An amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada, Hiroshima Mon Amour) loses track of time hunting bugs in the sand dunes and misses the last bus home. So when a local offers to arrange a bed for the night in the nearest hamlet, he gratefully accepts. The home turns out to be a wooden shack at the bottom of a vertiginous sandpit, and despite the friendly ministrations of the attractive widow who lives there (Kyoko Kishida), the man dimly begins to realize he’s been set up… But for what?
Suspenseful and loaded with allegorical import, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s movie of Kōbō Abe’s novel (Abe wrote the screenplay) is vividly strange, erotic and disturbing. Teshigahara’s carnal, granular imagery ensnares us in the story’s existential prison, a man trap where sustenance can only be bought through hard labour, shoveling the sands of time ad infinitum.
A sensation in its day, the film even garnered Teshigahara an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The movie’s secret weapon is the disconcerting, inspired, very modern score by Toru Takemitsu.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 20-minute introduction and talkback.
An unforgettable cinematic experience… The film is one of unearthly power, telling the story of an entomologist trapped by villagers and forced to live with a woman in a house hemmed in by sand dunes… It comes across as a bizarre nightmare.
The Rough Guide to Film
A tour de force of visual style and a knockout as an unusually cruel thriller… the erotic attraction between the man and the woman, filmed with a palpable physicality, remains extraordinary.
Tony Rayns, Time Out
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida
Japan
1964
In Japanese with English subtitles
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Cinematography
Hiroshi Segawa
Editor
Fusako Shuzui
Original Music
Toru Takemitsu
Art Director
Totetsu Hirakawa, Masao Yamazaki
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The Wild Bunch (Director's Cut)
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I Am Cuba
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The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black
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