NOW PLAYING: Hiroshi Teshigahara's WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Plus Short Films by Donald Richie and Rare Archival Treasures
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STILL: HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA’S WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964). SOURCE: IMDB.
ORIGINAL THEATRICAL RELEASE POSTER FOR WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964). SOURCE: THE MOVIE DATABASE (TMDB).
In addition to her work as a film programmer, Adrienne Mancia was an accomplished writer of film criticism and film treatments. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 avant-garde psychological thriller WOMAN IN THE DUNES was a film Mancia championed at length in Film Comment, and is one of the titles GME’s team has selected to stream this month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room. (Click the image above to view Teshigahara’s film).
WOMAN IN THE DUNES follows an amateur entomologist named Niki Junpei (played by Eiji Okada) who, after missing his bus out of a desert where he has gone to study a mysterious species of beetle, seeks refuge with a young woman (Kyōko Kishida) in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What follows is described by The Criterion Collection as “one of cinema’s most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday life as a Sisyphean struggle.”
In her essay for Film Comment, which can be read below, Mancia praises Teshigahara’s film as “ingenious” and remarks: “WOMAN IN THE DUNES is a film that raises many questions. Its denouement is ambiguous. Rightly so, for there is no one solution to contemporary alienation.” She also notes: “[In this film], sand becomes water, water, light; and then sand again. Each is different; yet they are similar. They are fused and confused. This is alchemy; yet it is real or was real or could be real. Reality is on the screen but also a dream, myth, unconscious primordial memories.”
Click on the first image to enlarge and scroll through the pages of Mancia’s review:
Mancia invokes the writing of her colleague, Japanese cinema expert Donald Richie, in this essay. Richie and Mancia worked together for a number of years at The Museum of Modern Art, where Richie was Curator of Film from 1969 to 1972. Mancia and Richie even collaborated on a treatment for a feature film, titled LOVE’S TENT, that Richie was set to direct in 1969. (The film never came to fruition). This rare and fascinating treatment, culled from Mancia’s paper archive, can be read below.
Click on the first image to enlarge and scroll through the pages of the treatment:
In addition to his work as an author, historian, and film curator, Richie was an accomplished director of experimental films, which he made in Japan beginning in the early 1960s. These shorts are included in this month’s program in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room as bonus features, and can be viewed below.
WARGAMES (1962, B&W, sound, Japan)
“WARGAMES is a neatly balanced cine-poem on violence and innocence and a quietly observed soliloquy on freedom. The portrait of children enacting the creation and breakdown of a community captures Richie’s charming persona and endearing view of the world yet unearths some deeply felt loathing for humanity and its history. Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the originator of the (in)famous dance form butoh, assisted Richie in production and the result is a masterpiece in visual poetry that is a treasure to behold.” —Close-Up Film Centre
ATAMI BLUES (1962, B&W, sound, Japan)
“A young man and a woman meet in the bath of a resort in Atami one evening.” —IMDb
BOY WITH CAT (1966, B&W, sound, Japan)
“A cat's inquisitive look interferes with the pleasurable sensations of a boy while masturbating.” —Frameline
FIVE PHILOSOPHICAL FABLES (1967, B&W, sound, Japan)
“These short films are extremely provocative ‘fables’ of modern Japan, rather barbaric in their eroticism, but peculiarly admirable: one is touched by them with alternate feelings of horrified surprise and amusement, and it is reasonable to assume that the director’s point of view is basically satirical; he seems to carry the Japanese penchant for covertly hostile humor to its ultimate.” —Albert Johnson, Film Quarterly
