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Shifting
Sands by Audie Bock
Of
the varied media the artist Hiroshi Teshigahara mastered, filmmaking
is the one he let go. Upon the death of his headmaster father,
in 1979, he assumed the full responsibility of leadership of
the Sogetsu flower arrangement school, in which his sister had
been far more active than he. He would return to film in later
years, as the revered headmaster himself, but in a far more
solemn and far less sensual mood than that which marked his
greatest, earlier works.
The
feature film Woman in the Dunes, his 1964 collaboration
with novelist-playwright-scenarist Kobo Abe, stands at the high
point of his filmmaking career and constitutes the most eloquent
of his several works with Abe. Using the textures of his pottery
and the grand scale of his floral constructions, Teshigahara
brings to Abe’s text the full force of his nonverbal artistry
of chiaroscuro, of shapes and surfaces, of speed and languor.
From his work as a potter, which harks back to the gently curved
shapes, rough surfaces, and muted glazes of vessels associated
with the refinements of a late sixteenth-century Japanese tea
ceremony, he lends a sculptural beauty to the sands of Woman
in the Dunes, bringing them to life as a key player in
the drama of a man and a woman pitted against the elements and
each other. As the heir to Sogetsu, one of the world’s foremost
schools of ikebana flower arrangement, Teshigahara moves between
the extreme delicacy of an art-alcove vase for setting off a
hanging scroll painting and the imposing drama of gigantic blooming
forests constructed on a stage and animated with moving lights
and music. Woman in the Dunes, set almost entirely
in a single house, shows both his powerful staging and his love
of fine, almost microscopic, detail. Add to all this the brilliantly
expressive yet nonintrusive score by Japan’s most distinctive
film-music composer, Toru Takemitsu, and every cinematic element
combines to support the powerful interaction of a stranger who
misses the last bus out of an isolated village and the widow
in need of a helper who accepts him as a gift from the collective.
Yes,
this is a story about identity, but it is a very Japanese and
peculiarly Kobo Abe-esque approach to the subject, where the
identity sought is not only that of the individual in personal
relationships but, at the same time, that of the group/family/village
in opposition to the greater society. Japanese identity is layered
in that way. It comes in concentric circles. Abe always examines
the individual for comfort level in his society: Is his family
or job oppressing him? Does he feel any connection with or loyalty
to the group he claims to be part of? And the most important
question pervading the writer’s work, whether it is in his other
collaborations with Teshigahara, such as Pitfall (1962)
or The Face of Another (1966), or in his stage plays,
such as Friends: what kinds of bonds with the group
does the individual find positive and meaningful as opposed
to constricting and demeaning?
These
issues, so vivid in the mid-1960s for Teshigahara and other
filmmakers, who faced the new phenomenon in postindustrial Japan
of ordinary people going missing, seemingly without provocation
or foul play, never to be seen again (Shohei Imamura’s documentary
A Man Vanishes, from 1967, is another such study),
have lost none of their relevance today. For a nation of islands
that was unified only by a police state that required a passport
to travel from one region to another for nearly three hundred
years, where marriages are consummated after thorough detective-agency
investigation of family, health, education, and professional
records, where even now an individual’s new address is verified
within days by a visit from the policeman from the corner kiosk,
the impulse to drop out remains extremely powerful. If today’s
dropouts simply remain at home, doing nothing but surfing the
Internet and eating food shoved under the door, they are still
rejecting the perennial demands of ordinary Japanese life for
an identity of belonging.
Woman
in the Dunes states
its premise early, through the design of the opening credits.
Cast and crew names are decorated with fingerprint patterns
and the imprints of seals bearing the actors’ names in archaic
characters – still used instead of a personal signature in Japan
as an identifying legal mark. The soundtrack begins with urban
noises of trains, car horns honking, and public-address systems
blaring. Gradually these blend with the wooden clappers and
traditional drums of the classical Bunraku puppet theater. These
are the composer’s hints that we are about to move from the
cacophony and chaos of modern urban life to something older,
deeper, and more melodramatic, and where the characters’ interactions
are manipulated by others.
The
first cuts in the drama itself introduce the sand in extreme
close-up, then gradually withdraw to show the unnamed man, back
to the camera, climbing up a towering dune. A high-pitched hum
in the score evokes the stultifying heat of the desert and is
accompanied by ominous electronic sounds. After a refreshing
shot of the distant ocean, the unidentified man’s preoccupation
is introduced as he captures a worm on the sand and pops it
into his specimen container. An amateur entomologist, he is
looking for a variant of a tiger beetle that may get his name
in a field guide to the region. He later tells the woman that
he is a man who is “only good for catching insects by the tail.”
We also see him poking at an insect trying to hide in the sand,
and we hear him laughing a little cruelly at its struggle. His
self-esteem is clearly lacking.
The
first words in the film are the man’s, exclaiming, “This is
terrible!” as he nearly stumbles off a cliff of sand onto the
roof of a house far below. He gets out his camera to photograph
the strange ugliness below him, and a shadow appears across
his back, demanding to know if this is an inspection. The man
now introduces himself to the questioning villager as a schoolteacher
whose specialty is the insects he brandishes in little jars,
but he never throughout the entire film gives his name or his
place of origin, nor does he speak of his life in the classroom
– as if he cared nothing for it.
Taking
a rest on the sand, in an abandoned boat on the shore, the man
then begins to comment on the human relations by rattling off
lists of certificates. As an attractive woman’s face is superimposed
over his musings, he asserts that men and women live in constant
fear of being cheated and therefore constantly produce certificates
to prove their innocence. His only directly personal statement
is to claim that “you criticized me for arguing too much. But
the facts speak for themselves.”
In
these opening minutes, Teshigahara introduces a man whose behavior
betrays his insecurity, his lack of satisfaction in his professional
life, his ability to be cruel, and his irritating need to dominate
or be right when talking to a woman. This unhappy fellow is
clearly ripe for a big change, and he is clearly not just the
person all his certificates show him to be. When the villager
reappears to inform him he has missed the last bus out of the
dunes, and he accepts the offer of introduction to a local household
to spend the night, his new identity adventure begins.
The
sand that so fascinates the man becomes his enemy as he faces
entrapment in a house in a hole. The villagers change his identity
gradually by calling him first Teacher, then, once he is captive,
Helper, and finally, once he has stayed part his three-day leave
from his job back home and had sexual relations with his hostess,
Your Husband. The woman likewise changes from Granny (or Old
Hag) to Mrs. The play of the sand, the wind, the heat and cold,
the crows and the water also brings gradual changes to the man’s
character. The apparently solid cliff of sand collapses gently
but ineluctably under his feet as he attempts to climb out.
The sand in the wind becomes a choking, burying monster, combining
with the heat to raise a painful rash on the skin. As he observes
the scavenging crows and waits with parched lips for the next
delivery of water, he becomes humbled by and respectful of the
nature that envelops him. Soon the presence of the woman envelops
him as well, and their sexual union becomes inevitable. The
cinematic presentation of these developments, fluttering between
the bestial and the refined, drives the story forward with breathtaking
energy.
The
villagers, who rank as the puppeteers in the drama – and at
one point wear masks to play further on identity questions –
provide the intellectual exploration of identity that Abe relishes.
It is they who have trapped the man in a pit, at the bottom
of a retractable rope ladder. When he rages over the crime of
his illegal confinement, what the woman hears is that the women
in Tokyo are more beautiful than she is and that there is more
to do there. The fact that he has lost his free will does not
bother her in the least. She does not worry about who he was
(she asks belatedly if he is married and is satisfied when he
does not answer); she worries only about how to make him accept
his confinement, and she continues to address him as “honored
guest.” Just as the meaningless of the man’s work is revealed
by the fact that no one comes to rescue him, the criminality
and amorality of hers is revealed by the fact that the sale
of her high-salt-content sand for concrete construction causes
buildings to collapse. But as the tensions play out between
the two of them and the encroaching sand, neither one of them
proves to care about the people who are unknown to them (tannin
or strangers); it is the two of them and the little village
collective that count, right or wrong.
By
the end of the film, the man has become involved with other
people as never before. He cares most about sharing his new
scientific knowledge with the very villagers who have enslaved
him, and the woman cares most about keeping this very man who
has been meanest and most insulting to her. She was already
happy with the larger circle of the village, but her inner circle
of family had been emptied by her widowhood. The message about
identity is that people need both: the nurturing of daily intimacy
and small-group recognition, as in a village or a company or
a school, where one’s contribution of labor is appreciated and
rewarded. Beyond that circle, both the ancient and the contemporary
Japanese feel no deep responsibility, and identity deteriorates
into the paperwork of officialdom. Just before the end title,
we learn the man’s name and his official status, but by this
time we know much better.
Audie
Bock is the author of Japanese
Film Directors and Mikio Naruse and the translator
of Akira Kurosawa’s memoir, Something Like an Autobiography
. She was assistant producer of the international version
of Kurosawa’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’or winner Kagemusha.
She has taught on Japanese cinema at colleges and universities
around the United States and at the Japan Film School, in Kawasaki,
founded by Shohei Imamura. Currently she lives and teaches in
Hayward, California.
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