Are we shoveling sand in order to live or do we live to shovel sand...
The man in the dunes
Of course this place isn’t as interesting as Tokyo.
The woman in the dunes
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 Woman in the Dunes exemplifies International Art House cinema. Exquisitely designed and shot, the film is intentional to the highest degree, a work of art in which every line of dialogue and every carefully composed image works to establish the film maker’s meaning. Like Antonioni’s L’Avventura or the contemporaneous films of Ingmar Bergman, the movie is a well-wrought enigmatic artwork complete unto itself as well as a thoroughgoing rebuke to the Hollywood notion that pictures should be an entertaining mass medium. Woman in the Dunes proposes a scrupulously rigorous esthetic that will not be available to the man in the street. Quick to acknowledge the justice of this rebuke, Hollywood awarded Teshigahara a nomination for Best Director for Woman in the Dunes in 1966.
Teshigahara’s pedigree could not be finer. The director was born in Tokyo in 1927, the son of Ikebana grandmaster Sosho Teshigara. Ikebana is the art of flower-arranging, a practice in Japan much aligned with Zen Buddhism. Teshigahara’s avant-garde credentials are also genetic. His father broke with conventional Ikebana practices to found the vastly influential Sogetsu school of flower-arranging. (Sosho Teshigahara criticized conventional Ikebana too restrictive in its tenets; his Sogetso school, both a form of practice and a literal academy, opened up the art of flower-arranging to allow a greater degree of creative self-expression. Sosho Teshigahara’s books on Ikebana have been translated into languages other than Japan, another innovation since traditional practitioners did not think that non-Japanese could master the art. In Japan, Sosho Teshigahara has the status of a culture-hero akin to Picasso.) When his father died, Hiroshi Teshigahara abandoned film making to become the head of the Sogetsu School and he was active in that institution until his death. Hiroshi Teshigahara also is renowned in Japan for his ceramics, elegant vessels made for his flower arrangements.
Because of other distractions, Teshigahara made fewer films than other similarly situated directors. He began his career with a collaboration with the celebrated novelist Kobo Abe, Pitfall (1962). The director produced three other films based on novels and scripts written by Abe, The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another (1966), and The Man without a Map (1968). The four films made with Abe also feature highly innovative scores by the great Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu. Teshigahara did some work in TV and directed a particularly renowned episode of the jidaigeki ("period drama") show, Zatoichi – Zatoichi is a blind swordsman who moonlights as a masseur. Teshigahara made a film about American deserters on the lam from the war in Vietnam and living on the edges of Japanese society, Summer Soldier (1972). His esthetic refinement is again demonstrated by his 1988 film Rikyu, a movie about the 17th century Japanese tea ceremony master, as well as a number of short films about ceramics, flower-arranging, and art. He continued working sporadically in the film and TV industry while serving as the leader of Sogetsu Ikebana school – his last film, a period drama, was released in 1992. In the West, his most admired films have been Woman in the Dunes, said by Roger Ebert to be the greatest film about sand ever made, the grisly plastic-surgery thriller, The Face of Another, and his 1978 documentary about Gaudi, the Barcelona architect, most notably the builder of the Sagrada Familia cathedral. Hiroshi Teshigahara died in 2001.
The International Art House style arose in post-war Europe, principally Sweden and France, as a reaction to the philosophy of existentialism – particularly the writings of Albert Camus. (Camus Myth of Sisyphus is central to Woman in the Dunes.) Post-war existentialism, in turn, derives from the collective trauma experienced by the countries entangled in World War Two. The absurd and meaningless world proposed by the existentialists is undoubtedly a reaction to the horrific events occurring in Europe and Japan between 1939 and 1945. Werner Herzog, who grew up in Bavaria during the last years of the war, and endured, with his family, allied bombing raids said that, as a child, "I saw things that made no sense at all." This was undoubtedly the experience of the founding members of the French "New Wave" as well as the Japanese avant-garde in film in the mid-sixties, a group of directors that included Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, and Teshigahara.
Woman in the Dunes involves a woman living in a crater in the sand desert. Her husband and child have been killed in the collapse of their home. She ekes out a precarious living based on Black Market sale of sand and supplements her income by sex-work. This bleak existence was not fictional for many people living in the ruins of their cities after 1945. Sometimes what appears as Kafkaesque allegory is, in fact, a sober recitation of the facts.
In the United States, the International Art House Cinema began with Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In 1961, Antonioni’s L’Avventura was representative of this genre, an elegantly filmed, sexually suggestive enigma. It seems to me that L’Avventura is a kind of companion pieces of Woman in the Dunes. In the Italian film, a group of wealthy, somewhat debauched Italians visit the Aeolian Islands. On one of the desert islands, one of the young women along for the trip, Anna, vanishes. At first, there is consternation and panic. Several of the characters set out to find the missing woman. But, in the end, her disappearance is never solved and, gradually, the characters forget about her, reverting to their ordinary concerns. In Woman in the Dunes, a man also disappears although we know exactly what happens to him – Woman in the Dunes is, perhaps, L’Avventura from the perspective of the person who vanished. In both films, the narrative arc is from the extraordinary and adventitious toward an accommodation with the mystery and, ultimately, the restoration of something like the routines of ordinary life.
Characteristic of Art House Cinema is the so-called "boundary situation." This is a moment when a person is confronted with an event that forcefully draws that character’s attention to the fact that his life is, or has been, meaningless. In many instances, this event not only forces recognition of the protagonist’s absurd or meaningless existence, but, also, serves as an incentive for the hero (heroine) to change and live more authentically. In The Woman in the Dunes, this "boundary situation" occurs twice. Initially, the protagonist is visualized resting in a boat lying ruined in the dunes. The boat is going nowhere, becalmed in a sea of destructive sand. The hero reclines in the boat and muses about his identity and how we use our identities forged by passports, credit cards, driver’s licenses, and so on, as a bulwark against the meaninglessness of existence. Shortly after this epiphany, the hero finds himself stripped of that official or administratively sanctioned identity and reduced to bare existence in the crater in the dunes. A second "border" situation occurs near the end of the film, when the hero is confronted with an opportunity to escape his absurd and painful labor in the sands, but, like Sisyphus, seems to commit himself to the suffering that now characterizes his life.
Some additional information:
2. The great Russian film maker, Andrei Tarkovsky, ranked Woman in the Dunes as one of the ten best films ever made;
3. The man in the dunes is played by Eji Okada, a Japanese actor who earlier starred in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amou (1959). That film begins with Okada having sex in what appears to be post-nuclear soot and mud – poor Okada is best-known today for his grimy sex scenes;
4. The townspeople are playing "demon-killing drums" – that is Onigoroshi-daiko: this scene shows a kind of exorcism;
5. The film on the Criterion disk is 147 minutes long; this is the director’s original cut. As shown in the United States and at Cannes, Teshigahara voluntarily cut the film to 123 minutes;
6. The angle of repose for sand of the kind shown in the film is 30 degrees. Teshigahara had great difficulties creating the sand pits shown in the film – they had to be specially shored and the shoring, then, disguised;
7. Kobo Abe described the sand as shapeless, but all the more powerful because lacking shape and form;
8. The great Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, is said to have seen Woman in the Dunes over 100 times;
9. One of the few critics dissenting from praise of Woman in the Dunes was Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (It seems he moonlighted as a film critic in the early sixties.) Schlesinger despised the film as "café existentialism" and derided it as faux primitif. Schlesinger felt that the movie preached a acquiescence to totalitarianism and that it was a Communist fable.
10. Woman in the Dunes was shot over a period of four months in the Hamamatsu region at the Nakatajima Sand Dunes – this is an area of drifting white sand .4 kilometers wide and 6 kilometers long. The film was shot without sound because of the difficulties of filming on location and, then, post-dubbed.
11. Teshigahara interpreted the scene in which the sand dwellers demand that the protagonists have sex for their amusement as a positive development. He said: "This means that they have accepted the man into the midst – he is now one of them;"
Integral to the film’s design is the music by Toru Takemitsu. Takemitsu is an important composer, perhaps, the most well-known of all modern Japanese composers. Takemitsu was born in 1930 and conscripted into the armed forces when he was 14 in 1944. Takemitsu survived the war with a deep distrust and abhorrence for Nationalism. In his early compositions, he rigorously omitted any motives or phrases that might be construed as a derivd from Japanese folk music. An unabashed admirer of Olivier Messian, he met the French composer New York in 1975. Messiaen played his Quartet for the End of Time to Takemitsu. (Takemitsu was also a great admirer of J. S. Bach – he is said to have played the St. Matthew Passion through on his piano from beginning to end before starting any new composition – as a sort of "purification.") Takemitsu composed over a 100 film scores, including, notably, the four Abe collaborations with Teshigahara and most of the scores for Kurosawa’s films (including the famous elegy played during the massacre of the retainers in Ran.) Takemitsu’s later music uses Japanese traditional instruments, is influenced by Balinese gamelan, and develops into a tonal style. Takemitsu died in 1996.
Giri
Rumspringa is a Swiss-German word that means "running around." Between the ages of 14 and 16, Old Order Amish youth may experiment with life-styles non-conforming to their communities. The Amish baptize adults and, therefore, technically young people experimenting with Rumspringa are not yet full members of the congregation – accordingly, any minor sins committed during this period will be overlooked. The Old Order Amish require that their beliefs be accepted without coercion and with free will. This means that it is sometimes permissible for young people to consort with the non-Amish and learn about their lives before returning to the fold for their baptism and admission to full membership in the faith.
Westerners will not understand the sort of fame and nobility to which Hiroshi Teshigara was born. His father, Sofu Teshigahara, was a "living god", a National Treasure, the founder of the Sogetsu School, one of the principal factors in the renascence of Japanese culture after the end of the American occupation in 1951. Although there were over 300 competing schools of Ikebana prior to 1951, all of them were moribund, mired in the ancient traditions of the art. Like Noh and Kabuki theater, as well as the Tea Ceremony, Ikebana was passed on to its practitioners by the Iemoto system – this is a form of training that involves a long apprenticeship in which the novice is personally instructed by the Master. Iemoto apprentices copy the work of their masters exactly. There is no room for any personal expression or creativity. Sofu Teshigahara changed this paradigm – his pedagogy emphasized creativity and flexibility; the student was taught the ancient rules of the art but encouraged to experiment with deviation from them. As a result Teshigahara’s, Sogetsu School was fantastically successful – at one point, more than 2 million Japanese were studying Ikebana according to Sofu’s precepts.
There was never any doubt that Hiroshi Teshigahara would follow his father into leadership of the Sogetsu School. Although Sofu had relaxed some of the canons of the Iemoto system, nonetheless, Japanese art and traditional crafts remained intensely dynastic – trade secrets were passed from father to son.
Hiroshi’s surviving friends, all of them quite old now, recall that there was a kind of "rumpus room" in the basement of the Sogetsu School. In that room, Hiroshi entertained his friends, gathering around himself the leading young writers and artists of his generation. At that time, Hiroshi indicated that he really didn’t want to follow his father’s lead and become the Sensei of the School – rather, he said that he wished to make his own way. Donald Richie notes that, given his status, Hiroshi could have "been a master potter in his twenties with fifty retainers at his beck and call." Instead, Hiroshi forged creative alliances with the composer Toru Takemitsu and the novelist, Kobo Abe, as well as the architect, Araki Isozaki. Prominent members of the American avant-garde attended Hiroshi’s salon – these included people from the Black Mountain school including Merce Cunningham and John Cage. For a time, Hiroshi painted. He had the sort of genius that adapts easily to any medium that he chose and his canvases were striking. Hiroshi called his salon "The Century Club" – it’s leader was not Hiroshi, but Kobo Abe, someone who impressed everyone with his talent. For a decade, Kobo Abe and Hiroshi were inseparable – their ideas seemed interchangeable: as it was said of Braque and Picasso in the early days of Cubism, they were like two "mountain climbing explorers roped together".
Hiroshi had made short films, a documentary about the artist, Hokusai, and a lavishly beautiful picture about Ikebana. The short subject on Ikebana is revealing. We see Hiroshi’s father, Sofu, arranging flowers, making calligraphy (in one scene he paints kanji with a broom), and devising sculptures. Sofu’s flower arrangements seem to have been influenced by Alexander Calder – some of them look like mobiles. Sofu’s pottery and sculpture, an integral part of his Ikebana, are similar to the work of Henry Moore and Isamo Noguchi – it appears that as time progressed, Sofu gravitated more and more to monumental sculpture, great lattices of steel that are a far cry from his work with flowers. In the film, Hiroshi shows us the Ginkaji garden, an oasis with great pyramids and mounds of raked sand devised to "capture the moonlight" – "an unearthly spectacle," the narrator says. The film also shows the Zen gardens of boulders and raked sand at Ryunji Temple in Kyoto. Accordingly, this 1956 short film is very much alive to the pictorial possibilities of sculpting in sand. (The film also equates some of Sofu’s flower arrangements to neon lights and the sun shining through groves of perfectly aligned bamboo – an image that became very important later in Hiroshi’s life.) The point of Hiroshi’s film is to show that just about anything can be assimilated to the principles of Rikka – that is, the technique used in Ikebana. Rikka requires that each flower arrangement invoke Heaven, Earth, and Man. (At one point, we see Sofu saying that when using a Japanese chrysanthemum as a floating blossom, the flower should never occupy more than 2/3rds of the "water surface because the surface of the water is also key to the arrangement.") Hiroshi demonstrates in Ikebana that the conventional parameters of Japanese flower-arranging can be expanded almost infinitely.
(When I was a child, my mother had a big green book featuring images of Japanese Ikebana. I wonder if that book was not some kind of text book for the expansion of Sogetsu school principles into the United States. When she was young, my mother dabbled in pottery and made statuettes similar to those produced by Henry Moore – she used to tell us that the statue’s "negative space", that is, its hollows were central to its meaning. I know that my mother was very interested in Japanese flower-arranging and, probably, studied the subject at one time. There was really only one room for one artistic type in the family and that was my father and, so, my mother’s endeavors, which were probably more artistically successful, were denigrated. Now that there is no one to suppress her efforts, my mother has taken up painting – she paints clouds.)
As we have seen, Hiroshi made four films with Kobo Abe. Abe had the ideas; Teshigahara had the images. Abe moved on to other things and Sofu Teshigahara died. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s period of rumspringe was over – he stopped making movies and obediently took over the role of director of the Sogetso School. In time, Hiroshi Teshigahara assumed the role of Sensei in the Iemoto system – his mature work in Ikebana involved exuberant use of bamboo. One of his creations is a kind of waterfall entirely comprised of bamboo, about 200 feet tall. (Teshigahara also used bamboo to startling effect in designing the set for the opera Turandot.) Once a great film maker, Teshigahara became a great calligrapher, potter, architect, sculptor, and flower-arranger.
Donald Richie says that Hiroshi Teshigahara always knew that one day he would have to assume the mantle of leadership over the Sogetsu School – this was a fait accompli. Richie notes that "he was dragged kicking and screaming into the directorship position", although, then, amending his words to say: "Well, of course, he neither kicked nor screamed. The most anyone got from him was a tentative, regretful smile."
I think of the nameless hero of The Woman in the Dunes forced to the tedious task of shoveling sand. Shoveling sand is not Ikebana, but flower-arranging, I think, seems to have similarly limited horizons. Teshigahara said the film was about Giri – that is, the Japanese concept of "responsibility", "doing your duty" as defined by the group into which you are born. Teshigahara always knew that his identity required that take over his father’s role. The School was a destiny he couldn’t resist or elude. And, in the end, he seems to have accepted that role: Sisyphus, it is maintained, is content with the rock that he rolls uphill each day – it is his identity.
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