The Woman in the Dunes

Master of Ikebana, installation artist, director of operas and Noh theatre, Hiroshi Teshigahara was a man devoted to the aesthetic, and this is reflected in the powerful visuality of his films. I didn’t know Teshigahara until a boy who likes beautiful business cards lent me his crisp white box set, and although I’m scared to touch the covers for fear of making them dirty, I’m glad he did.

Based on Kobo Abe’s award winning book, The Woman in the Dunes is an existential story with a ridiculous plot, but it’s more about the metaphor than the reality. Jumpei (Eiji Okada) is a teacher and amateur entomologist. On a bug collecting trip in the dunes, he mistakenly accepts the hospitality of the seaside villagers, only to find himself trapped in a hollow with a lonely widower. Forced to shovel sand by night in order to keep the rickety hut from being buried, he at first resists, but after the woman falls pregnant, succumbs to his fate.

What makes the film so stunning is the incredible images. Opening with shots of abstract drawings based on the lines of the dunes, we then see a shot of the sand hills, stretching across the screen in a vast abstract design. I’d forgotten how striking a perfectly lit and exposed film can look. Every shot in The Woman in the Dunes has a full range of mid tones, and the slightly different skin colour of the two characters is perfectly balanced whenever they are on screen together. Teshigahara cuts cleanly between extreme, almost macro close-ups and long wide shots. The camera comes in close to the gritty, sand covered skin of the characters, creating abstract images out of their hair and the lines of their bodies. 

There is no escape from the ever shifting sand that cascades across the frame. At first, being stuck in the claustrophobic hut made the film difficult viewing for me, but the cinematic innovation overrode my initial discomfort. Just as Jumpei develops an eye for the details of the world around him, Teshigahara comes up with an incredible array of different shots from such a restricted location. It’s a beautiful lesson in filmmaking – now I want to use a macro lens.