The poetic expressiveness of Kobayashi's Kwaidan is said to be unmatched in all of Japanese cinema; breathtakingly photographed on handpainted sets, the film is at once a Japanese miniature writ large, and an abstract wash of luminescent colors that seem (indeed!) to come from another world. An electronic soundtrack by avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu plays hauntingly with the natural sounds--crickets, rain, the cracking of wood, the loud silence of snow. Yet the stories--four of Lafcadio Hearn's best known ghostly tales--strangely contradict this plastic splendor 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 as they gather every night in an abandoned graveyard. Our complete print includes "The Snow Maiden," the most eerily atmospheric of the tales in which a woodcutter marries a woman whose true calling is to wander, enveloped in swirling snowflakes, bringing death to mortals. (We will feature another, full-length version of this tale, Kaidan: Yuki Joro/The Snow Woman, directed by Tokuzo Tanaka, in August.)