MOVIE: JAPANESE ARTHOUSE 101: WOMAN IN THE DUNES" (1964)

Cross-posted with LA & OC Weirdo Music & Art Forum

Part of the series Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema

Date: Monday, July 21 , 7:45 pm

Venue: Frida Cinema
305 E 4th St #100, Santa Ana, CA 92701
Phone: (714) 285-9422

Dinner 6:15 TBD

Tickets: $9 https://thefridacinema.org/movies/woman-in-the-dunes/

Trailer here

Review here

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 100% positive review

1964 Japanese New Wave avant-garde psychological thriller film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and starring Eiji Okada, Kyōko Kishida, and Kōji Mitsui. It received widespread critical acclaim and was nominated for two Academy Awards. The screenplay for the film was adapted by Kōbō Abe from his 1962 novel of the same name.[1] The film follows an amateur entomologist (Okada) who is led to settle in the house of a lonely widow (Kishida) at the bottom of a sand dune in a rural coastal village. He soon realizes that the villagers have trapped him there and expect him to work for them.

Woman in the Dunes was an independent, joint production of Teshigahara Productions and the Japanese Art Theater Guild, a group of young film- makers involved in an attempt to create political-aesthetical films in opposition to the dominant studio productions of the 1960s, which they viewed as commercial, unartistic, and uninteresting[2]
The film is considered to be Teshigahara's masterpiece, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara Run Time: 147 min. Release Year: 1964

Language: Japanese

Starring: Eiji Okada, Hiroko Itō, Kōji Mitsui, Kyôko Kishida

The third film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Woman in the Dunes, a film about an entomologist on a casual field trip that finds himself lured into a nightmarish existence—trapped in a sand dune with a mysterious woman and forced into a Sisyphean task of survival. What begins as a bizarre circumstance becomes a harrowing philosophical inquiry into time, identity, and the illusion of freedom.

Based on the novel by Kōbō Abe, and brought to life by Hiroshi Teshigahara’s stark, surreal direction and Torū Takemitsu’s haunting score, Woman in the Dunes is a landmark of Japan’s 1960s avant-garde cinema. Nominated for two Academy Awards and winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, it’s both a psychological thriller and a profound existential riddle.

Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century! All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles!