Masaki Kobayashi, director of a number of famous features including the post-Samurai flick Harakiri and the '50s epic Human Condition (which played last month at Anthology Film Archives), adapts four stories from the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-Irish author who specialized in Japanese folklore at the turn of the century, into psychedelic poetry.
I call it that because Kwaidan is more of an aesthetic experience than anything else. The breathtaking imagery with which it skirts its characters' fabulous thinness is so constant that I regard this lengthy collection as an absolute masterpiece, successfully combining several sets of opposites: intricately decorated, impossibly stylized sets coexist with beautiful nature shots; heavily made-up masques cut to grainy flesh faces and back again; and the metamorphosing backdrops and lighting seem simultaneously high and low quality, lush and vivid like a big-budget epic yet hypnotic and saturated as a surreal cheapie. Each vignette has a distinctly different style, tone, and palate, and all of these various atmospheres come across very effectively. Looking back it seems obvious to describe the film as 'theatrical', but it was a comparison I never made while watching it because of the fluid and varied cinematography. I'd say the expressionistic backdrops and metamorphosing lights actually belong more to B-movie or technicolor TV staginess than anything in the world of drama.
Aristocratic Japanese customs make for wonderfully symmetrical static shots, but more often Kobayashi's camera follows characters in their mad dances, drifting Tarkovsky-like through the film's eerie and dark studio world. Highly choreographed, the way characters interact with Toru Takemitsu's kabuki-concrete score (or is it a soundtrack?) is particularly interesting. My very small complaints are with some overly long stretches of non-action, sloppy overdubbing, and the last story being a bit too silly (I loved it anyway). Kwaidan is a successful exercise in presenting essentially tongue-in-cheek material with deep seriousness for a real emotional impact. I can also say with certainty that the film captures more effectively than any other I've seen that certain type of strangeness unique to the genre of ghost stories, perhaps its most impressive feat.
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