880-02 Eiji Okada, Kyōko Kishida. Originally released as a motion picture in 1964. Based on a novel with the same title by Kōbō Abe. Fullscreen (1.33:1 aspect ratio). Special features on disc one: Video essay on the film from 2007 by film scholar James Quandt; Trailer ; on disc two: Four short films from director Hiroshi Teshigahara's early career: Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako (1965); Teshigahara and Abe, a 2007 documentary examining the collaboration between Teshigahara and novelist Kobo Abe, featuring interviews with film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato, film programmer Richard Peña, set designer Arata Isozaki, producer Noriko Nomura, and screenwriter John Nathan; booklet essay by film scholar Audie Bock and a 1980 interview with Teshigahara.
Summary:
An amateur entomologist is left in Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle found in sandy locations. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema's most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of the Sisyphean struggle of everyday life.
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