Cinema: Screen Painting

Kwaidan. Beauty and boredom are richly intermixed in this trio of Japanese ghost stories by Director Masaki Kobayashi, whose last exercise in horror was the classic Harakiri. The boredom stems from three supernatural tales by Lafcadio Hearn, each unfolding with the grace of a water lily and at approximately the same pace. The beauty lies in the film’s imagery, the delicate, dreamlike balance of sound and light and color in every frame.

Kobayashi begins with the tale of an impoverished samurai who deserts his wife to make his fortune and years later returns, repentant, for a macabre homecoming—in effect, a lopsided nightmare filtered through spider webs and gauze. The second story re-creates an ancient sea battle in vividly stylized panels, then leaps centuries to describe how a blind poet-priest, tattooed with Holy Writ to ward off evil, has his ears cut off by the dead heroes whose saga he sings. The third episode is a tale-within-a-tale about a 19th century author of ghost stories who is seemingly destroyed by his own demonology.

If they can keep their eyelids from drooping at Kwaidan’s plots, moviegoers may well be enchanted by its decor. Director Kobayashi imagines a never-never land of vermilion skies and shimmering, silver-green grass, as miraculously unreal as a Japanese landscape painting on silk. Such filmic virtuosity seems almost commonplace, though, among moviemakers of Japan, who sometimes say nothing and say it so impressively that their essays on art appreciation pass for art itself.