Ghosts Kwaidan

at Mather House, 8 p.m. tonight

FILM creeps toward realism, and the supernatural gathers dust. Meanwhile, NASA has institutionalized the imagination, leaving us with a choice of moon-landing simulations or reruns of Star Trek. Psychology, politics and religion, all conspire to rationalize the unknowable. Terror is reduced to neuroses, and fantasy becomes photographic gimmickry. We are, it seems, afraid to be afraid.

Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (first released in 1965) is a series of four short films that attempt to redeem the supernatural, to reverse the trend toward the merely real or the merely outlandish. Kobayashi doesn't strain toward the fantastic, challenging technology with science fiction. Instead, he looks for the unexplainable within the ordinary, adapting his stories from Japanese folk tales. Though products of a complex cultural tradition, the films are not in the least culture-bound; if anything, they are distinguished by the simplicity of their conception. Like pornography and war, ghosts-when given half a chance-have a universal appeal, and the films are eminently accessible.

The first two films are consciously commonplace in their choice of theme. In Black Hair, a young samurai, discouraged with his poverty, divorces his wife and remarries to advance his position. He succeeds in becoming rich but is haunted by his desertion. Eventually he returns home to his first wife, at which point the film reaches its ironic climax-worth not revealing. In the Snow Woman, a young woodcutter, caught in a storm, sees his companion killed by the woman of the title, but he is spared on condition that he never reveal what he has seen. As soon as the promise is made, we know it will be broken, and the film follows the pattern of happiness won and finally lost through disobedience.

Certainly, these are far from unusual scenarios. But what Kobayashi has done is deliberately limit the scope of his narrative in order to frame his technical virtuosity. He distills the essential elements of his conventional stories and concentrates two actions that would both easily fill a two-hour feature film into little over thirty minutes each. The result is that only the most structurally necessary scenes are presented (a departure, a wedding, a return, a revelation).

Kobayashi lavishes all his technical skill on making the limited number of scenes expressive of the implied greater whole. In Black Hair, for example, we see the samurai and his second wife together only once, but a scene of the woman slapping her sleeping husband is so constructed that their relationship is defined without ambiguity. The devotion to detail makes individual scenes become stylized pageants. Rhythms between sound and image and contrasts between sets of extraordinarily evocative color photography manipulate our expectations so that we are drawn along in a kind of measured processional.

KOBAYASHI is looking for something more in his ghost stories than horror. His end is not an emotional recoil through shock but a sensuous participation in the imaginary. He appeals to our fascination not our fears, with the result that he achieves that rare creation, a fantasy without pretension.

Hoichi the Earless, the third film, is the longest, the most complex and the most successful of the four. The film is in two parts. In the first we hear the recitation of a ballad relating a famous battle between two Japanese dynasties, while on screen Kobayashi fades back and forth between a pictorial representation of the battle and actors performing it. There is an almost faultless synthesis between the haunting of the biwa, the incantatory recitation, and the elaborate pageantry of the image. Kwaidan is reputed to have had one of the highest budgets in Japanese film history, and this shows up in the sumptuousness of the ballad sequence. But it is a sumptuousness that doesn't continually point to itself, flaunting its budge. Perhaps the greatest achievement of these films is that Kovayashi can indulge all the capacities of color photography without distracting us from the simplicity of his narrative.

In the second half of the film we meet Hoichi, the ballad singer, living seven hundred years after the battle. He is a blind, self-effacing young man, the only character in the four films who is sufficiently developed to completely win our sympathies. Hoichi is caught between allegiance to the priest he serves and the spirits who summon him to sing each night. Kobayashi permits here the introduction of all manner of implied themes-the autonomy of art, tensions between organized religion and spirituality, illusion us, reality and so on-but these are all carefully subordinated to the thoroughly human struggle in Hoichi. Kobayashi seeks not an intellectual but an emotional response, and the success of this film is not in thoughts provoked but in sympathies aroused.

INEVITABLY, the last film, In a Cup of Tea, comes as an anti-climax, a problem Kobayashi tries to escape by emphasizing the comic. A palace guard swallows his soul and spends the night chasing teasing apparitions. The film does work as a playful mockery, but we have moved in too many directions in the course of the four films to appreciate it properly. It's almost as though each film succeeds too well on its own terms to allow the diversity Kobayashi wants.

Fantasy is a disadvantaged genre that is always at the mercy of the audience. And it is quite possible to step back from these films in contempt, dismissing them in the name of realism or scope or any other arbitrary criterion. But I suspect that would say more about us than the films. They promise nothing; they explain nothing; they give us only simple unaffected fantasy. But they succeed as far as we let them and, deserters all, we owe something to the supernatural.