Now Playing in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room: Hiroshi Teshigahara's WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Plus Experimental Shorts by Donald Richie and Rare Archival Treasures

STILL FROM HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA’S WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964). SOURCE: INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE (IMDb).

ORIGINAL THEATRICAL RELEASE POSTER FOR HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA’S 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.

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, 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.”

Mancia invokes the writing of her colleague, Japanese cinema expert Donald Richie, in her Film Comment 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. Mancia's Film Comment essay and the treatment she co-wrote with Richie are rare archival treasures, and now available to view in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room alongside Teshigahara's film.

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.