Film Night: Woman in the Dunes
A special screening in celebration of the exhibition Bruce Giden - Why These?
About the event
One of the sixties' great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Eiji Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director.
Run time: 147 min.
Screening rights courtesy Janus Films. Founded in 1956, Janus Films was the first theatrical distribution company dedicated to bringing international art-house films to U.S. audiences.