Woman Of The Dunes [1964] [DVD]

Historical movie, it was great to see it again

When I looked at this film some years ago I was so amazed at the interplay of male to female, where the male "visitor" is trapped back to earth by his female captor/'host'; a sand pit becomes the entirety of both time and the world to these two where the male character at first finds that not only has his feminine counterpart been waiting for him but he cannot leave, his entomological peregrinations find him a captured specimen himself. He struggles to escape back into shallow knowledge when life overpoweringly waits for him to waken to it and take some interest. He does, and it's as if he could not have knew anything about life before that; he tries to escape once more but is caught in a pool of quicksand, the local villagers pull him out and bring him back to the hut at the bottom of the sand pit. He struggles with vanity, even tries to take the woman captive instead but that proves feeble too; life is overpowering to his self-centered view and he succumbs to another world that had up to then been of no interest to him. Just the scenes of the male character trying to climb free of the sand pit are worth viewing as another metaphor for self-centered need trying to reach an unattainable goal, finding meaning somewhere that repudiates understanding itself. Taking a makeshift grappling hook and trying to break free has to have some similarity to trying to complete a graduate degree, over and over he tries to pull himself toward some point free of the mundane, stultifying sand. But he finally grows to accept having disappeared somewhere where there's not anything more to do than to shovel falling sand night after endless night; acceptance of something in phenomenology/existentialism called "facticity" seems to finally make the predicament more understandable, there's a continuity that becomes more meaningful than the pursuit of a superficial knowledge that he'd had before. Life becomes more involved for somebody who'd actually only had to play everything merely by the numbers before, so the continuity of life had finally re-shaped a character that had only been hovering over it. A memorable movie, worth viewing over and over.

CRITERION COLLECTION has done it again! Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) offers of course the ultimate in cinematographic experience, one of a handful of truly exceptional films that continue to grow on you (I first saw it in 1971). Roger Ebert (in 1998) called it “radical, hard-edged and challenging” and detected an “almost pornographic underlying situation,” for Strictly Film School it is “a spare and haunting allegory of human existence.” In its reincarnation on this superbly re-mastered Blue-ray disc for home viewing, Woman in the Dunes exerts its magic in an even more compelling way.With Woman in the Dunes Teshigahara to me seems uniquely and almost effortlessly to transcend the constraints of his chosen medium as he meshes the different elements of camera, script and soundtrack into a seamless web of meaning. In that sense talk about “Sisyphus” or “parable of life” (Ebert) only gets in the way. As the woman lies asleep naked and exhausted and the camera closes in on the combined texture of skin and sand, all the meaning you want is there. Just watch – and surrender. In the end that’s what the man does as he decides not to “escape” and so finds his freedom: final shots that couldn’t be more haunting for the meaning they convey. Seven years later the authorities finally list him as “missing.” Only then do we find out what he was called. MESMERIZING!

I saw this movie at a film archive many moons ago, and it was one of those very few theatrical experiences which are so deeply impressive you can count them on your fingers. Over the years, I tried watching this movie on standard definition only to be disappointed by the loss of texture and detail which make it so unique. Well, Criterion has truly done one of their greatest jobs on this masterpiece, allowing the home viewer to experience it in all the astonishing cinematheque glory it so richly deserves. Tears began to well up in my eyes as I watched the minute waves of sand rolling down the hillside - you can literally see each grain! The macroscopic beauty of skin during the lovemaking scene, the barbs on the legs of the captured insects - all stunningly sharp and tactile! I am reawakened to what really great cinema can be - profound ideas articulated in vivid physical, sensual terms. I couldn't stop thinking about this movie for days afterwards, just like the time I first saw it. BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO CRITERION!

The physical setting defines the jail: inescapable, a continuous threat to a tenuous existence, and backbreaking, nonsensical toil for the necessities of life. If parts of the premise don't follow normal rules of logic, that's OK. This is about the imagery and about the people that lock themselves into less literal but equally constraining prisons.So, it's best to take this as it presents itself and absorb the Kafka-esque illogic of it. We are not a logical species, and some truths have little to do with literal facts.-- wiredweird

"Sunna no Onna" by Kobo Abe. Joy of escape... I've read the book before I purchased a VHS (DVD was not available last year), so my review will be about about the VHS version. What can be more wonderful than being imprisoned in a sand pit with a beautiful woman, suffering the heat and the sand, living a simple life and then... what a joy of escape. And once you are free... you want to go back... Reminds me a little be of a life of a criminal who's been in and out of prison most of his life. But the man is not a criminal, he is a photographer, a harmless hunter for images. What a joy of escape, but... Be it a prison, a mandatory military service or a sand pit like this. It's always about what you want to do and what they want you to do. This movie has a soul, a deep soul. It made me change the way I live life, the way I think and the way I look at life. The book, of course, had a deeper impact on me, but I just had to see the movie. All 5 stars goes for the movie, not necessarily the technical quality of it.

Sehr, sehr außergewöhnlicher Film. Zwar nicht in Deutsch.. Bleibt Jahre in Erinnerung.. Lässt einen nicht los.. Ein Meisterwerk. Möchte bald das Buch gerne dazu lesen.

BlueRay は流石に良い画質ですね。原作に忠実なようです。もっと激しい（性的）描写があるのかと思っていたら、そうでもなかった。ので、家族とも落ち着いて見られます。岡田英次も岸田今日子も若くて初々しい。熱演。ただ、元の世界への復帰願望から砂の中の異常世界安住に心が移ってゆく過程の変化をもう少し詳しく描写して欲しかった。

Camus used the myth of Sisyphus to describe our existential plight and mortality. The grade is steep, the stone large, endurance finite. The weight of the stone is constant, as is gravity, both wiping out our incremental gains. The task is impossible, the stone too heavy, the incline too extreme, so in the end we lose, the crest of the hill or summit forever out of reach.In Kobo Abe’s version of the myth (beautifully filmed here in harsh B&W by Hiroshi Teshigahara and his cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa) the hill becomes sand.It’s the height of summer in the San-in, that desolate stretch of coastline in Shimane and Tottori that faces the Sea of Japan. An amateur entomologist named Junpei Niki wanders the sand dunes, net in hand, collecting specimens. He looks faintly comical as he stumbles along, sighing in the heat, wiping sweat from his brow. His parents were disappointed, one imagines, if they thought he would go on to medical school. They did not anticipate that as a man he’d be collecting and photographing insects. Insect collecting is what young boys in Japan do, not grown men. Nominally he is a schoolteacher back in Tokyo, but it’s clear his true love is natural history and the great outdoors.The dunes are like an ocean filled with waves of sand. They shift in the wind, their tiny grains blown airborne. The entomologist struggles to walk in the wind, sun, heat and shifting sand. He pants and sweats when he reaches the crest of a dune, wiping his face with a rag and looking out to sea. The sea is close enough for the dunes to sometimes claim it, or a part of it. Sunken fishing boats are found in the sand. In fact, the entomologist sits in one of them now, eating his lunch.The sky, sea and sand — that is what he sees for miles around him. If man exists in this landscape, he’s tiny like the insects who creep through it too. Some small creatures we soon see: a centipede, a grasshopper, a sand crab, ant lion and several beetles. Junpei has jars for imprisoning the insects he finds and keeps, sticking pins through them to mount them on cardboard. He’s in search of a rare beetle, and if he finds it he thinks his name will go into the encyclopaedia with it. People toil in their daily lives, and most go to their graves in oblivion, unknown to the world. But if your name appears in an encyclopaedia you will be remembered. At any rate, Junpei thinks so. He has drive, purpose, ambition. The rare insect will make his name.Out of nowhere a man appears — an old man, a local villager. Is Junpei an inspector, he wants to know. Does he work for the government? Ha, that’s a laugh. Junpei hates authority: tax offices, local councils, registration forms, ID cards, certificates, licences, all to prove what? Does one need to be certified to live? What business has the government to know everything about its citizens? He’s happier here, free from authority, Tokyo, his job, people, the world. Free under the big sky in this ocean of sand.He’s cheerful, happy in his solitude and independence.Some other villagers come by. They say the last bus for the day has gone, so Junpei will have to spend the night in the village. He doesn’t mind. It will add to his adventurous outing. The villagers take him to a wide, deep sand pit. A rustic house stands at the bottom, though ‘house’ is a generous description. A one-room wooden shack, in truth. In it a young woman of about 28 lives alone. She’s a widow, having lost her husband and small daughter in a sandstorm. The shack is only reachable by a long rope ladder. Junpei descends it, meets the woman, sits down for a simple dinner of rice, miso soup and sea bream. She also serves him tea. He is delighted by the simplicity and rusticity of the place. Delighted too by the woman, as she is modest, humble, considerate, well-mannered.No electricity, just candles and a single gas lamp at night. Where shall he sleep? Wherever he likes on the cool, damp floor with some simple bedding. She sleeps where she always sleeps — in her makeshift kitchen. And now when the summer nights are hot and humid she sleeps like this — in the nude, her only bit of raiment a simple cloth covering her face. Why the cloth? To keep the sand out, as it leaks through the roof. Why the nudity? Sand rash from clothes.Junpei is startled to see her like this in the morning. She’s slender and thin boned. Her skin looks soft and smooth, though now it’s coated in sand. She’s used to it, these nights of sand seeping through the ceiling. The sand is everywhere, a presence greater than anything else. It must always be dealt with, lived with, accommodated, respected. It sets the terms for living in this landscape. Underestimate it at your peril, as apparently the woman’s husband and daughter did.Junpei doesn’t wake her. He just looks at the smooth flesh and long black hair. He packs his small rucksack, leaves money under the teapot where he knows she will find it. But outside another surprise awaits him. No exit, only the shack, sand pit, crumbling walls and sky above. No rope ladder, the ladder removed during the night. Like the insect in its jar, Junpei is trapped now too, a prisoner of the dunes. Why this should suit the villagers is a mystery eventually revealed as the narrative proceeds.The shot of the woman asleep in the nude in the morning light may be erotic for Junpei. His look says it is. But for us, detached from the immediacy of the scene, it’s aesthetic. She sleeps on her side, her backside (fully exposed) facing Junpei. We only see what his face mirrors — something beautiful and desirable. She faces our perspective in shadow. We mainly see only an outline, contours. The camera frames her body like a landscape. Remember, she is covered in sand. Her rib cage forms a depression between her left shoulder and left hip, both of them raised, shaped and curved like sand dunes. These curves are beautiful, voluptuous, as beautiful as the actual curves of the dunes Junpei has trudged across. The title of the novel and film in Japanese is “Suna no Onna” (lit., “Woman of Sand”). This moment in the film confirms the view, woman and landscape merged as one. In English the two translated titles are “Woman in the Dunes” or here in this BFI version, “Woman of the Dunes”. These English titles place her in the physical landscape, whereas the purer Japanese title says she is the landscape, the thing itself, a creature made of sand.The film thus slyly questions the borders separating animate from inanimate forms in material reality. The very first images in the film show grains of sand highly magnified. Their internal structure looks elegant, as complex and beautifully constructed as any living cell. That’s because the atoms and their subatomic particles that underlie the structure of each is the same. The atoms that make up the elements found in rocks and sand are no different from the atoms and chemical compounds found in your body and mine. The unity of all material reality is therefore inescapable. Every material thing in the world was manufactured in the cosmic blast furnace of the stars. So in a sense animate and inanimate are mental constructs, not reality, artificial divisions and illusions.It’s there, this interpretation within the film, but it does not announce itself grandiosely. In fact, nothing is very definite, clearly outlined. Instead, things are left vague, opaque, ambiguous. The film thus provides no answers to whatever questions it may ask.Another intriguing quality of the film is the social background depicted in it. Who are the villagers, and why do they live where they do among the sands? They are remote, isolated, far from cities and civilisation. Why seek such isolation? Or are they exiles, banished by the so-called civilised world? One interpretation says they could be burakumin, the lowest of the low in the Japanese social order. They are to Japan what the Dalits are to India, essentially unclean persons, untouchables: butchers, tanners, garbage collectors. Discrimination against them occurs to this day in Japan, though like all Japanese taboos is seldom spoken of, silence and denial the best weapons against facing and solving the problem.There is a logic, an economic logic to the sand pit and other pits in the area on the outskirts of the village. The workers toil in them for two reasons, forever shovelling sand into buckets: (1) to prevent being engulfed by the sand, and (2) to sell it to the villagers. Sand for sale? Yes. Sold to the village cooperative which sells it in turn to construction companies at half the market price. The sand quality is poor, degraded by its salt content. The buildings and bridges made from concrete mixed with this sand will crumble and collapse. So what? Why should the villagers care about a world that has abandoned and banished them? They do to it what it did to them. Darwin was right about the insidious nature of the world: the strong survive; the weak perish.Winston Smith is a broken man at the end of George Orwell’s “1984”. Big Brother has survived; Smith has emotionally perished. The key that unlocks the door to freedom may be available to him, but he no longer has the strength, will and desire to grasp and use it.Kobo Abe writes an interesting thought at the beginning of his novel. He says:“Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight.”This seems true. Rope ladder hanging there or not as time passes, Junpei is non-plussed, ambivalent. Escape to where, to what? What of worth remains to retrieve and preserve in the abandoned world?Lastly, there’s the question of identity, a quality that existentialism always poses. Who we are is often defined by what we are to those examining us, what we do a substitute for who we are. What is Junpei? Many things as time passes, many definitions and labels: stranger, traveller, teacher, naturalist, guest, prisoner, worker, de-facto husband. Like one of his insects, he goes through stages of metamorphosis.And there’s one more label the film ends with, an official, impersonal label registered on a stamped form or document kept by the court or government. Presumed lost after six years of silence, he is adjudged by the bureaucracy to be “a missing person”.Is it possible that he found a kind of freedom in indentured servitude? We cannot know for sure, though six years is a long time to go missing. One symbolic thing he has done in his captivity is to open the jars of his insects. The lid on the jar no longer there, the insect is given choice: remain or flee. All our choices seem existential, none of them easy.

This movie ambushed me. It was a provocative movie to watch and one that kept popping back to mind for days after watching it.

Una película sorprendente.Una película filosófica que te envuelve visual y acústicamente.Criterion es garantía de calidad, pero es una edición sobresaliente, con muchos extras incluyendo cuatro cortos del director