Japan
1964
147 minutes
Black and White
1.33:1
Japanese
394
One of the sixties’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eija Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director.
| Junpei Niki | Eiji Okada |
| The woman | Kyoko Kishida |
| Director | Hiroshi Teshigahara |
| From the story by | Kôbô Abe |
| Producer | Kiichi Ichikawa and Tadashi Ono |
| Cinematography | Hiroshi Segawa |
| Music | Toru Takemitsu |
| Art direction | Totetsu Hirakawa and Masao Yamazaki |
| Editing | Fusako Shuzui |
Of the varied media the artist Hiroshi Teshigahara mastered, filmmaking is the one he let go. Upon the death of his headmaster father, in 1979, he assumed the full responsibility of leadership of the Sogetsu flower arrangement school, in which his sister had been far more active than he. He would...
The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker, designer, flower artist...
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