Kwaidan (怪談, Kaidan)

Wednesday 7 October at 7.00pm (note early start)

Masaki Kobayashi | Japan | 1964 | 183 mins | PG violence

A colourful and visually stunning adaptation of four classic Japanese ghost stories, in which mortals encounter supernatural forces with fearful consequences.

“Breathtakingly photographed on hand-painted sets, Kwaidan is at once a Japanese woodcut writ large, and an abstract wash of luminescent colors that seem to come from another world. An electronic soundtrack by avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu plays hauntingly with natural sounds—crickets, rain, the cracking of wood, the loud silence of snow. Yet the stories—four of Lafcadio Hearn’s ghostly tales—strangely contradict this plastic splendour in their simple, aching humanity. All are tales of mortals caught by forces beyond their comprehension when the supernatural world intervenes in their lives. One of the most memorable of these is “Hoichi, the Earless,” in which a blind young monk is compelled by the ghosts of a famous battle to retell their story over and over again. In “The Snow Maiden,” the most eerily atmospheric of the tales, a woodcutter marries a woman whose true calling is to wander, enveloped in swirling snowflakes, bringing death to mortals.” – Judy Bloch, BAMPFA

“At the time of its production, Kwaidan was the most expensive film ever made in Japan. It exhausted its budget three-quarters of the way through filming; Kobayashi was forced to sell his house, and his production company was bankrupted. But on its release it was hailed as a rare masterpiece, and won the Special Jurists’ Prize at the 1965 Cannes Festival.” – Philip Kemp, Sight & Sound