Word: kwaidan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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