Woman in the Dunes
Kobo Abe and Hiroshi Teshigara, 1964

#8 (chronologically) in Mike D'Angelo's list of twelve films to which he would give a score of 100 out of 100.

Premise
An entomologist misses the last bus and some local villagers arrange to have him spend the night with a widow who lives at the bottom of a sand pit. She spends all her time shoveling sand to keep her house from being swallowed up. The next morning, the man discovers that the ladder into the pit has been removed and that he's a prisoner.

Reaction
Quit after about an hour. This is a dream-logic allegory that is to a great extent an exploration of monochrome film's ability to capture texture. Not my thing.


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