Kwaidan
This week the From Below Microcinema presents *Kwaidan *(1964) on Thursday, October 24, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
As we trudge and creep closer to Halloween, we wanted to explore two forms of narrative that are absolutely essential to the horror canon: the ghost story and the anthology film. The former is a bit obvious, but the latter is as crucial to the distribution and consumption of spooky narratives the world over. The anthology film is the campfire scary story writ large, fed into the dream factory and found appetizing for its flexible and affordable filmmaking structure. Well, flexible and affordable in some circumstances.
Which is why we turn to Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, a massive and ambitious rendering of four Japanese folkloric ghost tales onto beautiful technicolor. *Kwaidan *is a fascinating film coming at a crucial point in global film production, when the Japanese industry began outpacing their American counterparts and the most famous auteurs of Japanese cinema were becoming household names. Kobayashi himself was coming off of winning a Grand Jury prize at Cannes for his 1962 film Harakiri. Kwaidan is, in some ways representative of that global approach, adapting Irishman Lafcadio Hearn’s versions of the ghost stories he translated from Japanese texts and heard in oral recollections. Hearn is often credited with being the major public figure that introduced Japanese culture and folklore to western audiences at the turn of the 20th century.
We are excited to bath in the eerie and beautiful world(s) of Kwaidan with you on Thursday!