Lady of Sand

"Sand Girl" is the work of Japanese director Hiroshi Kawara, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964. A man who studies insects comes to the sand dunes by the sea to find a beetle, misses the car back to Tokyo, meets a few locals, and takes him to a nearby village for the night. The house he was staying at was in a strange place, and he had to climb down a rope ladder to get there. It was late at that time, and he couldn't see his surroundings clearly. There was only one woman in the family, and her husband and daughter both died in the sandstorm. The next morning the man got up and was about to leave, but found that the rope ladder was gone, and the house was in a deep sand pit, surrounded by steep sand walls, making it impossible to climb. It turned out that the village was hit by sand and dust, and the sand around the house had to be dug up every night to keep the house from being engulfed by sand and dust. People in the village will trick passing travelers into the village as laborers. The man was so angry that he tried to escape, but failed. He went from being furious at first to helplessly digging sand with women in exchange for food and water. Eventually, the woman fell ill because of her pregnancy, and the villagers came to take her to the hospital. Before leaving, they left the rope ladder behind, either negligently or deliberately. The man could go, but he didn't.

In this film, men seem to represent the modern civilized world, with minds armed with science and technology. In fact, he came to this remote sand dune to look for beetles, but also to think about the meaning of his life. Women, on the other hand, represent the simplest and most primitive life, isolated from the world, and their daily activities are only eating, sleeping, bathing, working, and having sex. Men once asked her, "Do you live to dig sand? Or dig sand to live?" And this question seems meaningless to a woman. That's how she lives, and she doesn't want to leave. This film is excellent from photography to music. The photography composition of this black and white film is very particular, and there are many very abstract close-up shots, accompanied by the music of the famous Japanese modern composer Toru Takemitsu, which is very Hitchcock-like. Those sand dunes, from the soothing and graceful at the beginning, to the dangerous tyranny when the hero was trapped, to the peace and kindness later, fully matched the mood of the hero, adding a lot of shock. The director of this film, Hiroshi Kawara, is also good at arranging flowers and is the third-generation head of the Japanese flower arranging grass moon stream. The original author of the film is Kobo Abe, a representative of Japanese existential literature. Another important film "The Face of Others" directed by the imperial envoy Hiroshi Kawara is also a work adapted from the Abe public house.

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