(KAIDAN, Masaki Kobayashi, Japan 1964, 161 min., Japanese with subtitles, 35mm)

Using stunning color and a widescreen canvas, Kobayashi’s masterwork consists of four nightmarish tales in which terror thrives and demons lurk. Adapted from traditional Japanese ghost stories, the lavish production drew extensively on Kobayashi’s own training as a student of painting and fine arts. New 35mm print! Members admitted free.

Program Notes

Kwaidan

~Paige Sloan, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation

The inspiration for the 1964 film Kwaidan was originally taken from a collection of short stories called, “Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan.” Remarkably, this publication was compiled not by a native Japanese but by an Irish-American writer residing in Japan in the late 1800s. One scholar has written, “This Western author was probably the single most responsible individual for bringing Japanese culture, especially ghost stories, to the Western world.” When he died in 1904 at the age of 54, he was known in his adopted country by two names, Lafcadio Hearn and Koizumi Yakumo. Hearn’s adaptation would provide the foundation for director Masaki Kobayashi filmic adaptation.

Today, Hearn is still revered by many Japanese as one of the only foreigners to ever truly understand their culture (Johannsen 1). Of the 20 books he published in his lifetime, 12 were devoted to his adopted homeland. Hearn’s principle interest in Japan was the spiritual beliefs and ghost-lore of its people. He wrote numerous essays and short stories in addition to collecting, adapting, and translating ghost tales from Japanese literary and oral traditions. His volume Kwaidan is actually more widely read today in its retranslation, from English back into Japanese, than from the original Japanese!

Hearn’s translations were elegant transformations of the Japanese into English, shaping the text for a global audience. Hearn’s Japanese widow chronicled some of his struggles to put into another tongue the exact feeling and atmosphere of these “ghostly tales” of old Japan. She has said that in order to capture the exact nuances of the original story, Hearn would make her perform the legend live. He would then study her every gesture and exact intonation of each word. “Had anyone seen us from the outside,” she adds, “we must have appeared like two mad people.”

Filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi seemed to share Hearn’s creative passion in sharing traditional Japanese stories with the world. After seeing the acceptance of his film, Harakiri (1962), at Cannes, Kobayashi decided to make another film which would not only appeal to an international audience but which would also help introduce Western audiences to Japanese traditions.

He gathered a collection of four of Hearn’s folktales to structure the script. The film was produced independently and took ten years of planning and one full year of production. When Kwaidan was finished, it was the most expensive film made in Japan to date. Along with being Kobayashi’s first color effort, there was a meticulous attention to detail in the film. Many of the articles used in the stories were authentic artifacts from the time depicted, and some were even national treasures lent to the filmmakers (Buehrer 180-1).

In a 1972 interview, Kobayashi expressed his primary motivations for Kwaidan: “My main intention in the film [Kwaidan] was to explore the juxtaposition between man’s material nature and his spiritual nature, the realm of dream and aspiration. I wanted to create a drama that dealt directly with the spiritual importance of our lives. I also enjoyed conveying the sheer beauty of traditional Japan.”
Kwaidan would go on to win the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1965, and in so doing, it introduced a whole new world to the writing of Lafcadio Hearn and Japanese Folklore.

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