Suna no onna

A schoolteacher and hobby entomologist from Tokyo travels to an area of sand dunes to collect insects. After he misses the last bus, the villagers lead him to a hut at the foot of the dunes where he can spend the night with a local widow. The next morning he realizes he is trapped in the hut with the woman, surrounded by steep slopes of sand that must be continually shoveled away if they are to avoid being buried. The struggle to keep digging is now a fight for his life. Although he initially resists and seeks to escape, he eventually accepts his fate and abandons his former identity. Sand is ever flowing and perpetually in flux in this parable of human existence, which also brought Teshigahara fame in the West.

Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001) was more than just a filmmaker. He was also active in many other areas of the arts, taking over his father’s famous Ikebana school after the elder Teshigahara’s death. Although he made his first films around the same time as those of Japan’s Nouvelle Vague, they were created independently through his self-founded production company. Of the four films he made in the 1960s in close collaboration with writer Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemitsu, we are screening two that deal with fundamental questions of human existence: the alienation and loneliness of the modern individual.