Kwaidan

Masaki Kobayashi adapted four tales collected by Lafcadio Hearn and built every location indoors, including entire skies painted on backdrops with eyes in them.

The second story, The Woman of the Snow, and the third, Hoichi the Earless, are the reasons. Hoichi is a blind biwa player who performs the ballad of a sea battle to an audience of the dead, and the sequence in which monks cover his body in sutra text to hide him, and miss his ears, is one of the great images in cinema.

The sound design uses silence and wooden percussion where a western film would score, and Toru Takemitsu's work here is closer to musique concrète than to a soundtrack.

It bankrupted its production company. It won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

The original Japanese cut runs 183 minutes. Anything shorter is missing a story.