Word: kwaidan
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Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (first released in 1965) is a series of four short films that attempt to redeem the supernatural, to reverse the trend toward the merely real or the merely outlandish. Kobayashi doesn't strain toward the fantastic, challenging technology with science fiction. Instead, he looks for the unexplainable within the ordinary, adapting his stories from Japanese folk tales. Though products of a complex cultural tradition, the films are not in the least culture-bound; if anything, they are distinguished by the simplicity of their conception. Like pornography and war, ghosts-when given half a chance-have...
...relating a famous battle between two Japanese dynasties, while on screen Kobayashi fades back and forth between a pictorial representation of the battle and actors performing it. There is an almost faultless synthesis between the haunting of the biwa, the incantatory recitation, and the elaborate pageantry of the image. Kwaidan is reputed to have had one of the highest budgets in Japanese film history, and this shows up in the sumptuousness of the ballad sequence. But it is a sumptuousness that doesn't continually point to itself, flaunting its budge. Perhaps the greatest achievement of these films is that Kovayashi...
...Kwaidan. Beauty and boredom are richly intermixed in this trio of Japanese ghost stories by Director Masaki Kobayashi, whose last exercise in horror was the classic Harakiri. The boredom stems from three supernatural tales by Lafcadio Hearn, each unfolding with the grace of a water lily and at approximately the same pace. The beauty lies in the film's imagery, the delicate, dreamlike balance of sound and light and color in every frame...
...they can keep their eyelids from drooping at Kwaidan's plots, moviegoers may well be enchanted by its decor. Director Kobayashi imagines a never-never land of vermilion skies and shimmering, silver-green grass, as miraculously unreal as a Japanese landscape painting on silk. Such filmic virtuosity seems almost commonplace, though, among moviemakers of Japan, who sometimes say nothing and say it so impressively that their essays on art appreciation pass for art itself...
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