Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Mike D'Angelo

This is one of those canonical masterworks I just somehow never got around to, and although my thinking about cinema would have been more advanced in many ways if I had seen it before, I'm glad that I encountered it late. Almost from the jump, Teshigahara makes it clear that he is telling an elemental story, quite literally. Human beings are in service to the expansive fields of shifting sand, and one of the things one notices immediately is that these fields provide no visual perspective, no reference point. We see sand falling in horizontal ripples, and until we catch a glimpse of a human being, we cannot tell if we are in close-up or long shot.

In other words, Teshigahara has zeroed in on a space and a substance that is almost preternaturally cinematic. Film grain swirls on celluloid, and those atomic particles are often matched bit by bit in Teshigahara's images of the dunes. This draws on some of the earliest experimental films, although they tended to focus on water rather than earth. Ralph Steiner's H2O and Joris Ivens' Rain (both 1929) similarly employ the camera as a means of getting lost in fluctuations and textures. The only film I know of offhand that approaches what Woman in the Dunes does with sand particles would be an early film by Nathaniel Dorsky, Pneuma (1983). (Here's Dorsky discussing it.)

Of course, we eventually see more than just human beings silhouetted against the sand dunes. Despite appearances, this is the home of a community who, although seemingly tribal, have certain technologies at their disposal. The pulley frame stationed at the edge of the pit, that the locals use to hoist boxes of sand, stands against the sky like a gallows on a high hill in Monument Valley. This object is the only purchase in a landscape that is forever in flux, always crumbling beneath one's feet. It is the target of Jumpei's (Eiji Okada) aspirations for escape, and it is the pole around which his captors congregate in order to mock him. The line between life and death, civilization and perdition, exists at exactly one point, something that could be expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds. It is agonizingly concrete.

Despite knowing that the prisoner was doomed, I was almost physically invested in his efforts to escape. It's exhilarating to see a condemned man flee, because it suggests that maybe fate isn't absolute, that the human will counts for something. However, what happens to Jumpei in the sandpit, his psychological disintegration, is arguably more compelling than his struggle to make it out alive. The unnamed woman whose home is located at the bottom of the sandpit (Kyōko Kishida) proves a true foil for Jumpei, largely because her knowledge and experience -- the peace she has made with her imprisonment -- is angrily misinterpreted by the man as naivety or even mental illness. He is so impressed with his own scientific study that he refuses to believe that yes,sand draws moisture. He laughs at her. She is his teacher, but his arrogance prevents him from learning.

Also, the eventual fate of Jumpei and the woman provides a harrowing contrast in terms of exactly what "civilization" means. For the man, it is all about freedom, the choice to come and go, to lead his own existence. But for the woman, it is not just about a misplaced sense of duty, or the warped mentality of Stockholm Syndrome. When the villages agree to let Jumpei out of the pit each day to see the sea, he does not care about the price they mean to exact. They want to watch him have sex the woman, and he is more than happy to oblige. This is where the woman draws the line. "We aren't perverts." In other words, her sense of self hinges on the maintenance of dignity and refusal to be debased. "It doesn't matter," Jumpei insists, has he tries to rape her to the delight of the gawking villagers.

This is a foreshadowing of the woman's probable death at the end of the film. The man and woman had already been intimate, and now she was experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. (The fact that the village "doctor" diagnoses this is crucial. These people have access to civilization; they choose barbarism.) This outcome recodes the couple's sex scene, because for the man it was mostly an act of desperation, or an outgrowth of his own animal urges. For her, it was about human connection, and the possibility of replacing her lost family. What's more, the literal grittiness of the scene, the pair encrusted with sand and sweat, implies that the dunes are the third lover in a ménage à trois. The woman has not embraced the sand, exactly, but accepts it as a fundamental condition, the boundary of her existence.

So what does it all mean? Woman in the Dunes offers a kind of ground-zero for interpretation. The sand -- its pervasive character, its inexorability, the futility of trying to defeat it -- is an all-purpose metaphor. In addition to reflecting the haptic nature of film itself, it can serve as a more diegetic "second skin," something alien that coats the couple's bodies, preventing them from ever completely touching. It's the phenomenological stuff that exists between us. There is also a fairly obvious Sisyphean aspect to the falling, the shoveling, and the removal, and while this too can be perceived as something primal and universal, it also speaks to the mentality of the villagers, forcing others to toil so as to refuse modernity and maintain a dying way of life. (Then again, once we learn that the village counsel is selling the sand, even this wrongheaded commitment to tradition is a red herring. These people are irredeemable.)

But then, at the risk of sounding grandiose and overly literal, perhaps the sand is simply time. It moves, and we try to direct its movement. It destroys everything, and we spend our lives attempting to retard the decay of everything we care about. And then, once Jumpei has discovered his "purpose," he appears to come to terms with his plight. This is acceptance of death, the realization that there's only one way out of the pit. And that will happen another day, maybe tomorrow.

POSTSCRIPT: This has little to do with Woman in the Dunes itself, but it does perhaps speak to my visceral reaction to it. I live with too many pets. We ended up with a number of them by accident, and so now we live with six indoor cats. As it happens, I have a serious aversion to sand and grit on my body, which is a problem because we have four litterboxes and the cats track litter out, or even kick it over the side. I am sweeping up cat litter several times a day, not just to avoid having it stuck to my feet, but because I have an intense commitment to not living in a "cat house," a zone of fur and dirt and stink. I am constantly on the job, trying to maintain civilization in my small corner of the world, and it requires vigilance. That's because (with apologies to Neil Young) sand never sleeps.