Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
For quite a while, I’ve been jockeying into position one of my favorite films, Woman in the Dunes (1964), whose guiding light (along with novelist and scriptwriter, Kobo Abe), namely, Hiroshi Teshigahara, has occupied some of my daydreams due to his abandoning film in favor of flower arrangement, ikebana. That vocation seems very near to actress, Setsuko Hara’s abandoning film just after Yasujiro Ozu’s death, for life in a meditative retreat. These trajectories have a way of haunting us, in view of the unforgiving weight of social misalliance. Teshigahara’s film, however, could be seen as entailing a strange rejoinder to such quietism.
But Woman in the Dunes has many strikes against it as a communicative vehicle. It’s (that word) “slow.” It’s claustrophobic. Few have seen it. And still fewer have cared for its eerie illuminations in a super-strange Beast’s lair. Therefore, I’m broaching this tight squeeze by way of a pair of raucous and flashy soulmates to that quiet little gem (namely, Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the Coens’ A Serious Man), in hopes that their raging entropy will pave a way toward countering their suspicious helplessness. Just prior to that, however, we need to do a bit more grading of the Surrealist Inter-State to ensure that subsequent apparent strays more clearly take their bearings from the imperative—memorably keyed by Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—of cogent interpersonal motion. Louis Bunuel’s Viridiana (1961) and Tristana (1970) transmit with gratifying transparency the “Pitfalls” (an alternate title for Woman in the Dunes) of maintaining that dynamic route in a state of perpetual waylaying of its uncanny prospects. But, in one of those cases at least, there is intriguing traction, necessitating one further twist to this preamble that may seem to be inspired by Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy.
