BY RAYMOND BENSON

“SAND IN YOUR...”

By Raymond Benson

One of the hallmarks of 1960s art house cinema was Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Japanese author/playwright Kōbō Abe from his own 1962 novel. The picture won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1964 and was nominated that same year for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. The following year, Teshigahara was nominated for Best Director (but lost to Robert Wise for The Sound of Music).

This is avant-garde cinema at its finest—or perhaps its most tedious, depending on your taste.

The story is straight-forward. Niki (played by Eiji Okada, the male lead from Hiroshima mon amour), a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist (he studies bugs), has ventured to a desert-like area of Japan (does one exist?) near the sea to find specific species of insects. He is stranded and needs a place to stay overnight. The “villagers” (we never see a village) point to a dilapidated shack at the bottom of a deep sand pit where a young woman lives. They throw a rope ladder over the side of the pit so that he can meet the woman (Kyōko Kishida). She seems nice and welcoming enough, and she’s attractive, too. The next morning, the rope ladder is gone. Niki is stuck in the sand pit with the nameless woman, despite several attempts to leave.

It is the woman’s “job” to shovel sand from the pit, which is raised by the villagers to be used in concrete for sale. It also prevents the shack from sinking into the sand and being forever buried. Niki is forced to be her helper, whether he likes it or not. Weeks and months go by—eventually he becomes the woman’s lover. Even when Niki does manage to escape, he is caught and brought back to the pit. The sand becomes his lot in life (pun intended).

All this takes place over 2-1/2 hours. Is it entertaining? Yes and no.

The symbolism and metaphors may have been revelatory in 1964, and I always tell my film history students  to judge a film within the context of when it was released, not by whether it “holds up” today. In that perspective, Woman in the Dunes is fascinating. It’s obviously meant to be a modern-day take on the myth of Sisyphus, a Greek king who was punished by the gods to continually roll a heavy stone up a hill, only to have it roll down again. Niki and the woman toil with the sand, day after day, and yet there’s always more sand. The couple represent, of course, man and woman, the pit represents life, and the villagers are the “taskmasters” or perhaps the gods. It’s not a spoiler to say that Niki, in the end, accepts his fate.

As to whether or not a young audience today will find much to like about the picture is a matter of aesthetics. The film is beautifully shot in glorious black and white (but in the old Academy ratio, i.e. not widescreen, unusual for 1964) by Hiroshi Segawa. The shots of sand, in particular, are striking—sand slipping, sand falling, sand on skin, microscopic sand, sand everywhere. The arty love scenes (there is some nudity, but this was Japan, not America, in 1964) are notable because the sand coats the sweaty bodies, causing one to wonder where all that sand is going. Ouch.

The Criterion Collection released the film a few years ago on DVD as part of a set of Teshigahara’s pictures. Now comes a stand-alone Blu-ray edition with a new high-definition digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The images are suitably grainy (sorry, couldn’t resist). Supplements are ported over from the earlier release: a 2007 video essay on the film by film scholar James Quandt; four short films by the director—Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako (1965); Teshigahara and Abe, a 2007 documentary about the collaboration between the director and writer; and the trailer. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Audie Bock and a 1978 interview with Teshigahara.

Woman in the Dunes is an important work of international cinema from the 60s and will be appreciated by serious art house cinephiles; the rest of the audience might feel like taking a shower after a viewing.

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