Kwaidan - The Beyond (1964)

Film based on stories by writer Lafcadio Hearn.

This film contains four separate and distinct stories.

• "Black hair": A poor samurai who divorces his true love to marry for money, but the marriage turns out to be disastrous and he returns to his former wife, only to discover something disturbing about her.
• "Woman in the snow".Stranded in a snowstorm, a lumberjack encounters an icy spirit in the form of a woman who spares his life on the condition that he never tells anyone about her. A decade later he forgets his promise.
• "Hoichi, the earless one"Hoichi is a blind musician living in a monastery who sings so well that a ghost of the imperial court orders him to perform for them the epic ballad of their deadly battle. But the ghosts are taking his life, and the monks set out to protect him by writing a sacred mantra on his body to make him invisible to the ghosts. But they have forgotten something.
• "In a teacup."A writer tells the story of a man who keeps seeing a mysterious face reflected in his cup of tea.

Trailer Kwaidan - The Beyond.

How great is cinema

Talk about the film, it helps a lot to better understand the film. Masaki Kobayashi

Kwaidan opens with ink: first black ink swirling in a clear liquid (on a white background), and then vortices of different colors, swirling and mixing in rich chromatic layers.

This credits sequence (interspersed with the names of the cast and crew typed on quality paper, as if it were a book) serves multiple functions: It marks director Masaki Kobayashi's transition from the monochrome of his earlier work to a striking use of Eastmancolor's full palette; its mix of different, clashing colors foreshadows the film's merging of the material and spiritual worlds; and, above all, it signals the film's literary origins, having been adapted by screenwriter Yoko Mizuki from a collection of short stories by Lafcadio Hearn.

The ghost stories (and entomological essays) in "Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things" represented part of Hearn's dispatches from Meiji-era Japan, where the Greek-born, British-raised, American-based writer settled in 1890, marrying a local woman, fathering four children and becoming a naturalized citizen (and Buddhist) before his death in 1904. Hearn had long been exploring the cultural geography of wherever he was posted, and the last chapter of his life in Japan coincided with the emergence of Western interest in the aesthetics of this remote nation.

Hearn helped, as it were, to put Japan on the map, and by adapting four of Hearn's stories, Kobayashi too, elated by the success of Harakiri at Cannes (where it won the Special Jury Prize in 1963), hoped to attract more Western attention to his domestic cinema, with Hearn serving as a medium between these two worlds.

The resulting film is abstract, elliptical and ambiguous in its narrative, painterly in its surreal stylizations and, at three hours long, is unlikely to appeal beyond art-house cinema (although it won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1965 and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards).

However, shot mostly on sound stages and with very mannered sets, it is a film of rare, hermetic beauty, replete with ethereal images and wandering ideas that haunt the mind.

If all of Kwaidan's stories are set in the past, the first of them immediately sours and complicates any straightforward notion of nostalgia, as the past turns out to be an irreparable place of decay, death and horror.

Black hair

In "The Black Hair", an impoverished samurai (Rentaro Mikuni) abandons his beloved wife (Michiyo Aratama), remarries and moves to another part of Japan, all in order to improve his own position, only to be haunted by his sense of betrayal, guilt and regret.

Thus, over the years, he keeps returning - in his mind, in his dreams and perhaps even in reality - only to be confronted by the ruins of his former home and the monstrousness of his own reflection.

Encountering the ghost of his first wife, now a living presence of devotion, now a skeleton reduced to the "same shiny black hair" he had once so adored, he flees through a shifting space, part well-maintained mansion, part dilapidated ruin, where he, rather than his late wife, is the real monstrous specter, trapped in a twilight zone between cherished past and desolate present.

The woman in the snow

The second story, "The Snow Woman", concerns a woodcutter, Minokichi (Tatsuya Nakadai), who, saved from freezing to death by a Yuki-onna (Keiko Kishi) on the condition that he never tell anyone he has seen her, survives to marry a pretty young woman and settle down to a happy family life, before finally meeting, several years later, the "snow woman" for the second time.

This entire episode was cut from the version of Kwaidan that was screened in the United States, in an attempt to shorten the length of the film. But it would be a shame to miss this story of love and death, with its beautiful snowy sets and vivid backdrops painted with giant eyes, and later giant red lips, to signify that Minokichi is always being watched by something supernatural that has both an erotic and protective interest in his treatment of him.

As befits a tragic romance, this episode has a truly bittersweet ending, as the very intimacy of Minokichi's relationship with his beloved is, paradoxically, what will drive her away from him.

Hoichi, the earless

Without a doubt, my favorite story in the film is the third one, "Hoichi The Earless". It begins with the sea battle of Dan-no-ura, which was the last catastrophic resistance of the Heike clan. in 1185.

We see a re-enactment of the naval encounter, with occasional cuts to paintings of it, while we hear an account of the battle sung to the accompaniment of a lute-like biwa. In other words, from the outset we are made aware that this event, though fixed in history, is also a mediated affair, coming with multiple representations in art (painting, music, epic poem) that, like a tomb, maintain its memory.

Seven hundred years after the battle, a blind novice monk named Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura), famous for his "uncanny ability to recite battle," is summoned from the local temple to offer a nightly performance to a Lord and his entourage. As this performer, blind as the epic rhapsode Homer, recites to his biwa, he fails to realize that he is not actually in a Lord's great hall, but in the clifftop cemetery, commemorating the last exploits of the Heike clan to their gathered ghosts. Once the head priest (Takashi Shimura) discovers what happens each night, he intervenes to save Hoichi, with painful consequences for the young monk, though it's not entirely clear that Hoichi is actually in danger or in need of saving.

Hoichi the Earless" is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on the power of art to evoke the past and bring it to life, and serves as a mise en abyme for Kobayashi's own period film, which resurrects and recreates not only stories from two different Japanese historical eras, but also Lafcadio Hearn's text from 60 years ago who, having lost one eye in childhood and suffering from myopia in the other, was almost as blind as Hoichi. Shut out by the sensory deprivation of this world, Hoichi serves as a medium for the next. And if, in the end, the temple priests can no longer be sure whether the now-famous bard's audience is "fake or real," his sweet, sad song goes on.

In a cup of tea

The last and shortest of the stories, "In a Teacup," is also the most convoluted, reflective and postmodern, and has to do, like "Hoichi the Earless," with art.

It begins in 1900 (when the real Hearn was writing his own Kwaidan stories) with an unnamed author (played by Osamu Takizawa) at his desk inking a story that the narrator (also voiced by Takizawa) warns will be "curiously unfinished," and jumps to the story proper, set 220 years earlier, in which landowner Kannai (Kan'emon Nakamura) sees the face of a smiling stranger (Noboru Nakaya) impossibly reflected in his teacup.

After unwisely swallowing the tea, the squire becomes embroiled in a supernatural dispute with the ghost man and his three equally ghostly servants. As promised, the story does not come to a resolution. Instead, we return to the author's house in 1900, though the author himself is mysteriously absent, with his work interrupted midway through. And so, this second unresolved story (about the author) reveals to us, in its final image, how nothing "swallows a soul" as well as an involving ghost story. We are left to examine the tea leaves and complete our own ending.

All four stories feature a score by the great Toru Takemitsuwhose concrète electroacoustic music constantly confuses the viewer as to where the soundtrack ends and the intradiegetic sound effects begin. The artificial sets of Dai Arakawa also constantly change their appearance (especially in The Black Hair and in Hoichi, the earless one), and only the montage of Hisasho Sagara maintains a semblance of continuity. The result is a work at once delicate and delirious, as cinematographer Hisashi Sagara's majestic framing can barely contain the more irrational narrative elements that intrude so insistently. It is also the most unnerving and awe-inspiring cinema.