.
Also accompanying Teshigahara in his first production was a close friend
named Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996). They had collaborated once before, in
1959, on a short film about the boxer Jose Torres. Takemitsu, who loved
film and preferred writing film scores to composing concert works, would
quickly become the most sought after and certainly the most brilliant
modernist Japanese composer. While writing music for all of Teshigahara's
subsequent films, he would also work closely with virtually every notable
Japanese filmmaker of the 1960s, including Masaki Kobayashi, Masahiro
Shinoda and Nagisa Oshima. And he would later compose the score for Akira
Kurosawa's formidable Ran (1985).
Perhaps the most famous post-modern tale of a person who went missing is Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, which Teshigahara took on for his next project, once again with Abe writing the script. It is the story of Jumpei Niki, an entomologist and family man who innocently seeks shelter for the night in a remote village situated among ever-encroaching sand dunes. What Niki finds there is so fraught with implications about the human predicament, and written with such obsessive detail, that few people believed anyone could pull it off as a film. That Teshigahara does, with moviegoers worldwide leaving theatres brushing imaginary sand from their clothing, attests to his genius at finding the most vivid equivalents to Abe's odd universe of words. And Teshigahara's success with actors (his wife was the film actress Toshiko Kobayashi) was never more obvious, as Eiji Okada and Keiko Kishida become veritable epitomes in their roles, at first resisting and then relenting to the cruel dictates of the village and the pit in which they find themselves together and from which they can never escape. "Both Okada and Kishida got into their roles so deeply," Teshigahara later wrote, "that the look on their faces changed during the four-month shooting." (2) Teshigahara's wonderful abstract compositions of sand dunes constantly shifting bestow on geology an alarming presence.
The film was originally 147 minutes, but when Teshigahara was invited to bring his film to the Cannes Festival, he cut it to 124 minutes. Although the cuts do no harm to continuity, and actually make the film seem tighter, it is easy to miss the deleted 23 minutes, since the world that Teshigahara made so palpably real is yet harder to leave at the film's conclusion.
The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna , 1964) won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and it was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Award by the American Academy. It became Teshigahara's most highly praised and best-known film, which is just as well. Although he would make two more films with Kobo Abe, The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao , 1966) and The Man Without a Map (Moetsukita Chizu, 1968), both of them based on a published Abe novel, neither was as successful as adaptations or as compelling as films. Abe's abstractions seemed to expand exponentially with each new book. Their increasingly hermetic ideas, pushing meaning to impenetrable extremes, drew progressively narrower interest from readers. And although Teshigahara, equal to the challenge, would often find splendid cinematic solutions to Abe's prose (doubtless with the author's considerable help), one could argue that, because of his obdurate devotion, Teshigahara's work followed Abe's into obscurity.
For the last decade of his life Teshigahara made no films. His work in other media, however, continued unabated. He produced and designed operas in Europe and mounted numerous exhibitions of his own and other artists' work. In 1996 he was awarded the title of National Chevalier by the Legion of France, and the following year was given the National Order of the Sacred Treasure in Japan-a quite unique title which declares certain cherished artists (Kurosawa among them) a National Living Treasure. He created bamboo "installations" in halls and galleries (one can be seen in the closing minutes of Princess Gohime), and he honoured his old friend Takemitsu by directing a tribute to him at the shrine where his funeral service was held.
By now his name is virtually synonymous with Ikebana, which his Sogetsu Institute has sustained into the 21st century. It is essentially a Japanese art form that utilizes fragile, perishable material to express and induce a meditative state. To some, Teshigahara's devotion to flower-arranging may seem antithetical to his efforts at filmmaking. And yet, how can a plucked and dying blossom seem less ephemeral than a play of shadows on a screen?
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- Dan Harper, April 2003