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.

Teinosuke Kinugasa sources and links

Jujiro was the 55th film directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, out of a total of 118. So far I've seen four, and only one of those on the big screen, a Page of Madness. It may be a small number, but if there are people out there who have seen more of his films than that, not many are writing about them.

The most significant English-language tackling of the scope of Kinugasa's life and work, that I'm aware of, is still Robert Cohen's six-page article found in the Summer 1976 issue of Sight and Sound. There are few overviews to be found on the internet, though here is one and here is another. Many surveys of Japanese cinema history barely mention the director, though Donald Ritchie's tend to be exceptions. Most other discussions of Kinugasa zero in on a few films, usually a Page of Madness, Jujiro, and/or the 1953 Gate of Hell, which would become the second Japanese film after Rashomon to receive an Academy Award.

Kinugasa did publish an autobiography before his death in 1982, but I'm not aware of it having been translated into English. Another book that has been essentially inaccessible to me thanks to a language barrier is Marianne Lewinsky's book on a Page of Madness entitled Eine Verrückte Seite - Stummfilm und Filmische Avantgarde in Japan. I guess I should have studied a lot harder in my high school German class.

Jujiro in the West

Teinosuke Kinugas's Jujiro was shown in Europe and the United States in 1929 and 1930, but it was not, as is sometimes reported, the first Japanese film to have screened for Western audiences. Kenji Mizoguchi's Passion of a Woman Teacher was screened in Paris at around the same time, and Minoru Murata's The Street Magician came to Germany before Kinugasa did. In New York, Mordaunt Hall's March 1929 Times review of Heinosuke Gosho's a Daughter of Two Fathers indicates that that comedy played the Fifth Avenue Playhouse with a Harry Langdon short at the time, more than a year before Jujiro played at the Fifty-Fifth Street Playhouse.

Nor was Jujiro the last Japanese export known to Western audiences until Rashomon launched the post-World War II Euro-American fervor for jidai-geki upon its winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. A selection of Japanese films had played at the 1937 edition of that festival, for instance. Mikio Naruse's wonderful Wife! Be Like A Rose was circulated in a number of North American cinemas in 1937 as well.

But evidence suggests that Kinugasa's tour of Europe with his Jujiro print was the most significant exposure of a Japanese film in the West in its time. According to D. A. Rajakaruna's preface to his translation of the screenplay, Jujiro played "in ten countries including Germany, France, Switzerland and England". In Germany the film was screened for UFA producers, and secured a theatrical release under the title Shadows of Yoshiwara, Yoshiwara being Tokyo's licensed red-light district just outside Asakusa, where the film's action is set. Rajakaruna relates that there was some outcry from Japanese residents of Berlin over the title and subject matter -- Yoshiwara was notorious, not a source of national pride.

Critics in France compared Jujiro's close-ups to the aesthetic of Carl Dreyer, who had just released the Passion of Joan of Arc. The film's appearance in London is the reason why an English-intertitled print survives to screen today; most of Kinugasa's silent output no longer is known to exist. Though Kinugasa began his European tour in Moscow, it seems that Jujiro did not screen there. However, Kinugasa did meet Soviet directors Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, and apparently picked the latter's brain on the transition to sound, a process that was just starting to occur in Japan. Kinugasa would go on to direct the first jidai-geki talking picture, the Surviving Shinsengumi in 1932.

For its New York engagement, Jujiro became Slums of Tokyo. It played for two weeks in July 1930, along with an early talkie short with a Japanese subject, called the Golden Kimono. According to Joanne R. Bernardi and Greg M. Smith, Slums of Tokyo was sold as an exploitation picture, with ad copy promising "Painted Lilies Barter Bodies in Yoshiwara Tenderloin...For Adults Only! No One Under 18 Admitted!" The only advertisement I was able to find in my research was the New York Times' more highbrow appeal, however; there Slums of Tokyo was billed to arthouse audiences as the "Greatest since the Passion of Joan of Arc and Shiraz". Presumably the exploitation ad copy comes from another New York paper or other source.

One final caveat: since my research focused on English-language sources, it ignores the film screenings held within Japanese-American communities in Western states, where films were shown untranslated at Buddhist temples and elsewhere, and advertised only in Japanese-language newspapers. There's always another door left to unlock when it comes to researching early cinema.

Jujiro Week

Welcome to the slightly-belated beginning of Jujiro Week here at Hell on Frisco Bay. Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1928 film is playing at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival this coming Sunday at 6:10 PM, and I can't wait to see it for the first time on the towering Castro Theatre screen.

I was bowled over by Kinugasa's 1926 a Page of Madness when I saw it on that screen back in 2002. Jujiro, (frequently known in the English-language world as Crossways or Crossroads) while considered not quite as avant-garde in its narrative approach, was the director's attempt to apply the experimental technique of that film to a jidai-geki (period) piece; it's a samurai film without swords.

Jujiro will be accompanied by a newly-composed score by Stephen Horne, who wowed last year's festival audiences with his performance to a Cottage on Dartmoor.

As I've mentioned here before, I was charged with researching Jujiro, writing an essay for the festival program guide available to each festival attendee, and preparing a slide show that will be presented while the audience files into the Castro's seats on Sunday. Much of the material I collected on the topics of Teinosuke Kinugasa and Japanese silent cinema had to be left out of these educational materials for space concerns. Over the next several days, I'll be putting up some of this here on my site.

In the meantime, make sure you check out the terrific advance coverage of the festival on The Evening Class: A preview by Michael Hawley and Michael Guillén's two-part interview with the festival's artistic director (and not-so-secret Bollywood enthusiast) Stephen Salmons.

Mark Your Calendar: Silent Film Festival and More

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 5/7/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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I've left link hints in my previous two posts, but I'm not sure how many of my readers follow all the purple-font clickables in some of my more densely-packed entries (what say you, readers?). So I'd like to take a bit of time to point out some of what's going to be playing at the 13th Annual Silent Film Festival, to be held at the Castro Theatre this July 11th, 12th and 13th. As I did last year, I will be contributing an approximately 1200-word essay on one of the films to the festival program guide and developing a slide show presentation to be seen before the film begins. I've been attending biweekly meetings of the festival's Writers Group, where the essayists for each of the films compare research notes and drafts. So you could say I've been biased by hearing all sorts of fascinating things about each of the films in the program. But I was excited by all eleven feature films playing this year's edition from the moment they were revealed to the writers group a few weeks ago, and I honestly would have enjoyed researching and writing on any one of them.

But I'm thrilled that I'm getting to research what was my first choice from among the selections (picked by festival programmers Stephen Salmons and Stacey Wisnia.) The first Japanese feature ever to play at the festival, it's called Jujiro, or Crossways in English. It was directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, perhaps best-known for his remarkable a Page of Madness made two years before Jujiro. I haven't seen the film I'm writing on myself yet, but I've been delving as deeply as I can into English-language sources on it, on Kinugasa, and on the context of silent-era filmmaking in Japan. Every day I feel more certain that I'm going to love seeing Jujiro projected in a reportedly astonishing 35mm print provided by the BFI at the Castro in a few months.

The weekend-long program will open Friday, July 11th with what happens to be my personal favorite Harold Lloyd film, the Kid Brother. Having seen it with organ accompaniment at the Stanford Theatre several years ago, I can attest that Lloyd's rural exploits in this film slay an audience in the mood to laugh. Another comedy showing during the weekend is one of the original flapper Colleen Moore's few surviving films, Her Wild Oat. I've only seen Moore in the talkie the Power and the Glory and interviewed in Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's "Hollywood" series of documentaries, but that's more than enough to make me eager to see her in a silent film.

I'm also eager to fill a few gaps in my knowledge of a pair of European auteurs, Carl Theodore Dreyer and Rene Clair. The Dreyer film being shown by the festival is his early gay-themed drama Michael, and the Clair film is his last silent Les Deux Timides, a comedy. Between Dreyer, Clair and Kinugasa, there's some very prestigious directing muscle behind this year's foreign film selections; there are actually other well-known directors on the program schedule besides those three, but if I'm going to finish this post before passing out tonight I'd better leave it at that for now.

Well, maybe just one more. Or two, really. Tod Browning is another favorite around these parts, and the festival is bringing him back this year along with his favored star Lon Chaney. The film is the Unknown, and it features Joan Crawford in one of her first film roles, possibly as young as 19 (various sources on Crawford reveal various birth years, the latest being 1908, hence the centennial tributes popping up this year.) It will be shown at a late Saturday night screening and, here's the kicker, introduced by Guy Maddin. Maddin has designated the film as his "Director's Pick," something new for the Silent Film Festival. Presumably, in future festivals other current-day directors will be invited to present a silent-era film they feel particularly fond of.

Of course, this will not be Maddin's first trip to Frisco in 2008. He's also expected at the 51st SF International Film Festival that opens this Thursday, attending the first two of the festival's screenings of his latest curiosity My Winnipeg on May 1 & 3. I've seen My Winnipeg and feel confident in assuring Guy Maddin fans that they will not be disappointed in this new film. Unless they have an unexplainable aversion to Ann Savage, who puts in a terrific performance re-enacting the part of Guy's mother. Or to shots of snow, in which case how could you be a Guy Maddin fan in the first place? My Winnipeg is also narrated by Maddin, and I've heard conflicting guesses from people who saw him narrate the film live in Toronto as to whether they expect him to repeat that performance for his SFIFF appearances.

In case you haven't noticed, I've segued out of talking about the Silent Film Festival and am on to other events. I'll try to be quick, getting down to only the bare essentials so I can go to sleep.

As I mentioned, the SF International Film Festival opens this Thursday and runs for two weeks. The (in part) festival-funded sf360 already has the most voluminous coverage from its crack team of writers. Once again I'd also like to point in the direction of Michael Hawley on the Evening Class, who anticipates attending a very similar selection of festival films to the schedule I hope to use. One film Michael leaves out, however, is Johnny To's Linger, which I'm thrilled to see programmed as I have as much interest in To's non-gangster films as I do in the Triad- and/or hitmen-themed films he's best known for. I'm at least as interested in To's thematic concerns and his mise-en-scene as I am interested in him as a genre interpreter.

Some may have wondered why Linger was picked for the SFIFF instead of the more-acclaimed Mad Detective, which appeared at the Venice Film Festival and others. Well, their chance to see Mad Detective comes with the release of the newest PFA calendar. It's not the most jam-packed calendar of the year, as the Berkeley venue will be closed for three weeks following its stint as a venue for the SFIFF, and will also not be running programs on Mondays or Tuesdays in June. But the calendar does include a 9-title series of To's action films, including Mad Detective, which I've not seen yet. Of the eight I have seen my favorite is the goofy Running on Karma. Throw Down is the one I most feel I should give a second chance to after not liking it as much as I'd hoped the first time around. I do wish a Hero Never Dies had been selected as well, as it's my very favorite To film.

Other newly-announced PFA programs include the entire Berlin Alexanderplatz in four parts May 30-June 7, an all-day marathon of Lynn Hershman Leeson video works June 1, a very welcome Joan Blondell series including the big-screen must-see Footlight Parade and John Cassavetes' Opening Night, and a pair of series devoted to filmmakers I've never heard of (any reader suggestions would be welcome): Austria's Axel Corti and Turkey's Zeki Demirkubuz. In conjunction with the BAM exhibition of Bruce Conner's Mabuhay Gardens photographs, there will be four guest-filled Thursday evenings of punk films culminating in a June 26 pairing of Penelope Spheeris' seminal Decline of Western Civilization (the first, best, original segment in the eventual trilogy) with Conner's influential Devo promo Mongoloid.

And before I finally sign off, I just want to pick out the very best of the latest calendars from Red Vic on Haight Street and the Rafael in Marin county. The Red Vic calendar, amidst its usual excellent mix of premieres and second-run "last chance before DVD" screenings, has a few repertory gems in its lineup this time around, most notably a June 10th screening of Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, which I've never seen before, and a June 22-23 short stand of Max Ophuls's the Earrings of Madame de..., which I've only seen on VHS but love dearly. While the Rafael will be hosting a Jimmy Stewart retrospective Sunday and Wednesday evenings from May 18 through June 18. Having never seen the Shop Around the Corner on the big screen and the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at all you can bet I've already started scheming ways to secure transportation to and from San Rafael on June 1 and June 18, respectively.