The Benshi

A Japanese friend who is attending tonight's San Francisco Silent Film Festival screening of Harold Lloyd's the Kid Brother at the Castro Theatre told her mother that she was planning to see a silent film. The mother asked if there would be a narrator present at the screening. The answer was no; the screening will be accompanied by a performance by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, who played for Beggars of Life and Miss Lulu Bett at last year's festival. But no narrator. The highly-developed tradition of an interlocutor (of sorts) performing narration, interpretation, and giving voice to silent characters, is a distinctly Asian one. In Japan, these performers were known as benshi or katsuben, and in their heyday they were more popular than the stars acting on the screen.

I'm by no means versed in the benshi tradition. I've never seen a benshi perform live. The SFSFF has brought the foremost modern benshi, Midori Sawato, to perform for the Sessue Hayakawa film the Dragon Painter, but unfortunately that was the year I missed the entire festival (I have since learned to make sure my family schedules its reunions on another summer weekend). I did once see a Korean byonsa silent film performer in Berkeley in 2002, but I understand that the traditions are significantly different. For one, a benshi would always perform along with a live musical accompaniment as well, something this byonsa event lacked. The closest I've come to experiencing the art of the benshi is when I viewed a 16mm print of Kenji Mizoguchi's the Water Magician with a katsuben talkie soundtrack.

Likewise, Jujiro will not be screened this festival weekend with benshi accompaniment, but with a new original score composed and performed by Stephen Horne. This seems not so inappropriate, considering the fact that the film's screenings in Western countries must have been sans benshi as well.

I didn't want to focus too heavily on the benshi in the materials I prepared to contextualize the Jujiro screening; there were so many other fascinating aspects of Japanese silent cinema I wanted to make sure to cover. But the benshi played a very important role in the development of cinema in Japan. Filmmakers, knowing that their products would have someone on hand to explain narrative or other unclarities, had little incentive to use the motion picture as a complex visual storytelling medium, as their counterparts in Europe and Hollywood would. Or so it was argued by members of the "Pure Film Movement" which sprang up in the late 1910s, and set Japan's filmmaking on the path that led to the development of a national cinema appreciated the world over. The "Pure Film Movement" is well-documented in Joanne Bernardi's Writing in Light.

By the time Teinosuke Kinugasa made his most radical works, the battles fought by the "Pure Film Movement" had seemingly shifted. But the benshi still thrived, and in fact it was revered benshi Musei Tokugawa who secured the release of a Page of Madness at the prestigious Shinjuku Musashinokan, a cinema that normally played European film imports. Upon the film's premiere, some reviews lavished Tokugawa's benshi performance with more praise than Kinugasa's film.

I was unable to unearth such specific information about the benshi in relation to Jujiro, and thus decided to leave a treatment of the phenomenon out of the final draft of my program guide essay. But I decided to devote half of the slide show I prepared to play before the film screens, to the context of Japanese cinema and the benshi. If you're planning to see the show on Sunday, be sure to get to the theatre early, so you can view my presentation. Or, for a terrific brief primer on benshi, take a look at this article by Frisco Bay's resident expert Frako Loden, who also co-authored a much more detailed article on the performers in the Iris 22 (Autumn 1996) article called Mastering the Mute Image: The Role of the Benshi in Japanese Cinema.

If I weren't going to be at the Silent Film Festival all weekend, I would take a visit to Artists' Television Access, where kino21 is presenting the New Talkies: a neo-benshi cabaret, a periodic event that I never seem to be able to catch. How different are these poets' performances in front of video projections from the benshi of silent-era Japan, I'm ill-equipped to judge.