Review of the Film the Woman in the Dunes

فروردین ۲۸, ۱۴۰۱ ارسال یک نظر

Great Movie

"I love staying at local homes," the human says, accepting an offer of hospitality after he misses the last bus dorsum to the city. He has been collecting insects in a remote desert region of Japan. The villagers pb him to a house at the bottom of a sandpit, and he climbs downwards a rope ladder to spend the night with the adult female who lives there. She prepares his dinner, and fans him as he eats. During the night, he awakens to observe that she is outside, shoveling sand. In the morning, he sees her sleeping, her body naked and sparkling with sand. He goes outside to exit. "That's funny," he says to himself. "The ladder is gone."

There is a harsh musical chord at this moment, announcing the harsh surprise of "Adult female in the Dunes" (1964), one of the rare films able to combine realism with a parable near life. The man (Eiji Okada) is expected to remain in the pit and join the woman in shoveling sand, which is hauled to the surface in bags by the villagers. "If nosotros stop shoveling," the woman (Kyoko Kishida) explains, "the house will get buried. If we go buried, the house adjacent door is in danger."

I am not able to empathise the mechanics of that explanation, nor do I understand the local economy. The villagers sell the sand for construction, the adult female explains. It is also salty to meet the building codes, but they sell it cheap. Simply surely at that place are choices other than living in a pit and selling sand? Of form there is no logic below the story, and the director, Hiroshi Teshigahara, has even explained that sand cannot rising in steep walls similar those on the sides of the pit: "I plant it physically impossible to create an angle of more than thirty degrees."

Yet in that location is never a moment when the picture show doesn't look absolutely realistic, and it isn't well-nigh sand anyway, just about life. "Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?" the man asks the woman, and who cannot inquire the same question? "Adult female in the Dunes" is a modern version of the myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it ringlet back downwards.

In a way the man has himself to blame. He makes his desert trips to escape He seeks solitude and finds it. The film opens with a montage of fingerprints and passport stamps, and and then at that place is a closeup of a grain of sand as big as a bedrock, and then several the size of diamonds, and then endless grains, with the wind rippling their surface as if they were water. There has never been sand photography similar this (no, not fifty-fifty in "Lawrence of Arabia"), and by anchoring the story so firmly in this tangible physical reality, the cinematographer, Hiroshi Segawa, helps the director pull off the hard feat of telling a parable as if it is really happening. The score past Toru Takemitsu doesn't underline the activeness only mocks it, with high, plaintive notes, harsh, like a metallic air current. The first time I saw the moving-picture show, it played like a psycho-sexual adventure. The underlying situation is near pornographic: A wandering man is trapped by a adult female, who offers her body at the price of lifelong servitude. There is a strong erotic undercurrent, beginning with the woman displaying her sleeping form, and continuing through hostility, struggle and bondage to their eventual common ground.

More than almost whatever other film I can recall of, "Adult female in the Dunes" uses visuals to create a tangible texture--of sand, of pare, of water seeping into sand and changing its nature. It is not then much that the woman is seductive as that you sense, as you look at her, exactly how it would feel to touch her pare. The film's sexuality is role of its overall reality: In this pit, life is reduced to work, sleep, food and sex, and when the woman wishes for a radio, "so we could proceed upwardly with the news," she merely underlines how meaningless that would be.

The screenplay is by Kobo Abe, based on his own novel, and it reveals the enormity of the situation slowly and deliberately--not rushing to announce the human'due south dilemma, but revealing information technology in little hints and insights, while establishing the daily rhythm of life in the dunes. The pit-dwellers are serviced past villagers from above, who apply pulleys to lower water and supplies, and booty upwards the sand. Information technology is never clear whether the adult female willingly descended into her pit or was placed in that location past the village; certainly she has accepted her fate, and would not escape if she could. She participates in the capture of the homo because she must: Lonely, she cannot shovel plenty sand to stay ahead of the drifts, and her survival--her food and water--depend on her work. Likewise, her husband and daughter were buried in a sandstorm, she tells the homo, and "the basic are cached here." So they are both captives--one accepting fate, the other trying to escape information technology.

The human tries everything he can to climb from the pit, and there is ane shot, a wall of sand raining downwards, that is so smooth and sudden the heart leaps. As a naturalist, he grows interested in his state of affairs, in the birds and insects that are visitors. He devises a trap to catch a crow, and catches no crows, but does discover by accident how to extract water from the sand, and this discovery may be the i tangible, useful, unchallenged accomplishment of his life. Everything else, as a narrative phonation (his?) tells us, is contracts, licenses, deeds, ID cards-- "paperwork to reassure one another."

Hiroshi Teshigahara was 37 when he directed "Woman in the Dunes," which won the jury prize at Cannes and two Oscar nominations. His father had founded a famous school of bloom arranging in Tokyo--a school where I in one case took a few classes, getting just a glimpse of the possibility that to conform flowers harmoniously could be a triumph of fine art and philosophy, and a form of meditation. He was always expected to take over management of the school ("a situation ironically like to that of the protagonist of "Woman in the Dunes,' the film notes detect). He seems intrigued past variety, and has made documentaries on the boxer Jose Torres and on a wood block artist, has worked in ceramics, directed opera, staged tea ceremonies, and directed 7 other feature films. He likewise, according to plan, took over the flower arranging school.

"Woman in the Dunes" seemed to disappear for years. I tried to rent it for film classes, and couldn't. At Teshigahara'south schoolhouse in Tokyo, I was told vaguely past a translator that the chief had chosen to wait in new directions, instead of dorsum at his old work. But at present a fresh print has been released by Milestone, an American company defended to rescuing films, and seeing the film in 35 mm., I plant it every bit radical, hard-edged and challenging every bit when I kickoff saw it.

Dissimilar some parables that are powerful the first fourth dimension but merely pious when revisited, "Woman in the Dunes" retains its power considering information technology is a perfect wedlock of subject, style and idea. A human being and a woman share a common task. They cannot escape it. On them depends the customs--and, by extension, the globe.

But is struggle the only purpose of struggle? Past discovering the principle of the water pump, the man is able to bring something new into beingness. He has inverse the terms of the deal. You cannot escape the pit. Merely you can make it a meliorate pit. Modest alleviation is meliorate than none.