"Kwaidan" (1965)

Lafcadio Hearn, the enigmatic figure of international ancestry & lettering, an irish-greek born on the island of Lefkas, Greece (hence the 'Lafcadio' in his full name: Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn), who was later sent to Dublin at 2 years of age & educated in the Jesuit way as Joyce was (who proved to be as resistant to that tradition as that later irishman would be); who later absconded to the United States and educated himself first in Cincinnati, and later in New Orleans, as a journalist and an archaeologist of creole culture; who eventually got a commission to Japan for a magazine story, only to stay in Japan for the rest of his life after becoming a naturalised citizen upon marriage to a woman of the samurai class; devoted the remainder of his scholastic life to the interpretation of Japan and to the divulgence of the Way. His japanese name was Koizumi Yakumo, and the japanese know him under that name as the author of "Kwaidan", which translates to 'ghost tales.' The bulk of the book itself is something of a translation (or rather a transference) of old japanese tales taken from books, one from the mouth of a farmer he personally knew, and another from his own direct experience, into english; nevertheless, Hearn's pronouncedly fin-de-siecle style and erudition shine out and so the translation of these ancient stories passed down anonymously through the centuries are more or less a transference of old oriental tales into the specific understanding that his prosody contrives. As such the translations are rather the product of his authorship, and the japanese respect them so.

These transferences of japanese tales into the english tongue were consequently translated from Hearn's book to the film realm by the master director, Masaki Kobayashi. Kobayashi elected to make "Kwaidan" after having triumphed once and for all with "Harakiri", among the finest works ever laid on celluloid. If "Kwaidan" was a collection of distinctly japanese tales adapted to an aesthetically occidental mode by Hearn, then Kobayashi's treatment of Hearn's material alchemizes it further and brings it back full circle: for the stories presented in Kobayashi's film are fundamentally, unmistakably japanese.

Kobayashi was trained in oriental art as an academic and through the years of bloodshed that he witnessed as a private in the Japanese Army during the 2nd WW, which had interrupted his brief apprenticeship at Shochiku Studios, he never lost sight of the excellencies of the tradition he was raised in. It was not until he made his first color film in 1964, "Kwaidan", that he would explore to full measure the extravagances of the medium he worked in and of the traditions that were passed down to him. "Kwaidan" pushes the color aspect in film beyond its limit; as a first of its kind, it exponentially uses color as the primary mechanism to describe the themes in its stories. There is no perceivable trepidation that the director may have of creating his first color film, nor is there sign of any gradual reliance on it - Kobayashi blasts the screen with so perfect a symmetry and invention of color that "Kwaidan" seems to have been made years after the color innovation had been long introduced. The stories as such mean little; for the average moviegoer in the new century who has been inured by a cult of strong gore and horror films, the stories are doubtlessly predictable and perhaps not as frightening as one would expect from a 'ghost story'. But it is not in their content that Kobayashi cares to dwell; rather he places extreme care on the placement of atmosphere in the description of the tales. Kobayashi replaces emotion and narrative with a sustained meditation on the medium of color itself. This is most evident in the 2nd tale, "The Woman of the Snow", in which the production set assumes the role of conveying not only the freezing winter storm but also the fury of the eye of the storm, literally visible in the painted fresco backdrop of the production set ceiling that serves as a sky; the changeover from winter white to warm human tones and back to the ghostly bloodless white of the initial scene with the dread witch, is so effective that it breaks down our already obvious expectation that the protagonist's wife is the witch herself - but the point is not to surprise us with a plot twist in the weird tale, but to disarm our facile expectation with a steady immurement into aesthetic enlightenment. The use of extreme color artifice and theatrical set design, while appearing to us as clearly mannered, studio-based, and removed of naturalism, sharpens our attention on the parade of spectacular details that robe the stories in the traditional opulence of japanese ascetic fortune (a paradox that requires an attention to practical luxuries: a pot of steaming broth boiling on a warm fire in an earth-toned family hut; a late summer sun setting on an ascendant hill where young love congregates; a crown of cherry blossoms dressing a sunlit courtyard in shadows where a wealthy nobleman ponders the fate of the first wife he abandoned; the dilapidated ruins of a manor house that had once held great fame in the land; the misty moonlit blue-lined edges of tombs signaling the repository of an illustrious family that had drowned at sea in defeat & shame; these and many more scenarios are designed by an interplay of physical features that convey at once both flesh and emotion, asceticism and extravagance.)

Kobayashi performs the film in master strokes. There is no idle or arbitrary element in the film. The time lengths of the stories themselves, which to some who are untrained may appear lengthy, are in fact necessitated by the mechanism required to tell the stories. Since the stories are simple, and since they deal in a natural way with ghosts, the atmosphere is key, the atmosphere in which the ghost haunts in search of an abstract resolution. There is no death depicted in the film, only a proportion of means to an end. The 3rd story, "Hoichi, the Earless", already announces in its title the denouement to the buildup. Kobayashi devotes a good portion of the story's depiction to the reenactment of the background story, involving the battle of Dan-no-ura in which the Heike & Genji clans fought at sea, which resulted in the defeat and deaths of the Heike clan, who would haunt the seas thereafter, the details of which Hearn devotes only two paragraphs before moving on to the principal story. Kobayashi spends nearly 10 minutes reenacting the sea battle through expressionistic strokes because it is in his interest to commeasure the kinematic color expression with the established tradition of oriental art: he toggles back and forth from a traditional painting of the sea battle with the film's studio-based realisation. The camera will pan across the mist-smothered painting to the mist-smothered filmed battle, to the extent that both are meant to be taken as coextensive realities of the one plastic idea: both scenes are painterly, both are fog covered, both are at sea, both are scanned by the camera's energetic gloss. It doesn't escape us that the painting had likely been painted in reflection upon the battle, within the quiet cloister of an artist's studio, in much the same manner that Kobayashi's work is taking place within a controlled film studio with the use of props, lighting, & effects. The suggestion is that film art can rival even the work of the old masters.

For our purposes it is clear that Kobayashi in retrospect will be seen in the same light as a Hiroshige or a Hokusai, an artist in pursuit of a tradition that has not been broken by the technological achievements of film, but enhanced to a greater degree.
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