Kinema : : A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media

Kinema : : A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media



SISYPHUS IN THE SAND PIT: ON THE ICONIC CHARACTER OF SAND, AND HOW THE "ANTI-NATURAL MAN" CATCHES WATER IN WOMAN IN THE DUNES


While filming Woman in the Dunes (WITD), director Hiroshi
Teshigahara repeated that this adaptation of the acclaimed Kobo Abe
novel had three main characters: not just a man and a woman but also the
sand. Decades later he would remark: "The sand has its own identity."⁽¹⁾



My study examines how this sand with an autonomous character attracts water, and thereby redeems the anti-natural man. I have three principal, interconnected objectives as a focus:

1) Locate Woman in the Dunes as a key text in the emergent
genre of environmental film, i.e. audio-visual narratives that represent
or revision the human-nature relationship;


2) Read the film as an allegory about human freedom and community that
is both Japanese and archetypal in its revising of the myth of Sisyphus,
and in its treatment of gender;


3) Contribute to a theory of visual narrative by exploring how
Teshigahara constructs both the literal narrative (entrapment), and the
metanarratives of human-nature relationships and existential dilemmas,
primarily through visual means.