Hacker Cinema
Kwaidan
怪談
1965 · Film · 183 min
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue comes at a cost. Blind musician Hoichi is forced to perform for an audience of ghosts. An author relates the story of a samurai who sees another warrior's reflection in his teacup.
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Morricone himself addresses this in an old interview (https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2016/12/11/morricone-interview-cinema-papers/)
Your first big film success was A Fist Full of Dollars, whose score is very different from that of the Hollywood Westerns. Your cultural perspective is obviously different. What were the stimuli?
The stimulus was the film itself. Leone had made an ironic and, in a certain sense, a grotesque film in that it was funny, a caricature. It was necessary to respect the clarity that Leone wanted for his characters. Besides, I was not, and am not, a specialist in American folk music, so what sense was there in my treating the characters like Americans? If that is required, use an American composer. So, I treated Leone’s characters by attempting to re-invent, in my way, American folk, bearing in mind certain musical and technical data. And then the caricatured treatment of the characters encouraged me to introduce strange sounds into the score so that the character would have the charisma Leone wanted.
Not that I know much about it, but I find music in some old japanese movies very interesting, like Woman In The Dunes (https://youtu.be/UFbJ9iDeZgg) or Kwaidan (https://youtu.be/v_OFoOwzPZY)