By David Robinson | October 7, 2020
Hiroshi Teshigahara lived during one of Japan’s most turbulent periods. He was 18 at the end of World War II and graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1950. While he eventually embraced and explored the traditional cultural elements of his nation by taking the reins of his father’s ikebana school, his period of avant-garde exploration during the 1960s is a marvel of world cinema. His most well-known movie, and the one I’m talking about today, is Woman in the Dunes (1964).
It tells the story of an entomology professor who misses the last bus back to Tokyo while looking for a yet-undiscovered beetle on a beach in a largely uninhabited region of Japan. He makes his way to a neighboring village and is given a place to sleep for the night. The villagers are old and greet him with almost a wink as they lead him to the bottom of a basin, where a lone house sits, and a lone woman resides. She is friendly and gives him food while he studies the insects he found. He expresses his goal to find an undiscovered beetle and have his name put towards the discovery. Early the next morning, he sees the woman shoveling sand outside the home. When he gets himself fully up for the day, he sees she has since fallen asleep and lies naked in the home, covered in sand. The camera lingers on her, as if confused; the audience shares the man’s sense of foreboding.
Shortly afterwards, he learns the truth. When trying to leave, the ladder is gone. He’s stuck there, forced to shovel sand as the woman was doing that morning. He’s told the village is threatened by the sand, that it will consume them if it’s not dug out. They’re in financial ruin with no local economy and sell sand illegally on the black market for use in construction. The woman’s house is at the heart of the issue. If her house is overtaken by sand, the next house will be at risk. She performs her duty willingly, without questioning her plight. She’d lost her husband and child to the sand, and she seemingly won’t allow the village to suffer the same fate. The film follows the man’s assimilation into the village, showing multiple escape attempts and ultimately concluding with his accidental discovery of how to extract water from the sand.
The woman is a paragon of selflessness, though it doesn’t seem to have any extrinsic benefit to her. She has suffered and is suffering immensely, risking her life for the benefit of the village. The film seems to center on two different archetypes, those who question and strive to achieve and find purpose (the man) and those who quietly accept their role, either inherently or because life harshness has taken its toll on them. The story follows the man finding meaning and purpose in life. They are trapped together; she is the only one who can share and sympathize with what the man is experiencing.
From the film’s opening sequence, it establishes itself as a parable for the human condition. Its extreme close-up of sand particles, showing the crude beauty of such small particles found abundantly, zooms out to showing a beach hosting trillions of grains of sand. Teshigahara is making clear his intentions for this story to show something of a secret to happiness. In fact, the man is designed to be a stand-in for every one of us. Throughout the film, he goes completely unnamed. His anonymity serves to make him an Everyman, and it exemplifies the low standing he has in society. He’s taken from the mainstream, and the mark he left in the world is demonstrated only in the film’s final frame as Teshigahara shows the missing persons report with his name, “Niki,” displayed. There’s a degree of dehumanization occurring that’s reflexive to the perceived dehumanization Niki comes to terms with throughout the film.
Teshigahara had made one film prior to this one, 1962’s Pitfall, and multiple documentary features beforehand. His technical mastery is on full display throughout Woman in the Dunes, as he switches between rapid cross cuts, slow zooms, and sweeping panoramas. His characters are confined primarily to a small shack, which similarly confines him and his camera. Despite that, he remains nimble with tight, moving shots. As in the opening sequence, he creates a pattern of shifting camera distances from extreme wide shots (and wide angles) to microscopic, dissecting close-ups. This small, claustrophobic shack on the outskirts of Tokyo creates a disorienting experience that strengthens a thematic element of confusion. Teshigahara is a master of this reality, but his characters come off as free agents within it. The closest approximation I can come up with to real life is “the fog of war,” or the natural confusion that comes about when we don’t know the prescribed outcome. Us as the audience are privileged with either a bigger picture, and that’s something we lack in our own lives. We may feel like our realities are incarcerating due to an uncertainty of decision making; Teshigahara created an incarcerating reality for his characters.
The sand of the village defies any logic, despite the realistic look the film maintains. Teshigahara represents sand as though it were water. Doing so allows the film to take on more expressionistic representations, like early when the image of his wristwatch becomes a close-up of his face before the woman’s form fades onto the screen. When his face fades away, the image of sand scrolls over her, crisscrossing itself in a play of lines, especially when the parasol keeping the sand from the table comes next into the shot. It returns to her naked form, in various close-ups, and it is apparent the man has been watching her. These moments serve to draw the audience into their world, blending its elements together, denying any evidence of the divisions Teshigahara exhibits in other moments of the film.
Teshigahara cuts between drastic shifts in camera distance, creating a narrative that occasionally flows between the broader third-person reality of the audience as the viewer and dipping into their first-person view. At one point, the woman bathes the man. It begins with a wide shot of her kneeling beneath him, but quickly shifts to a close-up of her washing his feet, and more obscured close-ups of just his back. They are not immediately recognizable, and are disorienting, but it shows the woman’s interest in him as she studies his physique. It jumps around so much that it is rarely clear just what part of him she is bathing. They’re studying their situations, and in doing so their dynamic changes. Earlier in the film, he refuses to let her shovel sand. He prompts her with the possibility either of escaping or helping the village find enough economic success to let them go. As he discusses this, there is an extreme close-up of their hands flecked with sand. It cuts to a wide shot of him sitting before her getting close on his chin, then her face panning down to her hands, back to a wide shot of them both. There’s no point to their conversation, and they both know they won’t be able to do either of these things, but Teshigahara uses this as a moment to bring us into their world as their mind drifts away from the conversation and into idle observation of the world around them. It’s like when you’re in a meeting and notice toothpaste flecked around your supervisor’s mouth. These shifts are disorienting, and it undermines the reasoning and logic the man attempts to bring to his scenario.
The divide between the outer world and the inner space is erased by the sand as it pervades their home. Visually this suggests an erasure of civilized norms, but it also coincides with the man’s recognition that he’s traded one cage for another. Midway through the film the two become lovers, and the way this occurs underlines the man’s acceptance of his new reality. While shoveling, he becomes frustrated as he realizes how little his actions impact his situation. In a rage, he begins to tear down the house. The woman stops him, and they fall onto each other. She is the only one who understands his situation, and their embrace alleviates his grief and frustration. There’s little romance to their situation, and the following scene is almost pornographic in nature. The soundtrack drums and the sexuality of this instance is palpable in the camera’s craning from his face, over his hand to hers. It cuts to wide shot and the roof unleashes sand upon them. There is an inevitability to what follows: he helps clean the sand off her, partially closing the divide between them. For all its sensuality, Teshigahara undermines the eroticism, portraying their sex as a matter of course, with a sense of inevitability. Her hand explores his back and buttocks as he holds her close, brushing off the sand from her back. The angles jump to add disorientation to the events onscreen, and the soundtrack screeches as they fall into each other’s arms.
The villagers captured the man out of obligation to their homestead and more specifically to their duty to protect it. The woman is acting out of obligation to her dead husband and child. At the beginning of the film, the man’s obligation is to his career, shown by his obsession with finding an undiscovered beetle species. Throughout the film, his obligation shifts to the woman and later to the village. The more he assimilates, the more he fears the outside world. He embraces his simple life more and more as he realizes that his life in the city is just as confining, though using different means. There are economic limitations to his existence that prevent him from having true freedom. As he finds contentment, he realizes his human limitations and develops an awareness to the inherent futility that is the underbelly of our privileged existences. Futility is a strong word here. I’d like to clarify that I don’t mean this cynically or pessimistically. It’s part of managing expectations so as not to succumb to defeat. The man continues to take risks and alter his situation, though it does so differently. Us, like him, owe to ourselves to do the same thing. Discovery is founded on risk taking, and it’s through risking his life to escape that he ultimately discovers his most proud achievement, how to extract potable water from the sand.
The man undergoes an enlightenment almost. Buddhist teachings prescribe a lack of attachment to worldly means, which the man emulates by giving up his urban life in Tokyo. His simpler life, lived for the benefit of others, brings him a tranquility and contentment he lacked otherwise. His discovery of extracting water from the sand not only brings him pride in himself, but it’s something he can teach to the villagers to improve their lives as well. It’s the missing piece he’d been looking for in his life. By comparison, the woman has already arrived at this conclusion. She is the bedrock to compare against his character arc. She is a survivor, short-sighted and insouciant, and indifferent to the world outside their own little bubble, unperturbed. At the end of the film, the man’s opportunity to escape arrives, but he lets it go by, instead choosing to refine his technique to draw water from the sand.
It’s up to us as the audience to gauge the nobility in what meaning the man finds. There’s a cynical worldview that says the man found acceptance by settling, but alternatively he had not meant to find meaning where he did. His manual work and persistence in saving the village follows a similar pattern to his existence in modern society. Throughout the story, he becomes aware of those parallels and embraces the simpler order which he deems of higher reward. His career goal and spoken purpose in life in his native Tokyo is to find recognition academically for his discovery of an unknown beetle species. However, it becomes clear that it’s an extrinsic motivation. He wants glory and a modicum of fame, but those are hollow victories once achieved. The glory he finds at the end of the film is intrinsic. When he accidentally discovers a method of straining potable water from the sand (don’t bother questioning the science behind that), he feels pride in himself which he lacked before. In doing so, he begins to see his situation differently and appreciates the simplicity of that existence.
The man is neither the first nor last captive claimed by the village. Early in the film, he has a monolog denouncing social identity as a social construct, yet knowing that he still seeks glory through getting his name in a textbook. He wants to distinguish himself and create an identity society will recognize. He eventually finds the beetle, but in doing so he doesn’t care. He learns to see beyond the fake identity and embraces a new, intrinsic identity founded in his own accomplishment. There was no purpose to his initial goal, just like there was no purpose to the woman wanting a radio. While he chastises her for having it at the beginning of the film, he understands its necessity to her at the end. When his opportunity to escape arrives, he does not take it. He has gained liberation in his incarceration, simply by being in a space where being is all that is required of him. Here he needs not fear the outside, but more importantly, here he finds he can make an impact. His discovery of how to get water out of the dunes is an undeniable feat, and one which nobody can dispute. He spends the majority of the movie struggling against something which cannot change, but despite that he found the means to improve his plight, if only slightly.
Sources
Ebert, Roger. “Great Movies: Woman in the Dunes.” Rogerebert.com. N.p., 1 Feb. 1998. Web. 3 Dec. 2015.
Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001. Print.
Suna No Onna = Woman in the Dunes. Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara. Criterion, 1964. DVD.
Woman in the Dunes, a Video Essay. Prod. James Quandt. Criterion, 2007. DVD.
David W. Robinson 