Woman in the Dunes (directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi)

Woman in the Dunes (1964)
Directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi
Written by Abé Kobo based on his novel
2 hours, 27 minutes; with English subtitles

The story is about Niki Jumpei (played by Okada Eiji), a teacher who made a field trip to a desert near the sea. He collects insect specimens. As an amateur entomologist, he is determined to discover an unrecorded beetle that would make his name. Trying to find lodgings for the night, he is helped by men of the village to descend a sand pit leading to a hut using a rope ladder. A woman living below (the "woman in the dunes", Kishida Kyōko) will take him in for the night. When he wakes up in the morning, however, he finds the rope ladder is removed. He realizes that he is trapped. Against his will, he is held down there to help the woman clear away the accumulating sand that continually threatens to bury the village.

Sand is the element that propels the novelist Abé Kobo's story, and the film captures its tactile physicality. The sense of place is grainy, and the black and white photography enhances all the textures. Of sand on skin, sand on hair strand, sand mixed with beads of sweat, wind carving the face of sand cliffs, sand percolating in the air. The close ups of the two characters' perspiring faces and bodies show the gray grains of sand sticking on the open pores of their skin. Outside the hut, the landscape is suffused with flowing sand, falling sand, sliding sand. The very sand is alive. It gets in your eyes.

The effect of this textural treatment of sand--together with the subtle imagery of light and shadows and the desert heat and a lack of moisture--is a sensual battle and ballet of desires and wills. There is an erotic component to Jumpei's seemingly futile attempts to escape the sand pit.

As opposed to Kafka's portrait of a man seeking employment under an unavailing power structure in The Castle, Abé and Teshigahara's depiction of a man's imprisonment into work itself, into slavery, for the sole purpose of daily shoveling away sand, is seen as an existentialist predicament of modern man. Both K. and Jumpei, however, do initially resist their fates and work toward changing their contrasting "employment status". If anything, Jumpei's extreme situation shares more with Josef K. in The Trial who one day finds himself guilty of an unknown and unknowable offense. This is apparent in a passage in the book where Jumpei reflected on his fate.

   This entire nightmare could not be happening. It was too outlandish. Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order? He could not believe it. Perhaps there was some mistake; it was bound to be a mistake. There was nothing to do but assume that it was a mistake.

As a Castle employee tells K. with ironic certainty: No errors occur, and even if an error does occur, ... who can finally say that it is an error. As with any fertile allegorical story, Woman in the Dunes dramatizes a situation that can be read in many ways. Jumpei's entrapment can be seen as a spiritual imprisonment. In context, the novel is published in 1962 and is set in 1955, ten years after the atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the events that led to the surrender of Japan in the world war.

As works of this period, the novel and film are grounded in postwar anxiety. The threat of a destructive war and nuclear event still hangs in the air. This is not referenced verbally in the film, but in the novel it is directly alluded to. Apart from the titles of articles in a newspaper, such as "Ingredient in Onions Found Effective in Treatment of Radiation Injuries", a reference to the war is given in conversation between the two characters.

   "But I have taken walks," she said abruptly in her monotonous, withdrawn voice. "Really, they used to make me walk a lot. Until I came here. I used to carry a baby around for a long time. I was really tired out with all the walking.
...
   Yes, he remembered, when everything was in ruins some ten years ago [1945], everybody desperately wanted not to have to walk. And now, were they glutted with this freedom from walking? he wondered.

The woman here, who is unnamed throughout both film and novel, is presented as a victim of war. Homeless, she must have wandered around after escaping from air bombings until she finds this seaside community. When the character of the woman was introduced for the first time, she is called "old hag" by the village men (from the subtitles; in the book, translated by E. Dale Saunders, she was referred to as "Granny") but she is actually a young woman, about thirty years of age. Perhaps her wartime experiences has aged her. Maybe she has been living in the desert sand, still in the front lines of destruction, since time immemorial.

Sand, its oppression, can be thought of as symbol of time or eternity (as in sands of time). Its dynamic processes are powerful, destructive, and beautiful. In the book, Jumpei equates unsympathetic sand with death, the "beauty of death", "a rejection of the stationary state",

... a world where existence was a series of states. The beauty of sand ... belonged to death. It was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction.

The imagery of the natural destruction wrought by sand is not that different from the destruction wrought by wars. Both lead to peoples being left homeless and destitute. The sand pit, therefore, can also be seen as a bomb shelter where people take cover in order to survive the air raids. The apparent conflict is between the meaninglessness of resistance and the discovery of meaning out of an extreme environmental situation.

For all its stifling and suffocating set up, the hopeful ending of Woman in the Dunes can be seen as a response to Rousseau's proposition of a universal social contract. Man is born free, and everywhere finds himself enchained. Living in an inhospitable environment, under parched conditions, sentenced into a lifetime of manual labor, man's resilience is tested to its outer limits. Jumpei is in denial of his innate punishment. He is answerable to the general will of the people (the villagers) and his acknowledgement of it can lead to his redemption.

Though K., Josef K., and Jumpei shared the seeming futility of life experience, the latter's slow acceptance of his absurd condition through the repetition of activities and the discovery of new aspects of desert living that are robust for scientific investigation, his curiosity for knowledge signal a renewal of life in the face of perpetual destruction.

Teshigahara's film adaptation is faithful to Abé's science fiction. Human nature is presented with a savage precision, as with the scene where the masked villagers gathered round the sand pit to witness Jumpei's temptation and his consequent psychological undoing. The accompanying ritualistic beats of drum heighten the primitive voyeurism.

The technical aspect of Teshigahara's direction is excellent. But beyond the production values, the film is to be credited for bringing out through tactile images Abé's novelistic use of illusion and perspective. Perspective or point of view as a way of looking at the scheme of things, a way of recognizing one's place in the world. Illusion as the image we think we see. At the end of the film, after numerous failures to escape the sand pit, Jumpei has seen through the illusion and has gained a deeper perspective of his enchained state of being. This perspective is illustrated in the novel through the image of a Möbius strip, a continuous band of twisted paper where front and back is indistinguishable.

He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already outside. Turning around, he could see the whole scene. You can't really judge a mosaic if you don't look at it from a distance. If you really get close to it you don't get away from one detail only to get caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not the sand but grains of sand.

In the movie, the thinking and penetrating gaze of actor Okada Eiji, his fierce meditation on the immensity of the sand dunes, as if looking from a farther distance and within a bigger desert picture, gives him a novelistic perspective of his state of nature. He is both outside and inside the pit. He is both free and enslaved at the same time. His duty now is to live and rethink his own morbid diagnosis of his condition. He will study the emergent properties of sand. Sand is its own paradigm shift.



My viewing of this Japanese film, with popcorn, is due to two events: the World Cinema Series 2012 by Caroline and Foreign Film Festival by Richard.

Stark white

And is not blindness precisely the condition of men who are entirely cut off from knowledge of any reality, and have in their soul no clear pattern of perfect truth ...

- Plato, The Republic

There is no substitute to a reading experience, even if that experience is an essay on blindness. When we read the fine print that is thrust into our hands, we couldn’t help but finger the Braille in our minds. The literal obscurity of vision becomes a catatonic experience of helplessness and powerlessness. In the face of unseeing, we disappear into the story, and live in the recounted horrors as active participants, commiserating with the villains, cheering the do-gooders. Once we are thrust into the world of sightlessness, we are implicated in the narrative in which the violence of our humanity is exposed, in the full light of day. Not amber, not black, but stark white.

In José Saramago’s novel, Blindness, an epidemic of something called white blindness sweeps an unidentified city. One by one, patients are brought in quarantine – the government’s primary response to contain the spread of contagion. What happens when blind people all live together in one place and food eventually become scarce? It's an invitation to chaos and the ensuing breakdown of human values, decency, morals, and all other things we associate with goodness in human civilization. The futility of governmental response and the individual human response is exposed. Throughout this crisis, a woman – an ophthalmologist’s wife, no less – is the only one left who can still see. She helps a small band of blind people cope with the situation.

If that sounds very cinematic, it is. At least on paper. Few people would dare to translate Saramago’s vision into a movie because it is not, in the first place, “movie material.”

Of course, cinema can get the verisimilitude, the characters can fit the bill, the production design can nail everything right, the props, the bunks, the facility for the blind, even the stink. But the emotional trauma is lacking, not that we want more of it, that would be perverse. It’s the trauma of blind reading experience that is impossible to capture, which in the case of Blindness the book, is virtually (visually) impossible to communicate.

I think any movie adaptation of Blindness will be hard-pressed to live up to expectation because to transform into the physical medium the essence of white blindness will require a new way of seeing. That is the prejudice I harbor before watching the movie, and that is the certainty that I have after seeing it.

In the movie, directed by Fernando Meirelles, we have a multinational set of characters. (They are not just Portuguese as one would expect. The language in which the book was first published is Portuguese). That’s a good indication that the filmmakers get the universality of the situation right. The actors essentially play well their counterparts in the book. It is a faithful adaptation. It will be heretical to deviate too much from the book as it is. Blindness the book is one solid vision and an already perfect manifesto.

A movie is about seen images, and so we are presented with images dissolving into white. A character sees white tiles dissolving into white, bleached walls becoming white, and other white dissolutions of scenes into fog. Fair enough. So what is lacking in the movie experience? For one, how can a filmmaker translate into images the unbroken paragraphs that is Saramago's unique style? The dialogue separated by commas in which a character seems to dissolve with the one he is speaking with, so that one confuses the speaker with the one spoken to. In the book, it is not merely the images dissolving into stark white, but characters dissolve into each other. The confusion in the book is all the more unsettling because it is the “white imagination” that we are flung in the midst of, without a map or guide. In a movie, the very images themselves appear to defeat the purpose of viewing.

This is not to romanticize the book beyond its intention. The representation of a banal nightmare is not only visual but also metaphorical. What is lacking is the complexity of imagination that the movie supplants with photography.

Am I asking for too much in a movie? Well, yes. One couldn’t help it. The reader identifies with the Saramagian universe, where the essence of characters is delineated in terms of their ability to cope with an extraordinary situation. The reading experience is the more disorienting one, the more exemplary in its psychological and emotional exploration of stolen lives. It is the imagined blindness that is exhibited in the mind, a mental conjuring of a world deserted by eyes. And since it is a world gone blind, it is also beyond imagination. It is of the unspeakable and unimaginable variety. In this case, the sense of the literary does not beg for a sense of sight.

Blindness the movie then is a contradiction, in both the physical and metaphysical sense. In the physical sense because the premise is lost in the very act of watching the scenes unfold, and in the metaphysical sense because the idea of blindness is also an allegorical notion. The movie is really essentially not about blindness, but an appeal to blindness.

[What Socrates meant by blindness (being "cut off from knowledge of any reality" and having "no clear pattern of perfect truth" in the soul) is of the abstract sort. This is the definition he gave to Glaucon in a dialogue about what qualities the Guardians of the state should not possess. For me, this kind of blindness ("spiritual blindness," if you will) is what propels the book to more than its literal meaning. As opposed to "physical blindness" (the subject, for example, of Henry Green's masterful first novel, also titled Blindness), spiritual blindness is the graver and the more dangerous for it knows no cure and the symptoms are harder to detect.]

Yet this does not mean that the entire movie sucks. It is just that compared to the book, the imagery is now simplified, or the action being reduced to physical images. How can imagery substitute for the experience of Blindness the book when it is the very idea of seeing that is expelled out of the picture? Fade to black is now fade to white?

For those who have read the book first, the movie is experienced in the realm of familiar images. The blindfolded statues in a church, the purifying rain, the shopping center, the facility, the dog of tears – all these are faithful and just-right recreations.

(In The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Saramago’s novel immediately preceding Blindness, the religious theme is very explict. The reference to atheism in Blindness is more subtle. In one of the early scenes of the movie, the doctor’s wife likens the disease to a case of “agnosia” or the inability to recognize familiar objects, and she naturally recognize the pun with agnosticism. This term is, I believe, not mentioned in the book.

The connection betweem agnosticism or atheism or lack of faith/belief and the loss of sight has been made before. Think of Saul of Tarsus on the way to Damascus. In the book, this idea is reinforced by the image of blindfolded statues of saints in the church, which the wife visited after escaping from the facility. This is a powerful evocation of un-belief. Along with the horrific consequences of the epidemic of white blindness, it questions the existence of a god who watches over all this. It may be stretching too much the meaning of Saramago, but there it is. Saramago is a confessed atheist and is known for his strong ideological views.)

It was reported that Saramago had reservations about the potential of his novel as a film. And with good cause. As mentioned earlier, it is hardly a material for a movie or any dramatic adaptation, for that matter. We expect the filmmakers to have been guided by their instincts. For the most part they are. They took all they can from the book and it served them well.

Still, the movie pales in comparison with the book. Scratch that. “Pales” is a visual term. The movie is lackluster (in the sense that it lacks sufficient power to pull the reader in). That is not to say that the movie is utterly fails. It is, on its own terms, a well made movie.

Like the book, the movie’s images are fluent at capturing the horror and degradation that happens inside and outside the facility of the blind. We find ourselves averting our gaze from the despicable things that happen in the story. The film’s aesthetic is stable, grounded as it is in the novel’s aesthetic of madness and ugliness. The filmmakers were able to see in the eye this mad and ugly concentration camp and at the same time deliver glimpses of empathy in this darkest of nightmares.

For all the idealization of the book being impenetrable to adaptation, and the criticism of the movie’s inability to live up to the book, I admit that there is a certain virtue that the movie was able to adapt and to deliver, and this is compassion. It is that rare quality that brings hope even after a parade of horrifying events. The director’s compassion alights on the screen just as they do on the novelist’s pages. It renders Blindness into more than an experience of cruelty, irony, and cynicism, but an experience of regeneration and purification.

Blindness the movie is well made because, however wanting, it sees through the novel vision of the book. For me, the movie even functions as a homage to Saramago. It has a high regard for the author and for the literature he created. Maybe that is why Saramago was very touched, even in tears, upon seeing the movie himself. Maybe he could not believe someone will have the audacity to transfer into film, into stark color, what we can just imagine seething against the blinding light of day.