This short article was originally for a 10 day film challenge for friends in Facebook.
I originally saw this movie when I was about 10 years old with the movie director in the next seat. It made a very long-lasting impression on me, and I have always wanted to perform the song by Toru Takemitsu in this film.
This is another masterpiece from the golden age of Japanese cinema and one of my all time favorite films.
Those who know my music know that I have arranged the main theme and song from this movie in various different arrangements.
I originally saw this movie when I was about 10 years old with the movie director in the next seat. It made a very long-lasting impression on me, and I have always wanted to perform the song by Toru Takemitsu in this film. There are now 3 CDs with my arrangement of the theme song from this film. I have also performed a version of this song with violin, cello, piano, and bouzouki.
There are at least three different types of music in the film. All brilliant. An electronic musique concrete composition, a song sung in German at a beer hall, and a string orchestra arrangement of the song. The film made by the same director before this film also has an incredible composition for orchestra (which I consider as one of the favorites of this composer). as well as electronic music. The title artwork is by Kiyoshi Awazu, who also designed the posters and edited the trailers for some of this director's films. The novel by Kobe Abe is widely available in English and brings more psychological insight to the main character, and was a great influence in my lyric writing to some of my songs。
The main actors and actresses are well known to fans of Japanese cinema. The photo to the film I mentioned on Day 2 (UGETSU) also features one of the main actresses in this film and the main actor is well known in the West for the roles he played in Kurosawa's films.
Carl Jung seems to have been an influence on the writer, Kobe Abe. Jung's analysis of faces is used in the novel. Many quotes in the dialogue also reveal Jung's influence.
Many of the topics that Kobe Abe addresses in works such as "Face of Another" and "Woman of the Dunes" are highly relevant today.
Just look at some of the excerpts from the novel itself.
From "Face of Another" by Kobe Abe: The racial disturbances in New York are a cause for concern at the beginning of this long, black summer. Harlem streets are overflowing with more than five hundred helmeted police, The contempt and mistrust that exist between police and colored citizens.・
From "Face of Another" by Kobe Abe: "I had almost nothing in common with the Negroes, except for being an object of prejudice. The Negroes were comrades bound in the same cause, but I was quite alone."
Kobe Abe's books were one of the first by a Japanese author to have sold internationally. His books were more popular than Yukio Mishima or Kenzaburo Oe (who had won the Nobel prize in literature).
The film "Woman of the Dunes" directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara was the first film by an Asian film director to have been nominated for an Academy award in the US. He was also nominated as best director of the year. Andrei Tarkovsky, who is well known for directing "Solaris" considers "Woman of the Dunes" (also based on Kobe Abe's novel)to be one of the 10 film that influenced him the most.
The cinematography in "Woman of the Dunes" is highly artistic and beautiful in a scary way. Although it takes place in a region of Japan covered in sand dunes, it looks like another planet. There were many talented artists such as Kiyoshi Awazu and Arata Shinozaki, and the composer Toru Takemitsu in Tokyo in the early 1960s, and Hiroshi Teshigahara was use able to direct them to forge unique works that appealed to intellectuals and film lovers of the world.
One of the main themes is that of identity.
This is the difference in approach between Hiroshi Teshigahara's films of the time and Masahiro Shinoda's films. Masahiro Shinoda has written that he felt Kobe Abe's novels sold well in Western countries because Kobe Abe was highly influenced by Western litertature and Western philosophy. The characters in his novels behave tand think the same as many Westerners. Masahiro Shinoda has said that he was interested in depicting emotions and behaviors that were more unique to Japanese culture.
I remember the first time that I saw Shinoda's "Double Suicide" (Shinju Ten No Amijima") on US television. The film critic and journalist, Donald Richie had to explain to the American audiences behaviors which they would not understand. Some parts of the film had to be cut because it was felt that American audiences would not understand them because the culture was too different. This makes some of Masahiro Shinoda's films difficult to be accepted and imported abroad to Western countries.
I like both Hiroshi Teshigahara's films and Masahiro Shinoda's films. Toru Takemitsu composed for both directors and Kiyohi Awazu designed sets and did much of the artwork for both directors. Their best films represent the best cinemas of the time. However in te case of Shinoda's films, even in the films that depict the post World War 2 years, I can see that the way the characters behave may be sometimes difficult to understand, since I have difficulty in understanding them myself.
The recent success of film directors of the Korean wave such as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook and KPOP is because they are highly talented film makers who can create artistic films that can be understood internationally instead of just to a limited audience.
Here is a video talk about "Face of Another" and "Woman of the Dunes" in Japanese. The last 36 minutes analyses some of the dialogue using photos from the film. The opening and some of the music is Ayuo's arrangement of the theme song in the film. The talk in the first hour is mainly about the relevance to what is going on in the world today in 2020.
I plan to make a short version in English of parts of this talk soon.
"Woman in the Dunes" is easily available, and I recommend getting the DVD in the criterion collection.
Some of the other films, they may be harder to find.
I leave a link here of "Face of Another" without the English subtitles, recommend finding it. The English subtitles for this film is excellent. The translation of the novel is also highly recommended.
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