Woman in the Dunes


2h 3m 1964
Woman in the Dunes

Brief Synopsis

A mysterious woman spends her time preventing her home from being swallowed by sand dunes.

Film Details

Also Known As
Suna no onna
MPAA Rating
Genre
Drama
Adaptation
Foreign
Release Date
Jan 1964
Premiere Information
New York opening: 25 Oct 1964
Production Company
Teshigahara Productions
Distribution Company
Pathé Contemporary Films
Country
Japan
Screenplay Information
Based on the novel Suna no onna by Kobo Abe (Tokyo, 1952).

Technical Specs

Duration
2h 3m
Sound
Mono (Westrex Recording System)
Color
Black and White

Synopsis

While collecting beetle specimens on an isolated beach, a Japanese entomologist becomes so absorbed in his work that he misses the last bus home. The neighboring villagers inveigle him into spending the night in a dilapidated shack located at the bottom of a huge sand pit. The shack is owned by a young widow whose endless task is to shovel away the constantly shifting sands in order to prevent her home--and so the village as a whole--from becoming engulfed. With the coming of morning the man discovers that the rope ladder has been removed, and he is trapped at the bottom of the pit. After numerous futile attempts to escape, he becomes partially resigned to his desolate new existence, and helps in digging the sand in return for the necessities of life, which are lowered to him in a bucket. Even his initial hostility toward the woman is transformed into sexual attraction, and he becomes her lover. Still craving freedom, however, he willingly consents to make love to the woman in full view of the voyeuristic villagers in return for one brief look at the sea. One day he accidentally discovers a possible means of obtaining fresh water, not only for himself, but the entire village as well, through condensation and the maintenance of pressure differences. Then one night the woman, who by now is undergoing an abnormal pregnancy, suffers abdominal pains, and the villagers take her away for treatment. In their haste they forget the rope ladder. Free at last, the man climbs out of the pit and walks to the sea. He pauses, contemplates his plan for securing fresh water, and slowly climbs back into the sand pit.

Film Details

Also Known As
Suna no onna
MPAA Rating
Genre
Drama
Adaptation
Foreign
Release Date
Jan 1964
Premiere Information
New York opening: 25 Oct 1964
Production Company
Teshigahara Productions
Distribution Company
Pathé Contemporary Films
Country
Japan
Screenplay Information
Based on the novel Suna no onna by Kobo Abe (Tokyo, 1952).

Technical Specs

Duration
2h 3m
Sound
Mono (Westrex Recording System)
Color
Black and White

Award Nominations

Best Director

1964
Hiroshi Teshigahara

Best Director

1966
Hiroshi Teshigahara

Best Foreign Language Film

1964

Articles

Woman in the Dunes


The struggle between the sexes has fueled everything from romantic comedies to epic tragedies, but rarely has it found a more raw and primal expression than Woman in the Dunes (Sunna no onna), a 1964 adaptation of the novel by Kôbô Abe. A medical student turned novelist, Abe made a point of adapting his novels into screenplays himself beginning with 1962's offbeat crime film, The Pitfall. That film also marked his first collaboration with director Hiroshi Teshigahara, a documentarian making his feature film debut. Their second film together, Woman in the Dunes, proved to be a major international breakthrough even after over 20 minutes were cut for most international territories. Winning the Jury Special Prize at Cannes in 1964 and scoring two Academy Award(R) nominations for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film, it was a marked change of pace for audiences accustomed to more traditional Japanese films like Kurosawa's swordplay classics or Ozu's domestic dramas.

The spare plot involves the harrowing, protracted experience of entomologist and teacher Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada of Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959), whose studies involving a new breed of insect in a small village cause him to miss the last bus out of town. For overnight shelters, the villagers offer him the home of an unnamed woman (Manji's [1964] Kyoko Kishida) who lives in a sand hut accessible only via a rope ladder. Soon he realizes he's trapped with her and, despite his initial protestations, must work to shovel sand out of their home day after day to stay alive.

Critics and audiences have spent years deciphering the allegories of Woman in the Dunes, whose seemingly linear plotline can be approached from any number of political and sociological stances. In his essay on the film, Audie Bock posited it as "a story about identity, but it is a very Japanese and peculiarly Kobo Abe-esque approach to the subject, where the identity sought is not only that of the individual in personal relationships but, at the same time, that of the group/family/village in opposition to the greater society." What is indisputable is the film's visual power thanks to cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa (another Teshigahara regular) with the endlessly flowing, menacing, but life-giving sand functioning even more importantly than the characters onscreen. Along with the same year's Kwaidan (which also features a score by this film's composer, Tôru Takemitsu), it also paved the way for greater Western acceptance for more unusual, macabre Japanese fare, as only faintly eerie offerings like Ugetsu (1953) had previously broken through to mainstream acceptance around the world. Speaking of Takemitsu, his often jarring, experimental music here is almost a character unto itself, insinuating itself into the fabric of the celluloid as imperceptibly as the sand. Peter Grilli noted its particular effectiveness in the scene in which Niki is forced to couple with his companion for the villagers' voyeuristic pleasure, which "uses the hypnotic drumming of the villagers' Onigoroshi-daiko (demon-killing drums) to create a sound sequence that is as terrifying as it is dehumanizing... Deafening in its aural force and overpowering in its ritualistic, barbaric monotony, it is the sound of the drums that reduces everyone - the characters and onlookers in the film, as well as the spectators in the theater audience - to a common bestiality."

The notion of linking femininity to insect behavior was certainly nothing new by the time Woman in the Dunes came around; most obviously, American programmers like Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman (1959) and The Spider Woman (1944) made the connection explicit by literally turning their distaff villainesses into literal fusions of predatory insect behavior and human cunning. Aside from the more obvious symbolic approach of Teshigahara, it's important to note here that the film expands its focus to draw parallels between entire communities of human beings and insects. The male hero is no passive victim lured into a deadly relationship with a praying mantis or black widow; instead, like the insects he studies, he must scramble and dig at the sand for survival and learn to acclimate to the demands of his new surroundings to survive - and even find pleasure in his daily routines.

The partnership between Teshigahara and Abe proved so successful that a third feature (following a 1965 short together, White Morning), was quickly put into production. This film, the complex and disturbing science-fiction offering The Face of Another (1966), was once again adapted by Abe from his source novel and featured a Takemitsu score along with both leads from the prior film. Despite its abundance of pulp elements which could have been easily exploited internationally, this third film was rarely seen outside of Japan for decades and has only found a comparable critical reputation to its predecessors in recent years thanks to more widespread availability on video. The same unfortunately can't be said of the three men's fourth and final collaboration, 1968's identity-bending thriller The Man without a Map, which even today remains extremely obscure.

Both in its native country and abroad, Woman in the Dunes has remained steadily popular and has influenced several other films throughout the years, mainly in the horror genre even if Teshigahara's film defies that simple classification. Among these are Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast from 1969 (in which an environment once again bends two people to its own twisted demands) and Lars von Trier's Antichrist from 2009, which uses nature as the controlling force for a harrowing battle of the sexes. However, the more elliptical and ultimately challenging questions of Teshigahara's film make it resistant to any mere imitation; it is still wholly unique and the pinnacle of three brilliant talents at the height of their craft.

Producer: Kiichi Ichikawa, Tadashi Ono
Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Screenplay: Kôbô Abe (novel and screenplay)
Cinematography: Hiroshi Segawa
Music: Tôru Takemitsu
Film Editing: Fusako Shuzui
Cast: Eiji Okada (Entomologist Niki Jumpei), Kyôko Kishida (Woman), Hiroko Ito (Entomologist's wife), Kôji Mitsui, Sen Yano, Ginzô Sekiguchi, Kiyohiko Ichiha, Hideo Kanze, Hiroyuki Nishimoto, Tamotsu Tamura.
BW-123m.

by Nathaniel Thompson

Sources:
Bock, Audie. "Woman in the Dunes: Shifting Sands." Essay in Criterion's Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, 2007.

Grilli, Peter. "The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemistu." Online essay, July 2007.

Internet Movie Database
Woman In The Dunes

Woman in the Dunes

The struggle between the sexes has fueled everything from romantic comedies to epic tragedies, but rarely has it found a more raw and primal expression than Woman in the Dunes (Sunna no onna), a 1964 adaptation of the novel by Kôbô Abe. A medical student turned novelist, Abe made a point of adapting his novels into screenplays himself beginning with 1962's offbeat crime film, The Pitfall. That film also marked his first collaboration with director Hiroshi Teshigahara, a documentarian making his feature film debut. Their second film together, Woman in the Dunes, proved to be a major international breakthrough even after over 20 minutes were cut for most international territories. Winning the Jury Special Prize at Cannes in 1964 and scoring two Academy Award(R) nominations for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film, it was a marked change of pace for audiences accustomed to more traditional Japanese films like Kurosawa's swordplay classics or Ozu's domestic dramas. The spare plot involves the harrowing, protracted experience of entomologist and teacher Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada of Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959), whose studies involving a new breed of insect in a small village cause him to miss the last bus out of town. For overnight shelters, the villagers offer him the home of an unnamed woman (Manji's [1964] Kyoko Kishida) who lives in a sand hut accessible only via a rope ladder. Soon he realizes he's trapped with her and, despite his initial protestations, must work to shovel sand out of their home day after day to stay alive. Critics and audiences have spent years deciphering the allegories of Woman in the Dunes, whose seemingly linear plotline can be approached from any number of political and sociological stances. In his essay on the film, Audie Bock posited it as "a story about identity, but it is a very Japanese and peculiarly Kobo Abe-esque approach to the subject, where the identity sought is not only that of the individual in personal relationships but, at the same time, that of the group/family/village in opposition to the greater society." What is indisputable is the film's visual power thanks to cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa (another Teshigahara regular) with the endlessly flowing, menacing, but life-giving sand functioning even more importantly than the characters onscreen. Along with the same year's Kwaidan (which also features a score by this film's composer, Tôru Takemitsu), it also paved the way for greater Western acceptance for more unusual, macabre Japanese fare, as only faintly eerie offerings like Ugetsu (1953) had previously broken through to mainstream acceptance around the world. Speaking of Takemitsu, his often jarring, experimental music here is almost a character unto itself, insinuating itself into the fabric of the celluloid as imperceptibly as the sand. Peter Grilli noted its particular effectiveness in the scene in which Niki is forced to couple with his companion for the villagers' voyeuristic pleasure, which "uses the hypnotic drumming of the villagers' Onigoroshi-daiko (demon-killing drums) to create a sound sequence that is as terrifying as it is dehumanizing... Deafening in its aural force and overpowering in its ritualistic, barbaric monotony, it is the sound of the drums that reduces everyone - the characters and onlookers in the film, as well as the spectators in the theater audience - to a common bestiality." The notion of linking femininity to insect behavior was certainly nothing new by the time Woman in the Dunes came around; most obviously, American programmers like Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman (1959) and The Spider Woman (1944) made the connection explicit by literally turning their distaff villainesses into literal fusions of predatory insect behavior and human cunning. Aside from the more obvious symbolic approach of Teshigahara, it's important to note here that the film expands its focus to draw parallels between entire communities of human beings and insects. The male hero is no passive victim lured into a deadly relationship with a praying mantis or black widow; instead, like the insects he studies, he must scramble and dig at the sand for survival and learn to acclimate to the demands of his new surroundings to survive - and even find pleasure in his daily routines. The partnership between Teshigahara and Abe proved so successful that a third feature (following a 1965 short together, White Morning), was quickly put into production. This film, the complex and disturbing science-fiction offering The Face of Another (1966), was once again adapted by Abe from his source novel and featured a Takemitsu score along with both leads from the prior film. Despite its abundance of pulp elements which could have been easily exploited internationally, this third film was rarely seen outside of Japan for decades and has only found a comparable critical reputation to its predecessors in recent years thanks to more widespread availability on video. The same unfortunately can't be said of the three men's fourth and final collaboration, 1968's identity-bending thriller The Man without a Map, which even today remains extremely obscure. Both in its native country and abroad, Woman in the Dunes has remained steadily popular and has influenced several other films throughout the years, mainly in the horror genre even if Teshigahara's film defies that simple classification. Among these are Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast from 1969 (in which an environment once again bends two people to its own twisted demands) and Lars von Trier's Antichrist from 2009, which uses nature as the controlling force for a harrowing battle of the sexes. However, the more elliptical and ultimately challenging questions of Teshigahara's film make it resistant to any mere imitation; it is still wholly unique and the pinnacle of three brilliant talents at the height of their craft. Producer: Kiichi Ichikawa, Tadashi Ono Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara Screenplay: Kôbô Abe (novel and screenplay) Cinematography: Hiroshi Segawa Music: Tôru Takemitsu Film Editing: Fusako Shuzui Cast: Eiji Okada (Entomologist Niki Jumpei), Kyôko Kishida (Woman), Hiroko Ito (Entomologist's wife), Kôji Mitsui, Sen Yano, Ginzô Sekiguchi, Kiyohiko Ichiha, Hideo Kanze, Hiroyuki Nishimoto, Tamotsu Tamura. BW-123m. by Nathaniel Thompson Sources: Bock, Audie. "Woman in the Dunes: Shifting Sands." Essay in Criterion's Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, 2007. Grilli, Peter. "The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemistu." Online essay, July 2007. Internet Movie Database

Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara Including WOMAN IN THE DUNES on DVD


Criterion introduces another major foreign film director to Region 1 DVD with Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, a four-disc boxed set containing a trio of Teshigahara's top pictures and four of his earlier short films. It comes with a wealth of critical and academic analysis via text extras and new 'video essays' examining each film. Writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu collaborated with Teshigahara on these inventive, allegorical art films.

The arresting ironic allegory Pitfall toys with thriller elements, and then turns back on itself with existential questions. It's formulated as a film blanc, but with a European pace and fewer romantic options. An unemployed miner with a small son (Hisashi Igawa & Kazuo Miyahara) finds a strange deserted mining town. Gunned down by a mysterious Man in White (Kunie Tanaka), the miner returns as a ghost to witness his own murder investigation. The police soon give up but some reporters discover that the miner is a dead ringer for Otsuka, a union organizer: the killer may have thought he was shooting the controversial Otsuka, or was purposely trying to frame a rival union official for the crime. Meanwhile, the miner's ghost creeps back through the mud to the shanty town, to discover that a shopkeeper there (Sumie Sasaki) has taken money from the Man in White to mislead the police. As more bodies pile up, more ghosts assemble to view the confusing mess that transported them to their odd new existence.

Only once in Pitfall do we really know where we are: the dead miner suddenly vaults upright and becomes a ghost, via the same reverse-filming trick used at the end of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Most everything else treads unfamiliar ground, starting with the mudflats and dry roads where most of the action takes place. The living don't seem to have a clue as to the meaning of their lives, and mostly bide their time waiting to be moved along to the next level of consciousness. The miner discovers that he'll forever remain as he was when he died, and is assured that his desire to discover why he was murdered will soon fade. But there's more violence to come, thanks to a union rights subplot that's never fully developed.

As in the other Hiroshi Teshigahara film, what keeps Pitfall cooking are its arresting visuals and intriguingly paced storytelling. Teshigahara plays with various elements, like the little boy who shows no interest when his father dies but is keen to sneak back to the shopkeeper's house to filch candies. The movie flirts with police procedurals and a journalistic subplot, but those concerns quickly dovetail back to the main premise: against the quirks of fate, struggle is futile. The amusing Pitfall contains many near-hypnotic B&W images, such as the sight of the young boy's eye peeking through a knothole, or the literal ghost town of identical, abandoned shacks.

Woman in the Dunes is considered Teshigahara's masterpiece and is his only film to be well received by American art movie audiences. It had everything for the 1964 espresso crowd: beautiful B&W photography, a gripping story and a little sex thrown in for good measure. It was nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1965; a year later Teshigahara received an even more impressive Best Director nomination. The appeal of the disarmingly simple storyline could be expressed with the buzzwords of the day: "meaningful allegory"; "rumination on the meaning of life."

A Tokyo schoolteacher on a weekend insect-catching holiday (Eiji Okada of Hiroshima, mon amour) lingers too long in a sandy area near the sea. Some helpful locals suggest he stay overnight, and help him down a rope ladder to the shack of a gracious woman (Kyoko Kishida of Manji). The next morning, the teacher is a prisoner in a furtive community of isolated sand-dwellers. Climbing out of the pit is impossible, and he and the woman must labor all night to collect sand to be hauled out on buckets dropped on ropes from above. The teacher rebels and refuses to help at first. He fails in an escape attempt and over time falls into a relationship with the woman. As he becomes accustomed to his new life, the teacher begins to accept responsibility for fighting back the sand.

Woman in the Dunes invents an semi-plausible alternate lifestyle. Our hero has only two choices: work to keep the sand from overrunning the shack, or perish. He and the lonely woman (she lost her husband and child the year before) concern themselves with immediate issues that cannot be ignored. Their entire world is limited to a shack on just a few square yards of pit, with sand that seeps through the roof and gets into everything. The woman demonstrates that the sand is unaccountably moist and rots everything; she sleeps in the nude to keep from chafing. They awaken each morning covered with a fine dusting of sand. The pair must follow strange procedures to keep the sand out of their hair and out of the food that's dropped to them every week or so; all larger concerns are eclipsed by the constant struggle.

Woman in the Dunes delights lovers of still photography and nature studies. Teshigahara described the sand as the film's third main character and we see it behaving like a living thing. Dunes are formed into crumbling cliffs or lined with perfectly formed ripples; and always seems to be on the move, whether wind-blown or following the dictates of gravity. American viewers in particular weren't accustomed to the 'background' of a film intruding this strongly on the foreground, and surely decided that the stress on immense natural forces was a 'Japanese' quality.

Instead of finding resignation and defeat, the teacher eventually embraces his new 'wife' and his new life. He finds that he can collect pure water from the bottom of the sand pit through capillary action in a wooden bucket. He's eager to share the discovery with his peers and gain the approval denied him back in the 'big world'. Late night filmgoer discussions were divided between philosophical interpretations. Did the teacher open up to a new inner freedom afforded by an uncomplicated new life, or did he simply knuckle under to an imposed regime, as in a totalitarian society?

Mr. Okuyama's (Tatsuya Nakadai) face has been horribly disfigured in an industrial accident. His head wrapped in bandages, Okuyama festers in isolation, withdraws from his job and badgers his wife (Machiko Kyo) for wanting to evade his cruel accusations. A psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) offers Okuyama an unethical but fascinating possibility: he and his nurse (Kyoko Kishida) will fashion a sophisticated mask that will allow the scarred man to reconnect with life and society. Okuyama instead uses the mask to create a secondary, furtive identity. Okuyama immediately overreaches: his idea of a proper use for his secret identity is to seduce his own wife, and thereby prove her to be unfaithful.

It should be obvious why international audiences didn't accept the impressively produced and well acted The Face of Another. This Sci-Fi horror show functions in a normal urban environment instead of a remote wasteland or the exotic, erotic sandpit of Woman in the Dunes. The defenders of the film refer to classical and artistic precedent for Teshigahara's inspirations, when any fan can see that he and author Kobo Abe are arranging visuals already familiar from commercial genre films. Thirdly, although it brings up many fascinating and cerebral ideas, The Face of Another is just too talky; it probably has more subtitles than the other two films put together.

The key genre connection is Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face, a gory surgery tale that implied some of the same thoughts about personal identity. We empathized with the masked madwoman in Franju's movie, where Teshigahara and Abe merely tell us that "The face is the door to the soul." Both films begin with a waltz over the title sequence, and each injects a tangential reference to Nazi Germany. Teshigahara's technical tricks are excellent -- we have difficulty deciding when Tatsuya Nakadai is wearing a full mask and when he uses his real face -- but the plot is overly mannered and predictable. Like the mad scientist of The Invisible Man, Okuyama's alienation leads to an anti-social mindset. He's determined to oppress his wife and learns nothing when he fails, so we certainly don't identify with him. Okuyama calls himself a monster and is soon behaving along misanthropic lines.

Because the emotional foundation is faulty, The Face of Another's stylistic flourishes lack impact. The psychiatrist's abstracted office set looks like a collection of glass partitions in an art exhibit, arranged to set up decorative reflection effects and optical illusions. Nurse Kishida makes the super-convincing mask from a special goo that resembles the 'synthetic flesh' from the ancient Michael Curtiz horror show Doctor X.

Teshigahara then dilutes Okuyama's story with a dubious subplot that begins as a (letterboxed) vision of a film Okuyama may have watched in a movie theater. A facially scarred young woman (fashion model Miki Irie) does piecework with her brother, suffers in public and is molested by a deranged soldier at the veteran's hospital where she washes laundry. Obsessed with Hiroshima and war -- she seems too young for her scars to have been caused by radiation -- the girl is similarly driven to erratic sexual behavior. Her story ends with a melodramatic cliché, followed by the bizarre poetic visual of her brother transformed into a tortured animal carcass by a piercing beam of light. Unlike the frightening 'atomic sunset' that concludes Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, Teshigahara's shock image comes out of nowhere and doesn't elicit any particular emotional response.

Okuyama's finale combines The Twilight Zone with Jack the Ripper, as Toru Takemitsu's whining soundtrack grinds and snaps. For educated film critics, the faceless horde that crowds the sidewalks may evoke themes from surreal paintings. To genre filmgoers it simply resembles watered down Cocteau, as in the group of faceless girls in the dream art museum in Jack Garfein's 1961 Something Wild. The 'shocking' effects are too familiar, and too tame. The Face of Another verbally expresses many interesting ideas about the nature of identity, especially when the psychiatrist makes a case for anonymity as the ultimate personal freedom.

Criterion's disc set Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara departs somewhat from their older formula of presenting prime source interviews and exhibits. A lengthy video essay by critic James Quandt accompanies each film. Quandt's analytical narration is backed by appropriate images from the film, stills from other movies, word definitions, etc.. In a way, this is a good substitute for feature length commentaries, as the content is presented more compactly. Not every movie is Citizen Kane with two hours of essential comment to impart. Each disc also has an original Toho trailer.

A fourth disc contains some unexpected treasures. The new documentary Teshigahara and Abe examines the collaboration of writer and director, with input from Richard Peña, Donald Richie and Tadao Sato, and testimony from designer Arata Isozaki, writer John Nathan and producer Noriko Nomura. Even more exciting are four of Hiroshi Teshigahara's excellent short films. 1956's Hokusai covers the life and work of an 18th century woodcut artist and painter. 1958's Ikebana is a beautifully directed color movie about art and creativity that shows Hiroshi's father, a famous artist and flower arranger, at work in the academy that he founded. One impressive scene shows him evaluating his students' work. Tokyo 1958 is a rougher documentary about trends in the rebounding Japanese capitol. 1965's Ako is a compelling look at a Japanese teenager's date night with two other couples; it uses telling voiceover bites to express teen attitudes and viewpoints.

A fat booklet contains essays by Peter Grilli, Howard Hampton, Audie Bock and James Quandt, plus a Max Tessler interview with director Teshigahara. Be careful when replacing the individual disc holders in the sleeve case, as the card stock wants to snag on an anti-theft strip glued inside.

For more information about Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, go to TCM Shopping.

by Glenn Erickson

Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara Including WOMAN IN THE DUNES on DVD

Criterion introduces another major foreign film director to Region 1 DVD with Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, a four-disc boxed set containing a trio of Teshigahara's top pictures and four of his earlier short films. It comes with a wealth of critical and academic analysis via text extras and new 'video essays' examining each film. Writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu collaborated with Teshigahara on these inventive, allegorical art films. The arresting ironic allegory Pitfall toys with thriller elements, and then turns back on itself with existential questions. It's formulated as a film blanc, but with a European pace and fewer romantic options. An unemployed miner with a small son (Hisashi Igawa & Kazuo Miyahara) finds a strange deserted mining town. Gunned down by a mysterious Man in White (Kunie Tanaka), the miner returns as a ghost to witness his own murder investigation. The police soon give up but some reporters discover that the miner is a dead ringer for Otsuka, a union organizer: the killer may have thought he was shooting the controversial Otsuka, or was purposely trying to frame a rival union official for the crime. Meanwhile, the miner's ghost creeps back through the mud to the shanty town, to discover that a shopkeeper there (Sumie Sasaki) has taken money from the Man in White to mislead the police. As more bodies pile up, more ghosts assemble to view the confusing mess that transported them to their odd new existence. Only once in Pitfall do we really know where we are: the dead miner suddenly vaults upright and becomes a ghost, via the same reverse-filming trick used at the end of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Most everything else treads unfamiliar ground, starting with the mudflats and dry roads where most of the action takes place. The living don't seem to have a clue as to the meaning of their lives, and mostly bide their time waiting to be moved along to the next level of consciousness. The miner discovers that he'll forever remain as he was when he died, and is assured that his desire to discover why he was murdered will soon fade. But there's more violence to come, thanks to a union rights subplot that's never fully developed. As in the other Hiroshi Teshigahara film, what keeps Pitfall cooking are its arresting visuals and intriguingly paced storytelling. Teshigahara plays with various elements, like the little boy who shows no interest when his father dies but is keen to sneak back to the shopkeeper's house to filch candies. The movie flirts with police procedurals and a journalistic subplot, but those concerns quickly dovetail back to the main premise: against the quirks of fate, struggle is futile. The amusing Pitfall contains many near-hypnotic B&W images, such as the sight of the young boy's eye peeking through a knothole, or the literal ghost town of identical, abandoned shacks. Woman in the Dunes is considered Teshigahara's masterpiece and is his only film to be well received by American art movie audiences. It had everything for the 1964 espresso crowd: beautiful B&W photography, a gripping story and a little sex thrown in for good measure. It was nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1965; a year later Teshigahara received an even more impressive Best Director nomination. The appeal of the disarmingly simple storyline could be expressed with the buzzwords of the day: "meaningful allegory"; "rumination on the meaning of life." A Tokyo schoolteacher on a weekend insect-catching holiday (Eiji Okada of Hiroshima, mon amour) lingers too long in a sandy area near the sea. Some helpful locals suggest he stay overnight, and help him down a rope ladder to the shack of a gracious woman (Kyoko Kishida of Manji). The next morning, the teacher is a prisoner in a furtive community of isolated sand-dwellers. Climbing out of the pit is impossible, and he and the woman must labor all night to collect sand to be hauled out on buckets dropped on ropes from above. The teacher rebels and refuses to help at first. He fails in an escape attempt and over time falls into a relationship with the woman. As he becomes accustomed to his new life, the teacher begins to accept responsibility for fighting back the sand. Woman in the Dunes invents an semi-plausible alternate lifestyle. Our hero has only two choices: work to keep the sand from overrunning the shack, or perish. He and the lonely woman (she lost her husband and child the year before) concern themselves with immediate issues that cannot be ignored. Their entire world is limited to a shack on just a few square yards of pit, with sand that seeps through the roof and gets into everything. The woman demonstrates that the sand is unaccountably moist and rots everything; she sleeps in the nude to keep from chafing. They awaken each morning covered with a fine dusting of sand. The pair must follow strange procedures to keep the sand out of their hair and out of the food that's dropped to them every week or so; all larger concerns are eclipsed by the constant struggle. Woman in the Dunes delights lovers of still photography and nature studies. Teshigahara described the sand as the film's third main character and we see it behaving like a living thing. Dunes are formed into crumbling cliffs or lined with perfectly formed ripples; and always seems to be on the move, whether wind-blown or following the dictates of gravity. American viewers in particular weren't accustomed to the 'background' of a film intruding this strongly on the foreground, and surely decided that the stress on immense natural forces was a 'Japanese' quality. Instead of finding resignation and defeat, the teacher eventually embraces his new 'wife' and his new life. He finds that he can collect pure water from the bottom of the sand pit through capillary action in a wooden bucket. He's eager to share the discovery with his peers and gain the approval denied him back in the 'big world'. Late night filmgoer discussions were divided between philosophical interpretations. Did the teacher open up to a new inner freedom afforded by an uncomplicated new life, or did he simply knuckle under to an imposed regime, as in a totalitarian society? Mr. Okuyama's (Tatsuya Nakadai) face has been horribly disfigured in an industrial accident. His head wrapped in bandages, Okuyama festers in isolation, withdraws from his job and badgers his wife (Machiko Kyo) for wanting to evade his cruel accusations. A psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) offers Okuyama an unethical but fascinating possibility: he and his nurse (Kyoko Kishida) will fashion a sophisticated mask that will allow the scarred man to reconnect with life and society. Okuyama instead uses the mask to create a secondary, furtive identity. Okuyama immediately overreaches: his idea of a proper use for his secret identity is to seduce his own wife, and thereby prove her to be unfaithful. It should be obvious why international audiences didn't accept the impressively produced and well acted The Face of Another. This Sci-Fi horror show functions in a normal urban environment instead of a remote wasteland or the exotic, erotic sandpit of Woman in the Dunes. The defenders of the film refer to classical and artistic precedent for Teshigahara's inspirations, when any fan can see that he and author Kobo Abe are arranging visuals already familiar from commercial genre films. Thirdly, although it brings up many fascinating and cerebral ideas, The Face of Another is just too talky; it probably has more subtitles than the other two films put together. The key genre connection is Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face, a gory surgery tale that implied some of the same thoughts about personal identity. We empathized with the masked madwoman in Franju's movie, where Teshigahara and Abe merely tell us that "The face is the door to the soul." Both films begin with a waltz over the title sequence, and each injects a tangential reference to Nazi Germany. Teshigahara's technical tricks are excellent -- we have difficulty deciding when Tatsuya Nakadai is wearing a full mask and when he uses his real face -- but the plot is overly mannered and predictable. Like the mad scientist of The Invisible Man, Okuyama's alienation leads to an anti-social mindset. He's determined to oppress his wife and learns nothing when he fails, so we certainly don't identify with him. Okuyama calls himself a monster and is soon behaving along misanthropic lines. Because the emotional foundation is faulty, The Face of Another's stylistic flourishes lack impact. The psychiatrist's abstracted office set looks like a collection of glass partitions in an art exhibit, arranged to set up decorative reflection effects and optical illusions. Nurse Kishida makes the super-convincing mask from a special goo that resembles the 'synthetic flesh' from the ancient Michael Curtiz horror show Doctor X. Teshigahara then dilutes Okuyama's story with a dubious subplot that begins as a (letterboxed) vision of a film Okuyama may have watched in a movie theater. A facially scarred young woman (fashion model Miki Irie) does piecework with her brother, suffers in public and is molested by a deranged soldier at the veteran's hospital where she washes laundry. Obsessed with Hiroshima and war -- she seems too young for her scars to have been caused by radiation -- the girl is similarly driven to erratic sexual behavior. Her story ends with a melodramatic cliché, followed by the bizarre poetic visual of her brother transformed into a tortured animal carcass by a piercing beam of light. Unlike the frightening 'atomic sunset' that concludes Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, Teshigahara's shock image comes out of nowhere and doesn't elicit any particular emotional response. Okuyama's finale combines The Twilight Zone with Jack the Ripper, as Toru Takemitsu's whining soundtrack grinds and snaps. For educated film critics, the faceless horde that crowds the sidewalks may evoke themes from surreal paintings. To genre filmgoers it simply resembles watered down Cocteau, as in the group of faceless girls in the dream art museum in Jack Garfein's 1961 Something Wild. The 'shocking' effects are too familiar, and too tame. The Face of Another verbally expresses many interesting ideas about the nature of identity, especially when the psychiatrist makes a case for anonymity as the ultimate personal freedom. Criterion's disc set Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara departs somewhat from their older formula of presenting prime source interviews and exhibits. A lengthy video essay by critic James Quandt accompanies each film. Quandt's analytical narration is backed by appropriate images from the film, stills from other movies, word definitions, etc.. In a way, this is a good substitute for feature length commentaries, as the content is presented more compactly. Not every movie is Citizen Kane with two hours of essential comment to impart. Each disc also has an original Toho trailer. A fourth disc contains some unexpected treasures. The new documentary Teshigahara and Abe examines the collaboration of writer and director, with input from Richard Peña, Donald Richie and Tadao Sato, and testimony from designer Arata Isozaki, writer John Nathan and producer Noriko Nomura. Even more exciting are four of Hiroshi Teshigahara's excellent short films. 1956's Hokusai covers the life and work of an 18th century woodcut artist and painter. 1958's Ikebana is a beautifully directed color movie about art and creativity that shows Hiroshi's father, a famous artist and flower arranger, at work in the academy that he founded. One impressive scene shows him evaluating his students' work. Tokyo 1958 is a rougher documentary about trends in the rebounding Japanese capitol. 1965's Ako is a compelling look at a Japanese teenager's date night with two other couples; it uses telling voiceover bites to express teen attitudes and viewpoints. A fat booklet contains essays by Peter Grilli, Howard Hampton, Audie Bock and James Quandt, plus a Max Tessler interview with director Teshigahara. Be careful when replacing the individual disc holders in the sleeve case, as the card stock wants to snag on an anti-theft strip glued inside. For more information about Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, go to TCM Shopping. by Glenn Erickson

Woman in the Dunes on DVD


Produced for a mere $100,000, Woman in the Dune (1964) is one of the most remarkable films to emerge from the Japanese New Wave of the early sixties and is now available on DVD from The Milestone Collection, distributed by Image Entertainment. The plot is deceptively simple on the surface. While on a scientific expedition in an isolated desert village, an entomologist from Tokyo is given accommodations for the night at the home of a young widow who lives at the bottom of a sand pit. When he prepares to leave the next morning, he discovers that the only way out - a rope ladder - has been removed by the villagers, who intend to keep him captive in the pit. The scientist's attempts to escape prove useless, and he is forced to join the widow in her daily task, endlessly shoveling sand in order to avoid being buried alive.

A visual tour-de-force, Woman in the Dune, this fascinating allegory has much in common with Jean-Paul Satre's No Exit and Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. Coming out of the tradition of Eastern philosophy, however, the film is more affirmative than those works, and presents a more harmonious view of humanity in relationship to the environment. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara builds the erotic tension between the two main characters through the the use of extreme close-ups, eventually merging their bodies with the landscape, making them one with the glittering sand.

Woman in the Dune received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film of 1964. The following year, Teshigahara was nominated by the Academy for his direction of Woman in the Dune, making him the only Japanese director to ever receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director.

The DVD edition of Woman in the Dune includes the original Japanese theatrical trailer for Woman in the Dune which is distinguished by Toru Takemitsu's avant-garde score. The image quality is quite good for a black and white film of this vintage with minimal speckling and dirt damage. For more information about Woman in the Dune, visit Milestone Films. To purchase a copy of Woman in the Dune, visit TCM's Online Store.

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by Jeff Stafford

Woman in the Dunes on DVD

Produced for a mere $100,000, Woman in the Dune (1964) is one of the most remarkable films to emerge from the Japanese New Wave of the early sixties and is now available on DVD from The Milestone Collection, distributed by Image Entertainment. The plot is deceptively simple on the surface. While on a scientific expedition in an isolated desert village, an entomologist from Tokyo is given accommodations for the night at the home of a young widow who lives at the bottom of a sand pit. When he prepares to leave the next morning, he discovers that the only way out - a rope ladder - has been removed by the villagers, who intend to keep him captive in the pit. The scientist's attempts to escape prove useless, and he is forced to join the widow in her daily task, endlessly shoveling sand in order to avoid being buried alive. A visual tour-de-force, Woman in the Dune, this fascinating allegory has much in common with Jean-Paul Satre's No Exit and Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. Coming out of the tradition of Eastern philosophy, however, the film is more affirmative than those works, and presents a more harmonious view of humanity in relationship to the environment. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara builds the erotic tension between the two main characters through the the use of extreme close-ups, eventually merging their bodies with the landscape, making them one with the glittering sand. Woman in the Dune received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film of 1964. The following year, Teshigahara was nominated by the Academy for his direction of Woman in the Dune, making him the only Japanese director to ever receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director. The DVD edition of Woman in the Dune includes the original Japanese theatrical trailer for Woman in the Dune which is distinguished by Toru Takemitsu's avant-garde score. The image quality is quite good for a black and white film of this vintage with minimal speckling and dirt damage. For more information about Woman in the Dune, visit Milestone Films. To purchase a copy of Woman in the Dune, visit TCM's Online Store.. by Jeff Stafford

Quotes

It's like building a house in the water when ships exist. Why insist on a house?
- Man
You want to go home too.
- Woman
It's useless. The sand can swallow up cities and countries, if it wants to.
- Man

Trivia

Notes

Released in Japan in 1964 as Suna no onna.

Miscellaneous Notes

Voted One of the Year's Ten Best Films by the 1964 New York Times Film Critics.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival.

Re-released in United States April 11, 1997

Re-released in United States September 5, 1997

Released in United States on Video March 25, 1997

Released in United States August 1964

Released in United States September 16, 1964

Released in United States September 6, 1990

Released in United States March 27, 1996

Shown at Montreal World Film Festival August 1964.

Shown at New York Film Festival September 16, 1964.

Shown at Los Angeles Festival (Modern Masters of Japanese Cinema) September 6, 1990.

Formerly distributed by Corinth Films.

Formerly distributed by Pathe Contemporary Films.

Re-released in United States April 11, 1997 (Film Forum; New York City)

Re-released in United States September 5, 1997 (Nu Art; Los Angeles)

Released in United States on Video March 25, 1997

Released in United States August 1964 (Shown at Montreal World Film Festival August 1964.)

Released in United States September 6, 1990 (Shown at Los Angeles Festival (Modern Masters of Japanese Cinema) September 6, 1990.)

Released in United States September 16, 1964 (Shown at New York Film Festival September 16, 1964.)

Released in United States March 27, 1996 (Shown in New York City (Walter Reade) March 27, 1996.)