← Previous - Next →

Woman of the Dunes

Screening: Monday 8 October, 6:30pm

Woman of the Dunes [Suna No Onna] (Hiroshi Teshigahara, Japan 1964)

The theme might be characterised, very roughly, as a set of sardonic and paradoxical glosses on the Marxist definition of freedom as the recognition of necessity, though the attempt to reduce the film’s complex visual poetry to a simple verbal formula is a self-defeating exercise that will attract only the literal-minded.

Teasingly opaque, broodingly erotic: nothing could be better calculated to evoke that bland English distaste for the enigmatic and the ambiguous than this bizarre allegory. Thanks to Teshigahara’s sureness of touch and generally firm control over his refractory material, and [his] formidable technical authority, the film works perfectly (Monthly Film Bulletin, 6/65).

Oscar-nominated for Best Director and selected in 1993 by Sight and Sound as one of the 50 greatest soundtracks of all time. Local filmmakers may be unnerved to learn that this film was made for only $100,000.

(16mm, B&W, 127 mins, in Japanese with English subtitles)

Our activities have been sponsored this year by:

← Previous - Next →