Woman in the dunes [DVD video]

An amateur entomologist 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 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. One of the 1960s' great international art-house sensations, this film was the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic world of Hiroshi Teshigahara and garnered him an Academy Award nomination for best director.

General Note:

Title from container.

Originally released as a motion picture in 1964.

Full screen (1.33:1).

Special features: high definition digital restoration ; 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 ; booklet contains an essay by film scholar Audie Bock and transcription of a 1980 interview with Teshigahara.

Performers:

Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida.

Technical Details:

DVD, NTSC, region 1; fullscreen (1.33:1 aspect ratio); Dolby digital monaural.

Subject Term:

Man-woman relationships -- Drama.

Deserts -- Drama.

Entomologists -- Drama.

Widows -- Drama.

Sand dunes -- Drama.

Melodrama.

Genre: