Blog > The woman in the dunes

I don’t love cinema for a number of reasons I won’t list in this post, but this film by Hiroshi Teshigahara, written by Kōbō Abe, like few others, keeps coming back to my mind for certain aspects that I find particularly close and meaningful.

I love simple stories; I don’t like complexity, sensationalism, sugary entertainment, or distraction. If I watch or read something, it’s to go deeper, to work, to research, to be present. For a number of reasons connected to all this, cinema is not one of my preferred mediums, but there are exceptions.

This is, in fact, a simple story: the story of an entomologist who sets out in search of certain varieties of insects and, while wandering through the desert, falls into a sand pit from which escape seems impossible. Inside this depression he finds a house where a very young widow lives.

The protagonist soon learns that every day sand keeps pouring into the pit, constantly threatening to bury the house. The man is forced to help the woman dig endlessly in order to avoid being swallowed by it. Of course, he tries several ways to escape, but none of them succeed.

Yet when the man finally does find a way out, near the end of the movie, contrary to all our expectations—and perhaps even his own—he decides to stay and devote his entire life to that routine of digging.

What does this movie tell us? Is the man searching for freedom or for the meaning of life? Existentialism has made it clear that freedom implies responsibility—the responsibility to choose and to desire one thing instead of another—and it is through this process that we create meaning. The choice this character makes at the end of the film strongly reminds me of a moment of awakening, when a person chooses against their innate automatisms.

Ouspensky says that “real life” begins only when a conscious act of will is introduced—an act that interrupts this automatism. For Camus, Sisyphus is happy because he accepts the absurdity of existence and becomes aware of it, freeing himself from the infinity of possibilities that weigh on him more heavily than the rock he is condemned to push—and which now, to his arms, feels lighter.

Likewise, the character in this movie accepts the absurdity of his condition and finds meaning in digging until the end of his days, living each day with awareness, performing a gesture he has chosen with his whole being, resisting the automatism of his mechanical, base impulses.

I like this movie because it allows me to savor exactly this—it reminds me of awareness itself. It’s not the story itself that interests me, but the memory of awareness that it evokes.