Woman in the Dunes

On the data. One film, and the sand is the co-star. Most of it takes place at the bottom of a pit, and the photography of sand, grain by grain, in motion and on skin, is what people remember. Hiroshi Teshigahara came from the art world and his father founded a school of ikebana, which is visible in how the frames are composed. Kobo Abe wrote the 1962 novel and adapted it himself, and the two are unusually close. Toru Takemitsu's score is built from scraping and metallic sounds rather than melody, and is one of the reasons the film is unbearable in a useful way. It was nominated for the Academy Award for best director in 1966 and for best foreign language film the year before, which is an odd pair of nominations and very rare for a Japanese film of the period. It is routinely read as an allegory, variously about work, marriage or Japanese society. Abe declined to confirm any of them.

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