Woman Of The Dunes

Hiroshi Teshigahara - 1964
Teshigahara essays claustrophobia with deep compositions with slightly differing shades that give us cramped passageways of space on the inside. Even outside, we meet walls of sand, real enclosed spaces. Their are many many close-ups. We move, or rather jump cut from one to another, sharp jarring ellipsis, cracking up the space into junks, often seemingly in time with the music, or playing off it. Their are near birds-eye shots, for example.
The sand can be so many different things, hard and soft, jagged and smooth, but it is nearly always smothering, drowning. It seemed more often dark than overexposed to me, though on a few occassions the feeling from outside could burn through.
Their are such a wealth of symbols here, though to be fair to Teshigahara he keeps them so clear that opaqueness isn't really a problem. It is hugely complex though, with ideas of entrapment and so on. The elephant in the room for me, and coming from Abe's source text presumably, is Kafka; so many resonances.
Not least of these are the slightly absurdist villagers, and more importantly the general feel of a kind of gritty realism to the piece; what would 'actually' happen were a man to be trapped in the dunes? How would he reason himself out?