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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Woman in the Dunes (1964)

 


One of the 1960s’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic world of Hiroshi Teshigahara


Nothing can quite prepare you for the sheer macabre strangeness of this Japanese classic by Hiroshi Teshigahara from 1964, presented by the British Film Institute in a new print. It's a Dali-esque canvas or imagist poem on celluloid - but meaning what? - which pulses with claustrophobia, panic, eroticism and despair.

An entomologist wanders the dunes searching for rare specimens; he is persuaded by local villagers to spend the night in a young widow's tumbledown shack at the bottom of a pit. The next morning he discovers that the rope-ladder has been taken away and, like the woman, he is a prisoner, forced to shovel sand out from the foundations of this house every night. All the time, the sands of time come down in a thin, insidious drizzle.




Why are they being kept like this? The widow hints that if they allow the shack to become deluged with sand, the foundations to the village settlement will collapse, and the villagers are in any case selling the "salt sand" to unscrupulous construction companies. Or perhaps it is just a mad, bizarre spectacle of cruelty for the sake of it. What counts is their horrified, sensual intimacy.

The movie is in black and white, and I have never seen any film use those two colours in such bold, retina-popping compositions. It's like a dream - the kind from which you awake bolt upright in a cold sweat.





Historical Context: The Japanese New Wave

      1. Released in 1964, the film emerged during a period of radical change in Japanese cinema. Directors like Teshigahara, Nagisa Ōshima, and Shohei Imamura were breaking away from the traditional studio system to create "Art Theater Guild" films that were:

        • Politically and socially critical: Reflecting the alienation of the post-war "salaryman" and the rapid modernization of Japan.

        • Avant-garde: Utilizing experimental soundscapes (Toru Takemitsu’s jarring, dissonant score) and non-linear or symbolic storytelling.










The Myth of Sisyphus and Existentialism

The film is frequently cited as a modern cinematic retelling of the Sisyphus myth, specifically through the lens of Albert Camus’s essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. Like the mythological king condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down for eternity, Junpei and the widow are trapped in a cycle of "useless" labor.
The sand they shovel is sold to construction companies to make low-quality, illegal cement—rendering their exhausting struggle practically meaningless to the world while being essential for their immediate survival. This cycle highlights the "absurd"—the conflict between the human longing for order and the chaotic universe represented by the shifting dunes.
However, by the end, Junpei reflects Camus’s assertion that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." Through his discovery of a water-trapping system, Junpei finds a subjective internal purpose that supersedes his external entrapment. His labor ceases to be a punishment and becomes a choice.











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