We present two collaborations by director Teshigahara and novelist/screenwriter Kobo Abe. Woman of the Dunes was the classic "art film" and it still is. The sands of time, so to speak, have not worn away its startling beauty nor answered the fundamental questions of identity and commitment this film poses. A young widow is fed by her neighbors and forced to constantly clear her pit-house of the sands which threaten to engulf the whole village. To her the villagers bring a passing entomologist who has missed the bus home, to spend the night, share her work and her bed-forever. Many scenes still haunt-the woman's mysterious nocturnal labors, the man's own Sisyphean attempts to escape as the community of sand people watch from on high. Who's the insect now? "I've a job! I'm registered!" he protests but the metamorphosis has already transpired. Teshigahara literalizes and reverses the metaphor of the shifting sands of fate-here we have the shifting fates of sand, as in Beckett's "Grain upon grain..."