Woman Of The Dunes

That Woman Of The Dunes should get a DVD release at all is cause for celebration – and all the better that it is appearing for the first time in its uncut form, some twenty minutes longer than previously released versions. Equally faultless are the beautifully crisp transfer, preserving all the original film's stark black-and-white contrasts (unlike several earlier videotape versions of the film, where everything was shrouded in darkness), and the pristine soundtrack, doing full justice to Toru Takemitsu's extraordinary score and sound engineering.

There are, however, no extras at all on the disc itself, and while the accompanying 20-page booklet offers some compensation, by way of John Gillet's filmnotes, film credits, a biography of the director Hiroshi Teshigahara, a review of the film taken from the June 1965 edition of The Monthly Film Bulletin, Peter Grilli's essay on Teshigahara's collaborative relationship with Toru Takemitsu, and Susan Llorens' essay on the avant-garde novelist Kobo Abe, it is nonetheless full of typographical errors, suggesting that it may have been thrown together at the last moment. Such a timeless classic deserves better.