The Japanese New Wave began in 1956 with Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit and ended in 1976 with Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. This movement was marked with a general aversion to Japanese tradition and served to not only upend it in favor of newer customs, but upend the Japanese film industry’s conventions. This movement featured a wide variety of auteurs influencing global film, including Shohei Imamura or Seijun Suzuki, but was epitomized by the work of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Teshigahara directed three of the most prominent New Wave films, including the foremost film, Woman in the Dunes. This film focuses primarily on Teshigahara’s perception of Japanese wealth inequality using visual metaphor, such as the pit and insects, to represent it in an easily understandable fashion.
The two inhabitants of the pit in this film represent a literalized lower class, struggling to work hard enough to prevent their own death, though they know not what will come of their labor. As shown, the pit is inescapable. Early in the film, Junpei is shown attempting to climb out of the pit, but the constantly flowing sand pushes him back inward. It is this perpetual flow that requires the pit’s inhabitants to shovel every day, as it had collapsed on the eponymous woman’s family years prior. In addition, those that live in the village above the pit prosper from the labor of Junpei and the nameless woman, and exploit them both economically and sociologically. Economically, although the villagers also live in the expansive desert and could shovel sand for themselves, the labor is reserved for those that would die if they didn’t shovel. Sociologically, the villagers are shown urging Junpei to rape the woman for their entertainment in exchange for him being allowed to see the ocean, because they have total control over the world around them. This exploitation is the foundation of this film, representing the class divide that Teshigahara saw in Japan, and the various ails that the upper class imposes on the lower class.
In this film and countless others, such as Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, insects represent human life. As a visual metaphor, insects represent a way to scale down human behavior in order to better understand it. In Grave of the Fireflies, ants carrying food from hole to hole represent those attempting to survive Allied firebombing. In Woman in the Dunes, Junpei is an entomologist studying insects that manage to survive in the desert against all odds. This was done as a way to transition the viewer into becoming, effectively, an entomologist studying the two humans living in the pit as though they were insects, again surviving against all odds. This provides the viewers a means to easier understand the complex metaphor for social inequality that the film presents. His discovery of the beetles in the inhospitable dunes is abnormal, and the viewer would not understand how life can be sustained in the desert. Soon after, he is taken to the house in the pit and the viewer asks the same question, this time answered by the narrative from that point on.
Through Woman in the Dunes, Teshigahara elucidates Japanese wealth inequality using primarily the image of insects and the pit. Due to this, this film represents the epitome of the Japanese New Wave, as it heavily focused on using techniques that would later be prominent in arthouse film around the globe. On the surface, this film features a bleak outlook on life, viewing it as a hopeless struggle to survive with limited upward mobility; however, it is a haunting commentary on the direct or indirect impacts of wealth inequality in general, but specifically in the case of Japan.
Hunter's Blog 