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Film/Video JAPANESE NEW WAVE CINEMA FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 1999, $6 ($4 WALKER MEMBERS) ADMITS TO BOTH SHOWS AUDITORIUM

SEISAKU'S WIFE (SEISAKU NO TSUMA)
DIRECTED BY YASUZO MASUMURA
7 PM
One of the great Japanese films of the 1960s, Seisaku's Wife prefigures Oshima's scandalous In the Realm of the Senses in its powerful portrait of erotic obsession in the midst of rising militarism. An outcast peasant woman falls in love with Seisaku, the local "model youth," who has just returned from the army. Their amour fou escalates until she is driven to an act of cruelty to ensure that he will not leave her and return to the war. The film's passionate intensity is amplified by its cool, exquisite use of black-and-white CinemaScope, which reaches a pitch of shocking power in the final sequences. 1965,Japan, 93 minutes.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (SUNNA NO ONNA)
DIRECTED BY HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA
8:45 PM
In this legendary allegory, an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada, the architect in Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour) on a field trip finds himself imprisoned at the bottom of a sand pit after spending a night with the widow who lives there. The two are forced to spend every day shoveling away the sand that threatens to engulf them, their drive for survival igniting a sexual obsession. Toru Takemitsu's score adds immeasurably to the aura of eroticism and enigma, a mesmerizing counterpoint to Teshigahara's tactile, shifting topography of sand and flesh. Our screening features a recently struck 35mm print of a great classic. 1964, Japan, 123 minutes.