The Criterion Collection sinks to a new low with its totally unnecessary second disc of supplements for its release of Hiroshi Teshigahara's "Woman in the Dunes".
The half-hour piece on the collaboration between Teshigahara and author Kôbô Abe is somewhat interesting, but the three short films, "Hokusai", "Ikebana", and "Tokyo 1958", are unwatchable. A first-year film student could have produced more coherent films on an iPhone with actual content; these are just empty, meaningless wastes of time.
You can listen to someone dryly read facts about Tokyo while the imagery bears no correspondence (we are shown a bike race while given the statistics on suicides), or watch close-up tracking shots of woodcuts. I actually was frightened to learn that there are over 200 different schools of flower arranging in Japan.
A commentary track accompanying "Woman in the Dunes" would have been far ... FAR ... more interesting and informative. This second disc accomplishes nothing but show that Teshigahara was a really poor, unimaginative filmmaker before his big hit in 1964.
The half-hour piece on the collaboration between Teshigahara and author Kôbô Abe is somewhat interesting, but the three short films, "Hokusai", "Ikebana", and "Tokyo 1958", are unwatchable. A first-year film student could have produced more coherent films on an iPhone with actual content; these are just empty, meaningless wastes of time.
You can listen to someone dryly read facts about Tokyo while the imagery bears no correspondence (we are shown a bike race while given the statistics on suicides), or watch close-up tracking shots of woodcuts. I actually was frightened to learn that there are over 200 different schools of flower arranging in Japan.
A commentary track accompanying "Woman in the Dunes" would have been far ... FAR ... more interesting and informative. This second disc accomplishes nothing but show that Teshigahara was a really poor, unimaginative filmmaker before his big hit in 1964.
