Woman in the Dunes

One of the most original allegories in Japanese cinema. A teacher goes out to the dunes to collect insects. When he misses the bus the villagers find him somewhere to stay: a house at the bottom of a deep pit among the sand hills. He climbs down a rope ladder. In the morning the ladder is gone. The woman who lives in the house digs sand every night. If she does not, the house is buried and the neighbouring houses are endangered too. The village sells the sand. The man is expected to do the same work. The film's power is both physical and intellectual. The sand runs constantly; it gets into clothes, food and skin, and the image makes it almost tangible. At the same time the narrative asks a simple question: is what we call freedom, the life outside, actually different. The source is Kobo Abe's novel; he wrote the screenplay as well. The music is by Toru Takemitsu and uses no conventional melody; it works like sound design. It won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1964 and was Oscar-nominated for foreign film; the director Hiroshi Teshigahara was nominated for directing the following year. One of the foundational works for anyone who likes Japanese cinema and allegorical narrative. The pace is slow and the narrative deliberately repetitive; the film uses that repetition to produce the sense of a trap.