No Nonsense November #5

Words haven't been coming for me lately. But I cannot stop thinking of this movie. It felt to me like I had traveled back in time and caught a late night transmission of some forgotten dystopian sf film on TV. I felt like I imagined my father feeling as he must have seeing 2001 for the first time. When he took Polaroids of himself and friends wrote on them, "Observe the stoner in his natural habitat. Note the glazed look on his face and complete disconnection from reality." Alone with an accumulating set of empty soda cans, I felt like something was happening to me. Everything in this film just sung straight to me. Through me.…

Words to describe Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes can range from "exotic" to "surreal" or "hypnotic" but they are mere understatements if one is going to describe the experience that is set to come. Though if there was one word that hits me when I think of Woman in the Dunes is not "masterpiece," because such a word isn't going to do justice to the experience that I had when I watch such a brilliant work. The moment when I first watched Woman in the Dunes was an experience that overwhelmed every thought process that was going through my head - but in such a way that I could not pin everything down on the spot what a film…

Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?

Woman in the Dunes is a harrowing, thought-provoking, symbolic, sensual, and slow-burning psychological nightmare about a man being captured with a woman in a huge sand pit by local villagers in an isolated desert region. This film really struck a chord within me. Maybe it's because I hate sand, or maybe it's just because all of it's elements are so wonderfully put together to create an absorbing experience by its meticulous direction, whether it be the unsettling score, the beautiful b&w cinematography, the claustrophobic setting, or it's compelling and deceptively simple, but allegorical story open for a variety of interpretations. It feels almost like social satire with it's reflection upon society…

''Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?''

Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 Woman in the Dunes; the centrepiece of a Triptych including 1962's Pitfall and 1966's The Face of Another is quite a work of genius. While it's visual language and unique setting is astonishing, it is allegorically and metaphorically equally as rich and demanding of analysis.

The plot involves Jumpei Niki, a Tokyo based entomologist and school teacher being entrapped by a group of villagers in a poor seaside town. He is cast into a pit of sand which houses a woman, who seems to exist to simply keep the sand from swallowing up her abode. When he discovers that he is in-fact imprisoned as a companion for the…

"And as we watch him digging his own grave
It is important to know that was where he's at
He can't afford to stop
That is what he believes
He'll keep on digging for a thousand years"

There's a strange, fluid poetry to the way this film shoots and shows sand, one that near-perfectly defines the rest of the film's approach and why I almost instantly fell in love with it. In this story, sand never seems to exist in a single state at a single moment - it's at once solid and fluid, existing on both ends of the spectrum without ever touching the middle, rolling across the ground in a way that's half rockslide and half tidal wave,…