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Landscape, Allegory, and Historical Trauma in

Postwar Japanese Cinema: Recapitulating Existential
Horror
in Onibaba (1964) and Woman in the Dunes (1964)
Akshaya Kumar
Perhaps no national cinema has more thoroughly and consciously explored
the crises of its nations history and culture than the Japanese. The collapse of
the old warrior class in the 19th Century, the bitter struggle between traditional
values and western economics, the crisis of identity that Japan faced, all led
Japanese cinema to sword swaggering samurai to gangster films, disaster
epics to primitive pasts, wartime propaganda to traumatic representations of
defeat, nuclear holocaust, and occupation. Japans preoccupation with cultural
choices and Japanese identity has always managed to surface onto the film
screen. Donald Richie (1971: xix-xx) has argued about the individuality of
the Japanese film,
The relationship between man and his surroundings is the continual theme of the
Japanese film, one which quite accurately reflects the oneness with nature that
is both the triumph and the escape of the Japanese people. The Japanese regards
his surroundings as an extension of himself, and it is this attitude that creates the
atmosphere of the Japanese film at its best.

Postwar Japan teeters on the verge of a real confrontation between unfulfilled needs of people and rigours of daily life. It involves a collective social
code to repress rather than avow, the desires throbbing within the rubric of
societal conduct. Joan Mellen (1976: xxv) has argued that in Japan, change
has been a cause of dread, accommodation the norm, and popular control reduced to untested consensus. Yet there is ferment portents of discontent, if not
full-bodied dissent. The cinema in Japan has been used as a rite of passage,
a means towards discovering the multiple selves and the cultural habitus they
have produced. The ruins of postwar society have influenced a great variety
of filmmakers and they have responded with diverse images of the atmosphere
in which characters and their surroundings come together as mere extensions
of each other, as bound together by a certain logic but manifested through
psychological, retinal, aural, or mythical registers. Yet, Mellen has argued
that the touchstone of Japanese cinema has remained its preoccupation with
the past. To re-create the Japanese experience has been an obsession, as if that
alone shall allow cathartic relief, help comprehend what went wrong, where
societal values disappeared and why, thereby enabling redemption. Perhaps
this drive to uncover various pasts entangled into one another is also an attempt
to collectively decide which one to revive and cherish in order to shape the
nation, to model the present upon.
Therefore, not only does cinema hold a position of great spiritual authority
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in Japan, but it also provides an image contrary to how the West imagines it,
as a country of people voluntarily chained to factories and devoted to absurd
concepts of productivity. As a serious art from much more than casual entertainment, cinema has taken the task to reveal formidable energy and vitality
in the struggle against feudal institutions, and to counter the trauma of feudal
dictates of loyalty and obedience. The two major traumas of Japanese history
are the defeat of warrior clans in the middle of the 19th Century, and World
War II. While the former has been recorded over and over again, the latter has
not been given its due given the enormity of the event. Through the cinematic
representations, there have been attempts to answer questions around the
identity of Japan as a nation, Japanese as the people of the nation, and their
cultural specificities. In this quest, past becomes vital to resolve the present, to
distinguish feudal from dissident, to choose between the residues of past still
accessible. Under this rubric, writers have identied two major postwar themes:
a secular humanism which typically represents the individuals capacity for
self-cultivation and improvement (e.g. much of the work of Kurosawa) and
a type of victimization where the individual is often depicted as a powerless
pawn, caught in the machinations of a geopolitical trajectory (e.g. A Japanese
Tragedy [Nihon no higeki], Kinoshita Keisuke, 1953) (Standish, 2000: 220). It
took till the 1960s and 1970s, for a few filmmakers to finally insist on drastically new unsettling themes.
It is in this phase that Japanese cinema was bound to take a new turn.
In the films to arrive, past is not referred to within the framework of the social values of present, laden with judgments trying to take shape. Also, the
representations of present are still tentative and anxious, critical of changes
but unsure of criticisms. Amidst this identity crisis, the earlier historical form
could not but get destabilized. To mount the critique of the feudal warrior
past, and therefore also of Japans role in World War II, then, the cinematic
mise-en-scene required summation of man and his surroundings in an isolated
space where past and present could shake hands, and the processes of coming
together could be made visible so as to highlight how landscapes determined
human behavior just as much as human practices shaped the landscape.
While on one hand, this cinema establishes an intense link with landscapes,
on the other, the samurai figures and the feudal past keep haunting in varying
capacities, as if to punctuate the fact that Japan had failed to fully overthrow
its glorious feudalism.
If there emerges a gender critique of the earlier overambitious and now
dysfunctional Japanese masculinity, there is also a social critique of Japan
getting comfortable in its unwilling role-playing as a timid bedfellow to the
U.S. The trauma of the nuclear event and the awakening of the nation as to its
role in the war and the aftermath, and of course, U.S. occupation and censorship till 1952, had made it impossible to mourn the traumatic event through
the cinematic device. The most effective return towards Hiroshima and the
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atomic bomb tragedy after the occupation, took place in an otherwise haunting
landscape of the distant past, where samurais could appear at will and life-force
could find inspiration in the landscape as opposed to its threatened status in
contemporary postwar Japan, where things were decaying naturally and the
ruins of Japanese masculinity stood as testimony to self-inflicted wounds,
thereby rendering life incapacitated, unsure of its true state, let alone being
able to revitalize itself, or even perform itself. This was a grave crisis of all
representative forms, in the sense that the formal possibilities of representation
they opened up were found grossly inadequate to express the horror of life as
it existed, still trying to come to terms with the past, not only in psychological
terms, but also the biological, physiological challenges posed by the nuclear
radiations.
Among atomic bomb-related themes in Japanese cinema we find a number
of trends. Some films surprisingly few are intended as open social protests
of the U.S.s use of the bombs. There are critics who see the bombings as the
key stimulus to entire film genres, including the works of Yasujiro Ozu and
others, concerned as they were with rapid post-war social transformations
and their related spiritual costs. There are others who see the science-fiction
genre, especially the Godzilla films, as the main cinematic legacy of the
bombings and identify in this genre and its natural extension into anime films
deep insights into transformations in Japanese attitudes and social relations.
Finally, there are those films which perceive, in the experience of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, indications of broader spiritual and social dynamics with very
real, apocalyptic potential (Feleppa, 2004:1). Also significant, Donald Richie
(1971) argues, are certain cultural factors to understand the lack of protest
within cinema of the 1950s. While Western and other non-Japanese critics of
the bombings saw them as atrocities, the Japanese saw them as closer in species to earthquakes and other natural disasters. Richie remarks that the basic
view of the bomb in early documentaries was, in effect, This happened; it is
all over and finished, but isnt it too bad? Still, this world is a transient place
and this too is sad; what we feel today we forget tomorrow; this is not as it
perhaps should be, but it is as it is. This awareness of evanescence and the
resulting lamentation has a term in Japanese: mono no aware (translatable as
sympathetic sadness or inescapable sadness of living). It involves a nearBuddhistic insistence upon recognition of the eternal flux of life upon Earth
(Richie 1996: 22).
However, it is difficult to accept that a very aggressive and ambitious
imperial force that was at Japans disposal would take to Buddhist leanings
only in the wake of the bomb. It is more palatable that the cinematic image
found itself relatively incapable to re-present the images of the horror Japan
had inflicted upon itself, except through the allegorical. Benjamin (1996:
178-79) writes, Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in
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the realm of things. [..] In the process of decay, and in it alone, the events of
history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting.
The ruin, in other words, has a privileged potential for generating the shock
of the allegorical moment. Therefore, the context of historical trauma amidst a
crisis of national identity, mounted on top of a realist formal engagement with
the past, eventually had to make way for the allegorical encounter with national
discourses on war and social responsibility, as determined by the constraints
of the landscape. However, before we begin to look at the films under focus,
it is important to raise doubts over the claims that only the allegorical form
could capture the traumatic event, and was conclusively more effective than
forms that are more direct. Perhaps, Immamuras Black Rain (1988) is a fine
example of cinema of understatement, evoking the horror of the historical
trauma across generations. However, as would be argued later in this paper,
what needs to be understood is the power of the allegorical in transcending
the traumatic event itself and bringing out the horror of not the event, but the
experience of living through the progression of history, as it unfolds through
one catastrophic event after another. Allegory derives its strength from the
fact that it does not single out any event, instead, it collapses them into an
experiential category, condensed within the charged landscape.
Kaneto Shindos Onibaba (1964) and Hiroshi Teshigaharas Woman in the
Dunes (1964), films released in the same year, use distinctive, but powerful,
evocative landscapes, as if to mark a site of exception, in order to tell us tales
set in the paradoxical scenario that Walter Benjamin (1969: 253-264) remarked
on in the eighth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940) as, the
state of exception in which we live is not the exception but the rule. Later
developed by Giorgio Agamben as a concept in his book State of Exception
(2003), the state of exception has a temporariness to it that gives license to
an order that would otherwise be at odds with the juridical, as well as social
order, and would be considered illegal and immoral instead. Though there are
elements of cinematic horror in both of the films, and the images could be
seen as if they were allegorizing the state of exception that Japan had suffered
in World War II and Hiroshima / Nagasaki nuclear bombings, the horror of
everyday lives was refusing to die as nuclear attack had mutated Japanese
people into rotting, decaying bodies surviving time. The perpetual nature of
horror of life reflects itself in the states in which the protagonists of both films
find themselves, entrapped in a perpetual arrest, however, under a lingering
shadow of the promise that the state of exception would be over soon, to make
way for the regular, routine, and normal.
Both films have been read as allegorical representations of post-Hiroshima
existential crisis, absurdity of life in the face of an ongoing crisis that takes such
a toll on the very act of living that it slowly poisons out other alternatives, as
if affirming that there is no morally appropriate way to survive the landscape
itself. The dark clouds of this dislocated sense of temporality over a secluded
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landscape, whether that of waving susuki fields or sand dunes, gives birth to
unique anxieties and addresses the conceptualizations of trauma theory from
a tangential direction. If the rule of life is to be seen as a state of exception, it
does not translate to death in life as much as it intersperses life with a praxis
of keeping on hold certain essential components of living, as if in order to
resume them later when normalcy is restored.
It leads us to view trauma victims as haunted by death in perpetuity, but
also not only unable, also unwilling to escape it. Sexuality, therefore, becomes
the life force, synonymous with the state of being within allegorical life-image as opposed to the everyday banality, but also a mighty possibility of refuge
from death in life experience of post-trauma living. That is why, sexuality is
used as the life-force in both films: if it means escape from the inescapability
of the state of exception in Onibaba; it means an instrument of tightening the
clutches of state of exception, of finding the life-force within the exception,
and thereby losing the grip on the quest for life itself in Woman in the Dunes.
This paper shall try to look deeply into the revision of trauma theory:
historical trauma as a prolonged state of exception, perhaps not necessarily
linked to the historical event but more to the memory of an uninterrupted chain
of catastrophic events, which itself is history. How effective is the allegorical
representation as opposed to other direct forms to represent this history? How
does the fairytale aesthetic and ethic, role of morality and sexuality, socialization and transgression, come together to construct the allegorical form? We
shall try to read the tension between trauma and representation in proportion to
the slippage between the allegorical and the real, the love of life-force within
the allegory as opposed to the fear of living within the traumatic real. How
these slippages construct the cinematic image in the two films, yet spill over
it in order to make their various meanings, needs a complex analysis that this
paper attempts to accomplish.
Another question that can possibly be attempted here is whether the two
films in focus are read as allegories, because they actually are such, or because
when Japanese cinema is seen through an ethnographic lens, international film
criticism does not want to let go of theoretical frameworks easily applicable
over such a vulnerable film text that makes no direct references. It needs a
larger body of analysis to conclude whether the films are actually accommodated within the matrix of historical trauma, or the traumatic representation has
come to stand in for the ethnicity of postwar Japanese film, imposed from the
outside. However, it cannot be ignored that the true worth of the two films in
question here, has been constituted significantly by the western viewership and
their understanding of Japanese international cinema. As argued by Mitsuyo
Wada-Marciano (2007: 190), these films allow us to read the ethnicized filmic
body as one of the national cinemas singular deployments, as configured in
such international forums constructing ethnicity within an official narrative.
Though both of the films are loosely connected to the Japanese New
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Wave moment, they do not reflect the new wave ethic as much as they exist
at the cross-section of proto-new wave political interests, and the allegorical
trauma texts that confront the unspeakability of traumatic neurosis in a roundabout fashion. These two films nearly inhabit the no-mans land from where
one could witness the dialogue between the iconic filmmakers who helped
construct the image of Japanese national cinema, and new wave filmmakers
who later deconstructed that same image. David Desser (1998: 4), whose Eros
Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema remains
an invaluable guide to the movement that roughly spans the years between
1960 and 1970, defines the New Wave as films produced and/or released
in the wake of Oshimas A Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibo no machi,
1959), films which take an overtly political stance in a general way or toward
a specific issue, utilizing a deliberately disjunctive form compared to previous
filmic norms in Japan. What is at stake here is how the new wave is defined
and deployed, how the concept functions to include and exclude certain films
as political or apolitical while constructing a Japanese national cinema for
film history. These two films, in the sense that they challenge the influential
traditions of Japanese national identity and national cinema, anchored to the
wavelength of either Kurosawa or Oshima, indeed belong to the new wave
ethic, but not if the new wave matrix has dedicated boxes for those who were
a conscious part of the new wave project.
Onibaba (1964)
The film begins with an overhead view of a windy grassland, the reeds
more than six feet high swaying in the breeze. The camera moves closer to
show us a large pit in the ground and the next shot is from deep inside the hole,
looking up. Then the films opening credits begin, accompanied by a strident,
percussive music score. The existence of the pit is known only to a middleaged woman and her daughter-in-law, who live in squalid conditions in this
large marshland. Struggling to make ends meet (this is medieval Japan and the
son/husband is away fighting in an army), the two women murder a wounded
samurai who staggers into the grass looking for shelter, dump the bodies into
the hole, and then trade the armor for meagre rations of food. Meanwhile, they
also get by with killing rats, dogs, and whatever other creatures they can get
their hands on, and generally live like wild animals themselves.
Onibaba is a modern reworking of an Oni from Japanese folklore that
has the appearance of an old woman but feasts on humans. Variously known
as the Demon-Hag, Old Hag, Mountain Woman, Goblin of Adachigahara, and
Kurozuka, the Onibaba has many stories behind her name. In 1964, Scriptwriter and Director Kaneto Shind made the film Onibaba, based upon an old
Buddhist fable by the name of A Mask with Flesh Scared a Wife. Onibaba
offers a loose interpretation of one of many Ofumi Buddhist fables Shindo had
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learned in his childhood.The fable, apparently, has several versions. In one
of them, an old woman is furious with her daughter-in-law for continually
neglecting household chores to go off to the temple and pray. She hides in the
bushes along the path and when the younger woman comes along, she jumps
out wearing a demon mask, terrifying her. Buddha punishes the old woman for
her dishonesty and impiety by sticking the mask to her face. The old woman
desperately claws and scrabbles at the grotesque mask, but she cant get it
off; eventually she prays to Buddha to let her remove it and Buddha mercifully agrees, but his gentle mercy reveals itself as something quite different
when the woman wrenches it off and takes the flesh of her face with it.1 This
original fable was intended to promote the teachings of Buddhism.In Shindos
film, the fable has been transformed into an erotic noir tale of psychological horror,2 its religious overtones muted and the story altered so that the
antagonism between the two women now arises from jealousy around sexual
freedom.Things change when a man named Hachi arrives in the neighborhood,
and starts making advances on the daughter-in-law. Their resultant clandestine
relationship terrifies the older woman, who fears being left to fend for herself,
and whose envy provides a sexual motivation for the lonely woman to frighten
the young daughter-in-law. She tries to dissuade them by talking about hellfire
and divine punishment for carnal sins, but to no avail. Then she gets her hands
on a demon mask and an idea presents itself.
Onibaba, a waking nightmare shot in icy monochrome and filmed in a
colossal and eerily beautiful wilderness, is set during the Sengoku Warring
States period (of the 15th to 17th Century). A civil war is on,Kyoto has fallen,
and two emperors, vying for control of Japan, have torn the country apart.
Men are conscripted without warning, many to die anonymously in pointless
battles and skirmishes. Starvation is a real threat, given that there is no one to
tend the fields. With the country at war and its people starving, the Japanese
countryside has devolved into a forbidden zone where wandering samurai and
priests alike are killed simply for their clothing and material possessions. In
this atmosphere, an old woman (Nobuko Otowa), robbed of her son by the
war, lives on in the remote edges of a susuki field with her daughter-in-law
(Jitsuko Yoshimura). Together, they ambush lost samurai, stripping them of
their armor and gear, and dump the bodies to rot into a deep hole in the marshes.
In a shocking scene, a wild dog is brutally captured and roasted.The women
trade these spoils of war to a local merchant for food.However, the choice of
living this way has been imposed upon them by the social and temporal order
they inhabit. During the first half hour, the film merely pans out the state of
exception, the routine horror of everyday living, waiting for the war to end and
normalcy meaning agriculture, most importantly to be restored.
If the hole waits calmly like a doorway to hell, it perhaps belongs to a
different temporal order, or perhaps exists entirely outside temporal boundaries.
Or, perhaps it makes possible a temporal slippage, indicating that the civilized
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present can dump its crimes into the hole and rid itself of the primitive savage
past, thereby performing the civilizational act successfully. It is the arrival of
raw sexual desire and energy that explodes on the screen through Hachi, that we
are catapulted into a very uncomfortable territory. Through Hachis persistent
desire of the young woman and her eventual acceptance, we slide into the failure
of not only the civilizational pretense, but are also forced to acknowledge the
failure of an otherwise functional relationship between the old woman and
her daughter-in-law. With the explosion of sexual energy, and the recharging
of the susuki fields the landscape we confront the life-force for the first time
in the film. Therefore, the sexual subsides the functional so that it collapses
into the traumatic reality that the women were living through, assuming it to
be a state of exception. Not only do they collapse into one category then, but
are constantly threatened by the sexual that refuses to, first, buckle under the
death in life experience of historical trauma, and, second, acknowledge the
state of exception as a determining criteria. The sexual then, not only becomes
the only source of vitality, but also defies the temporal passivity built into the
idea of state of exception that derives its meaning from an outside conception
of normalcy, restoration of order. The sexual defies the order in the sense that
it locates the source of its energy, and also that of its replenishment within,
thereby allowing it to defy and destabilize the temporal order, while indeed
assaulting the civilizational order head-on.
It is indeed to the rhythm of the sexual that the landscape too responds,
an endless field of suggestively swaying seven-foot-high susuki grass charged
with eroticism. The older woman too, eventually, offers a sexual transaction
to Hachi herself, faced with a double threat of extinction, which he refuses,
thereby rendering her as barren as the leafless tree to which she clings during a paroxysm of sexual rejection and hysterical rage. Also, by turning the
younger womans wish to go to the temple in the Buddhist fable, into raw
insatiable sexual desire, Shindo has rendered the inescapable sexual urge
an unprecedented currency. That there is nothing beautiful about the sexual
transaction between the young woman and Hachi is also suggested in what the
older woman tells the Samurai. Take off your mask, whispers the old woman,
Ive never seen anything really beautiful. Her words open a window to a
lifetime of deprivation, but also to the ugly reality of everyday living within
the state of exception suggested further in references made to a land where
frost falls in summer, and a horse is said to have given birth to a calf, a black
sun rises each of them if forced to inhabit. The deprivation and harsh reality
of life is, suffocating and debilitating as it is, expressed through the confinement within the blades of tall susuki grass that arrests every moment of the
film before the young woman, along with her sexual partner, decides to run
through the fields and continues into the only open space that Onibaba ever
shares with us. Perhaps there is a suggestion that only the charge of the erotic
energizes, defying exception, trauma, even the allegorical image.
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The first tryst between Hachi and the young woman qualifies as a fight
scene as much as a love scene; she initiates the encounter by throwing a rock
into his hut; he grabs and gropes her; she slaps him, and they fall to the ground
in a mutual embrace. However, the physical relationship evolves over the film,
and their last scene together portrays them running happily through the fields,
as their laughter echoes over images of playful pursuit. Yet, hidden beneath
the matrix of tall susuki grass billowing softly in the breeze, gazes charged
with waiting-to-explode sexual urge, the dark abysses of Yoshimuras fiery
pupils, the lingering caress of Kurodas camera on her naked thighs, one particular shot that closes up on the swaying of her full hips over which Hachis
eyes seem fixed, the sound effects of cooing pigeons when she is aroused
and runs through the grass towards another passionate intercourse, the jazzy
percussion-heavy music score, or Hachis grabbing her naked breast at the
outset and kissing her nipples like a hungry beast later, as if recently released
from a vow of celibacy, is the moral question. Not only is it manifested in the
distinction the old woman makes in her cry I am a human. I am not a demon,
or the younger womans first line, Serves him right, but also in the Hachis
declaration gazing at the hole, I want a woman, thereby dispelling all notions of human feelings in the wake of a carnal desire to devour a female body,
regardless of her identity, later articulated by the older woman too when she
says that Hachi is like a dog after a bitch. However, what is indeed uncertain
is how the film resolves the question.
How are we to read the film, and, more importantly, the project this film
emerges out of? Are we to read the modern sexualized reworking of a Buddhist moral fable, as a story with a more appropriately contextual morality, or
it foregrounds the very crisis of morality in the absence of social or juridical
order? Or perhaps, by first punishing the old woman with a scarred face, and
also killing Hachi right after he declares that there is no God, Shindos film
asserts the still prevailing ideas of supernatural justice and moral order, the
state of exception notwithstanding. Also, that the mask is passed on from
the Samurai to the woman is also indicative of a link between the two that
perpetuates the contagious disease, thereby becoming the victim as well as
the perpetrator and suggesting an external logic that brings them together. By
using several interjections of the phrase Serves you right Shindo is indeed
not operating outside the orbit of moral order, we could conclude. He says in
an interview with Joan Mellen (1972) regarding the punishment meted out to
the old woman in the film:
I meant this punishment to be a spiritual one, so that through her suffering I could
reveal the real soul of the mother herself. After her recovery, we, the mother and
the director, are ready for the next step into a new world, the stage which might
take us to a new future. [..]As far as the storyline is concerned the mother was
punished because she tried to stop the girl from finding a new man. But behind the
surface drama there is a story other than the one we are now discussing. It is that
everyone in my films, the mother and the daughter-in-law in this case, is invariably

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an outcast of society. They are people totally abandoned, outside societys political
protection. Among these outcasts I wanted to capture their immense energy for
survival. Obviously the mother has done very cruel things, like preventing her
daughter-in-law from finding another man. She is punished for these acts, but
the punishment is an expression of the uncontrollable events which these people
meet in their actual lives. My next suggestion is that the destroyed face is not the
end of her world. This miserable face will dry later and she will find the day to
live again. She has to find it. By destroying her face, I said something about the
beginning of a new life for people who are assaulted by unexpected social events.3

Onibaba bursts with meaning, not only due to Shindos narrative but also
in his startling cinematic juxtapositions: symphony of graphic, rhythmic, and
sonic elements that never cease to thrill; extreme close-ups with long shots;
acute compositions with handheld camerawork; silence with thundering drums;
physical isolation with sexual conquest; serene beauty with ruthless violence.
The widescreen vision of pampas grass endlessly waving in the breeze seductively conveys natural undulating motions and whispering sounds tied up
within an eerie aural universe comprising of unusual sound effects, such as
the cooing of pigeons. The score by Hikaru Hayashi, with its Noh vocalizations and percussive Taiko drumbeats, pierced with occasional scat-screams
and laughing-gas blasts of snorting brass, perfectly complements the films
progressively disturbing images.The action too, is interspersed with abstract
compositions of the wasteland itself: either long shots of the scarily huge
prairie, or painterly close-ups of the grasses themselves: dagger-like blades.
At night-time, Shindo picks out the various locations with stark key lighting,
a stylized effect which makes no attempt whatever to approximate moonlight.
It is the cinematic construction of Onibaba that renders it to overwhelming
interpretations, partly because of the minimalism deployed and metaphorical
readings encouraged by its primal elements, but also, perhaps, because its
cinematic richness that persuades the viewer to look beyond.
Indeed, Onibaba juxtaposes emperors of the 14th Century over emperors
of the 20th Century by collapsing the allegorical and the real in that reference.
Lowenstein (2005:91) remarks that it embraces Benjamins temporality of
Jetztzeit, when the past and present illuminate each other in such a fashion
that the official continuum of history explodes. Has the earth turned upside
down? the old woman asks when Hachi speaks of unnatural war-related occurrences such as the rising of a black sun and the substitution of night for day.
In recalling these images of solar eclipse, Shindo deliberately connects the
Hiroshima bombing images of atomic destruction to the allegorical. Indeed,
the allegorical shatters the binary between realist/modernist forms and the
very ethics of representation. By enforcing a temporal, as well as conceptual,
distance questions around history, spectatorship and representation collapse
into the very image on the screen which contains and reflects the experiential
reality of historical trauma, sets up a shock confrontation between the viewer
and the image, blasting open the continuum of history (12).
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Woman in the Dunes (1964)
When first released, Woman in the Dunes an independent production
made on a limited budget achieved a kind of cult status in the West. Based
on a novel by Abe Kb of the same name, the film has been read as an updated version of the myth of Sisyphus the man imprisoned in the Absurd and
tormented by the need to find a meaning to his circumstances therefore, as
an allegory of our time. The landscape is represented as a site of synthesis,
based on formlessness and instability of rules order of any kind. The various
symbolic interpretations make the film both accessible and obscure, universal
and specific. Yet, Woman in the Dunes is a meditation on identity. Teshigahara
begins with the opening credits during which a mass of hanko (name-seals) fills
the screen. The woman, like in Onibaba, is never named and the mans proper
name Junpei Niki is given only at the end of the film. The entomologist is first
introduced as a character tied to identity cards that are his social credentials.
The male protagonist leaves Tokyo for a three-day research trip to rural
oceanside sand dunes in search of a new beetle. Seeking shelter at the home
of a woman who lives in a surreal village comprised of houses built in deep
pits in the sand dunes, Niki is imprisoned there by the villagers. Confronted by
the absurdity of the womans life, which is dominated by the arduous task of
shoveling sand (that if allowed to pile up would bury the house) for collection
and profit by the village collective, and the mystifying fact that in the dunes,
physical matter takes on scientifically irrational properties (such as sand being
moist, rather than dry), Niki first dedicates himself to escape. Eventually, he
immerses in a project he entitles hope (begun to free himself from dependence
on the villagers) that unexpectedly collects condensed water from the sand.
After several unsuccessful attempts at escape, he begins to embark upon a
strangely erotic relationship with her, and by the end of the film, he has lost his
desire to be free, for he has discovered meaning in the hitherto meaningless
life in the dunes. Indeed, the dominant interpretation of the film as an existential text tends to focus on the meaningfulness of the relation between self and
individual, as well as collective other, specifically, that between Niki and the
woman and Niki and the village collective. If former achieves its balance and
meaning in sexual transactions, the latter rests delicately on the rope ladder
that connects the collective and the individual through rules and traditions.
It must be acknowledged then, that however exceptional the circumstances
inhabited by the protagonists, the system hangs in the balance through rigid
rules, unlike in Onibaba. Also, it is suggested that an escape from the condition is possible in the stories about young men who do not stay in the village.
However, that possibility is not available to Niki, who is entrapped and must
work around his crisis getting rid of his past, his urban upbringing, his selfimage, and most importantly, his rationality, sharply reflected in his incessant
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questioning about why would the woman, and indeed the others, want to be in a
landscape as harsh and absurd as the dunes. It is a question that never arises in
Onibaba, for the only suggested outside is in no better condition, and also there
is no outsider like Niki in the film. Hachi, though returning from the war, is not
alien to the landscape and leers after the young woman straightaway, unlike
Niki who has internalized a very different logic of life and cannot reconcile
with his present degree of discomfort. Therefore, sexual fulfilment to him, is
a way to transact with life, to re-circulate the juices of life and its consciousness within, so as to confront the absurdity of the landscape. Hachi, unlike
him, much more than Niki, expressed the eroticism of the very landscape he
inhabited. Sexual for him is a rebellious life-force, but for Niki, it is the only
available way to hang on to the rope of life, to restore his threatened self
amidst the landscape of absurdity. Ehrlich and Santos (2001: 93) explain the
intervention of the landscape in great details:
From the very first images onward, sand is identified by its never-ceasing
movement, as well as by the continuous succession of days and nights. The flow of
sand is shown in a dual, and essentially ambiguous, form. It represents elements of
life and death, torment and pleasure, work and desire. Sand is also seen as water, a
maternal symbol linked with sexual desire (nureba, or erotic scenes; literally, wet
scenes). Streams of sands sliding over smooth surfaces provide a very obvious
sexual analogy. As the mans sexual interest in the woman increases, a shot shows
us the naked body of the woman dissolving into the dunes.
When passion breaks out, the couple lies frantically in the sand. The wedding
ritual consists of cleaning out the sand from the lovers body. Sweaty bodies are
tied together, but also cut into bits, by the work of editing.

It is also powerfully noted within the film text, that it is the landscape that
fills meaning into the everyday banality, as if serving a curse by living as if
dead. While Niki poses the most profound question as he shovels the sand, I
wonder if Ill ever get used to it. Doesnt this fill you with emptiness? Are
you shovelling to survive or surviving to shovel? the womans position is
annoyingly simple, But its my home.Its not like Ill have anything to do
outside. If it werent for the sand, nobody would bother with me. For her, the
freedom to walk around is unnecessary, an imposition perhaps, at least a bigger
discomfort than to have to shovel, a task with which she is indeed familiar
and comfortable with. Then, all of a sudden, she punctuates the argument with
a moving question filled with pathos, Isnt that right? Even you mister
suggesting her complete meaninglessness, even emotional depravity, once
she is taken out of the sand dunes. The emotional bond between them slowly
builds up to a powerful cinematic moment that captures the aesthetics of the
flesh. While applying soap over the completely naked body of Niki, the slow
circles of the womans hands start holding and playing with more and more
flesh, eventually leading to a sexually hyper-charged atmosphere on screen.
Contrast that with how the playfulness after Nikis first genuine attempt at
escape between them is punctured by Nikis sudden exit from the hut as he
declares, I wont die like a dog! I wont! The tussle is maintained throughout
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the film text, as Niki cannot abandon his desire to resume normalcy in his life,
while the womans remarkable patience with his desire, her condition, their
intimacy, and indeed with her harsh surroundings, never cease to befuddle
him; and us, indeed.
However, what has most captured the critics attention, is the films
visual presentation of a modernist parable concerning the body, the self, and
the landscape of enveloping sand. The images certainly make these objects
often indistinguishable from one another. The ever-shifting dunes are not
unlike the contours of the human body itself, within the folds and creases of
which sand rests and shifts. At times, we are denied the privilege of sight as
the screen is bathed in a murky darkness. Extreme depth-of-focus shots allow
us to see the human figures as small against the vast universe of sand. Also,
rarely in the film are we privileged by shots that reveal the entire house and
its surroundings. A sense of mystery around the landscape and its fullness, is
built. The horror of a looming threat is constantly re-introduced into the film
text by using shots of sand eddying down into the pit. Also, the film constructs
an intense vocabulary of intimacy, as inspired from mise-en-scene. With only
one lamp for illumination, the conversation between the man and the woman
assumes a quick sense of intimacy. As she scoops out rice for his evening
meal, a deep-focus shot connects them both in a sudden domesticity. In another
extreme close-up, we watch as Niki wipes the sand off the womans body and
gradually undresses her. The camera reveals her body in gentle, unpredictable
directions: a close-up of her feet gripping the sand, later followed by a closeup of her hand against his shoulder, and then patterns of sand eddying down
the cliff. The music on the sound track maintains one long sustained note, a
kind of drone (92). Also, Teshigahara revels in experimentation intrinsic to
the Japanese New Wave, through the use of such devices as the hand-held
camera, disjunctive editing, nondiegetic sound, as well as elegant sweeping
shots. He is a master of montage, particularly of a montage of qualitatively
linked patterns. As art historian Dore Ashton (1997: 96) noted:
Teshigaharas Woman in the Dunes is saturated with techniques common to the
visual plastic arts. His close-ups of sand, grain by grain, recalls Miros blade-byblade close-ups of grass [and that of Shindos susuki grass blades too, in Onibaba].
His way of focusing on an insect, so that it takes up the whole screen and transforms
itself into an attenuated, hardly identiable object, is similar to many approaches
in metamorphic or organic abstraction that of Arshile Gorky for instance.

Much like Onibaba, Teshigaharas film is so loaded with symbolism

and cinematic juxtapositions that an ocean of meanings can be drawn from
it. However, within the scope of this paper, having established the meanings
emerging from the landscape and the meanings it fills its subjects with, we
must return to the power of the allegorical over the real to bring out the horror
of historical trauma, and indeed, the relationship of trauma theory with the
state of exception, suspension of law, even morality. If the inability to escape
historical trauma is reflected in being arrested in the traumatic moment and a
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pathological inability to escape it, Woman in the Dunes captures the traumatic
living in its entirety. The suspension of legal order and the state of exception
too is highlighted through the notion of confinement within the landscape that
determines lives more than any outside order does. The film, however dependent on the sexual act and the sand dunes to constitute itself, does not pose
a moral question like Onibaba. It does not isolate human from demon, right
from wrong, divine from beastly, thereby directing us to crime and punishment.
Instead, it poses an existential question that navigates through all the above
binaries to survive with dignity. Dignity needs a special mention for the woman,
otherwise resigned to her fate, who resists violently when the villagers promise
the man a chance to see the sea if he makes love to the woman before their
eyes. They shine a spotlight on the man, to the sound of increasingly frenzied
drumrolls. The villagers disguise their appearance with scarves, goggles, and
the masks of animals (dog, monkey, insect), thus emphasizing their bestiality.
While the woman realizes the illegality of selling the moist sand for
construction work and goes on to add that she does not care about what would
happen to others (Who cares about others? she asks), it only means her imagination of collective stops short of the urban universe. In her hut surrounded by
the dunes, she is more than willing to be domesticated, to be loved, to work
and live normally, however skewed the notions lying within. To see the film
as we see it then, as a state of exception, is only Nikis perspective; for those
who inhabit that landscape, it has already become the rule, unlike in Onibaba
where the outside notions of normalcy are endorsed by the two women as well.
Perhaps we can acknowledge, therefore, that the traumatic neurosis may be
their curse and condition; it is surely not linked to the memory of an event.
This eventlessness of the state of affairs, this understanding of ones condition
not within a progression of events or as an outcome of historicity, but a given
(reflected in the assertion But this is my home!), is clearly stressed here
within the form that allegorizes the act of living within history as a curious
mix of resignation, suspension, transaction, and propagation, all calibrated on
their site-specificity.
Conclusion
The horror of historical trauma then, to whatever extent it applies to
living the everyday brutality, does not reside within the allegorical cinematic
image as Lowenstein (2005) would have us believe, as much as it does within
the temporal depth of that image. Part of the problems with Lowensteins
understanding of allegorical image and its powerful rendering of historical
trauma, is that he seems to be deeply entangled in the web of national cinemas
that he has conceptualized without taking into account various factors. One
of those factors would be the ethnicization of the entire filmic body by arresting it within the boundaries of the nation, while discounting how the notion
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of national cinema itself is a perspective from outside, or from inside for the
outsides. It operates through an imagination of whole that is in dialogue with
other wholes, thereby allowing them to determine its shape and size too.
Indeed, the overall cinematic juxtaposition of drumming beats, expressionist
masks, and overwhelming landscapes, determines the shock and horror of the
cinematic image. Yet, much more shocking is the idea that the demeanor of
the landscape taming its inhabitants, the necessity to confine or kill others to
survive, the urge to devour flesh physically as well as voyeuristically, to pass
on and even impose the notions of crime and punishment, thereby controlling
others lives, the inescapability of ones condition, as well as the domestication
of ones desire, all these have existed for centuries. What adds to the horror
is that these phenomena are not only the rules we confront in our lives, but
they even impose themselves on the states of exception, which have thereby
collapsed into the rules, resulting in the crumbling of all possible outsides, and
reinforcement of the same daunting order that imposes upon each one of us.
Put together, both of the films make vital, though sideways, contributions
to not only the notion of the larger body of traumatic memory, and locked
within it the possibility of transformation, but also the idea of representation
without directly addressing the event of historical trauma. Instead, it could
possibly be argued that both films acknowledge the helplessness to address
the logic of traumatic condition, thereby suggesting coming to terms with it in
affective terms in order to not transform as much as transcend it. Indeed, the
films are uniquely placed in the history of postwar Japanese cinema, just as
uniquely as within the body of what could be called bomb-cinema, i.e. Japanese
cinema in response to the A-bomb experience. The allegorical possibility is
widely read into the films, a trend surely linked to the ethnicization of the
filmic body of national cinemas, as argued by Wada-Marciano (2007). Yet, the
cinematic images in these films convey the traumatic human condition within
the state of exception, precisely because the exceptions are able to hold time
within for much longer, acting as time-resisting crucibles in which an antidote
to counter moral and existential crises could be prepared. Perhaps we could
also read these images as Deleuzian time-images (2005), for they contain
within the horror of historical trauma, lingering timelessness arrested between
cyclic traps that reflect the complexity and eclecticism of the architectonics of
states of exception, therefore, the rule.
Endnotes
1 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/oct/15/onibaba-kanetoshindo-devil-woman for more.
2. Ibid.
3 See http://eigageijutsu.blogspot.com/2009/11/kaneto-shindo-interview.html
for the full interview. The most interesting revelation Shindo makes is by
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remarking that, the mother is myself.
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Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago and
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Ashton, Dore. 1997. The Delicate Thread: Teshigaharas Life in Art. Tokyo:
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Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). In
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Ehrlich, Linda C. and Antonio Santos. 2001. The Taunt of the Gods:
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Feleppa, Robert. 2004. Black Rain: Reflections on Hiroshima and Nuclear
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Akshaya Kumar has completed his MA in arts and aesthetics from the School
of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is pursuing a Diploma
in Culture and Contemporary Systems at the Center for the Study of Culture
and Society, Bangalore. His major interests include urban spatial segregation
of cinema exhibition sites, conflicts within memory and history, and the role
of technology in determining the trajectory of art and culture.

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