The son of the founder of the first school for ikebana (the elegant Japanese term for flower-arranging), Hiroshi Teshigahara had a preordained sense of making normal acts of nature look like moments of art. Like the ethereal construction of the community in his debut Pitfall, the world of sand he creates in his most popular work is not only punctuation but an existent being in the film's heady plot. The act of sand avalanching, being carried of in a drift and suddenly shifting becomes the film's most haunting imagery. Freed from the bumpy transfer of its original Japanese pressing, Teshigahara's surreal Woman in the Dunes gets a smooth, detailed treatment from the good folks at the Criterion Collection.

Released in 1964, Woman in the Dunes premiered at that year's Cannes film festival and picked up the Special Grand Jury Prize, not to mentions nominations for both Best Foreign Film and Best Director at the Oscars. Predictably, the intrepid Teshigahara lost out to Robert Wise, who won for The Sound of Music that year. No matter: Woman in the Dunes shares its bloodstream with the likes of Sartre and Samuel Beckett in its existential bartering over the beginning and end of life.

An entomologist (Eiji Okada) has daydreams about his ex-wife as he searches for the elusive tiger beetle in the deserts outside Tokyo. His guides, a pack of wolves who grin and cackle without end, interrupt his daydream to inform him that he has missed the last bus out of the desert community. Without little pause, the hyenas drop the man into a sandpit where a woman (Kyôko Kishida) has built a small hut for herself. She feeds him, lays out a bed for him and tells him not to do any chores, "not on your first day" she remarks. The entomologist wakes to find that the ladder that delivered him into the pit is gone and doesn't seem to be returning. After several attempts at escape, the fate of the entomologist as the woman's lover and husband slowly begins to set in.

Almost the entirety of the action plays out in the fragile house and the surrounding pit, where the entomologist pleads with the docile woman. The man doesn't just plead for an escape but for her to accept life as much more than shoveling sand and trying to keep the house together. Besides the designs on "No Exit" (is the pit actually hell?), Teshigahara offers deep explorations on the man's existence as a worthwhile human being. Is it better to drift through his life in Tokyo or would it be more realistic to be of use to the woman and their unborn child? Disregarding the ploy of simple answers, the film's subtle psychology becomes mirrored in both Okada's eyes and the sloping sand.

Consistently awe-inspiring in visual terms, the physical action of climbing the sand pokes fun at the man's realization of inevitable terminality. Even when the man finds a key to get himself out, he chooses to stay at the house (the promise to leave might as well come from a heroin addict). In other films, this act would be seen as a confirmation of the family identity, a man standing up to his responsibilities. In Teshigahara's world, it becomes a thing of desperation and pathetic allure.

Aka Sunna no onna.

Criterion's DVD box set includes Dunes, Pitfall, and The Face of Another, each including video essays from James Quandt. A new documentary about Teshigahara is included along with four of his short films and an extensive booklet of essays about the director.