mike0221's movies

Woman in the Dunes (Criterion Collection)

Toho Film (Eiga) Co. Ltd. (1964)

NR (Not Rated)

715515184915

8.4

24,679

Drama | Thriller

Japan | Japanese | Color | 02:27

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An entomologist suffers extreme psychological and sexual torture after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village.

Cast View all

	Eiji Okada	Entomologist Niki Jumpei
	Kyoko Kishida	Woman
	Koji Mitsui	Village elder
	Hiroko Itô	Entomologist's wife (in flashbacks)
	Sen Yano
	Ginzô Sekiguchi
	Robert Dunham	?
	Kiyohiko Ichihara
	Hideo Kanze
	Hiroyuki Nishimoto
	Tamotsu Tamura

Crew View all

Director	Hiroshi Teshigahara
Writer	Kobo Abe, Eiko Yoshida
Producer	Kiichi Ichikawa, Tadashi Ôno
Musician	Tôru Takemitsu
Photography	Hiroshi Segawa

Trailer

Edition details

Edition	The Criterion Collection
Packaging	Keep Case
Nr Discs	1
Screen Ratios	Fullscreen (4:3)
Audio Tracks	LPCM Mono [Japanese]
Subtitles	English
Distributor	The Criterion Collection
Layers	Single side, Dual layer
Regions	Region A

Personal

Quantity	1
Index	2677
Added Date	Jan 13, 2024 17:55:25
Modified Date	Jan 02, 2025 21:00:17

Notes

Christmas 2023 gift from Nick

One of the 1960s’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic world of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eiji Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle found in a vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is 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—an achievement that garnered Teshigahara an Academy Award nomination for best director.

SPECIAL FEATURES
New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
Video essay on the film from 2007 by film scholar James Quandt
Four short films from director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s early career: Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako (1965)
Teshigahara and Abe, a 2007 documentary examining the collaboration between Teshigahara and novelist Kobo Abe, featuring interviews with film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato, film programmer Richard Peña, set designer Arata Isozaki, producer Noriko Nomura, and screenwriter John Nathan
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Audie Bock and a 1978 interview with Teshigahara