Lecture & Demonstration
The World of the Benshi 

Date & Time:
Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 7:00pm
(Door Open: 6:30pm)

Venue:
JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles, Salon on Level 5
(Ovation Hollywood: 6801 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90028)

Admission: FREE 
***Event is FULL***
 

The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles presents a lecture & demonstration on “The World of the Benshi,” co-presented with Yanai Initiative in conjunction with The Art of the Benshi world tour.
 
We invite three scholars, Dr. Kotaro Shibata, Dr. Makiko Kamiya, and Dr. Fumito Shirai to talk about world of benshi – or “movie orators” – and the history & charm of Japanese silent films. Also, a leading benshi from the world tour, Mr. Ichiro Kataoka will give us short demonstration and answer your questions about art of the benshi. This is a rare opportunity to experience the mesmerizing artistry of Japan’s celebrated benshi and learns about history and world of the benshi. 

Benshi—“movie orators” 
Since the days of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, the benshi has been breathing life into silent film. During the heyday of the benshi, more than 7,000 of these charismatic artists narrated the action in films, and made silent actors speak. Their voices rang out in movie theaters across Japan, as well as in Korea and other Japanese colonies, and in Japanese American communities in the United States. 

The Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour Trailer 

Program

Lecture of the World of the Benshi

Kotaro Shibata
“The Voices of Benshi in Japan and Beyond”

Makiko Kamiya
“The ‘Modernity’ of Japanese Cinema in the 1910s and 1920s”

Fumito Shirai
“Silent Film Music Across the Pacific”

A Demonstration of the Art of the Benshi

Ichiro Kataoka, Benshi

Demonstrated on:
Blood Spattered Takadanobaba (Chikemuri Takadanobaba: 血煙高田馬場)*

Star Denjiro Okochi and director Daisuke Ito helped remake the chambara genre in the late 1920s, infusing it with visual flash and mythic power. Sadly, the films of theirs that survive exist mostly in fragmentary form. Such is the case with Blood Spattered Takadanobaba. In this brief scene, the ronin Yasube comes home drunk to a letter from his uncle requesting assistance fighting off a band of villainous samurai. Yasube races to his uncle’s side and joins the battle already in violent progress! So that audiences can experience more directly how a benshi’s specific style can influence a film, Blood Spattered Takadanobaba will be repeated over the course of this series with a different benshi narrating each time.

*Demonstration of the film by Kataoka exclusively at this event

Print courtesy of the Toy Film Museum
Digital, b/w, silent, intertitles in Japanese with English subtitles, 12 mins.
Director/Screenwriter: Daisuke Ito
Cast: Denjiro Okochi, En'ichiro Jitsukawa, Harue Ichikawa

  Lecturer:

Kotaro Shibata is a Junior Researcher at Waseda University and a Yanai Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 2019. His first monograph Eigakan ni narihibiita oto (The Sound Resounded in Movie Theater), which will be published by Shunjusha in spring 2024, examines the history of Japanese film sound and film music from the silent era to the early sound era. His publications in English include “Musical Practice and Reception in Silent Movie Theaters in Tokyo: Intermission Music and Accompaniment Music” in Aesthetics, No. 25, 2022. In recent years, he has been actively involved in organizing screenings of Japanese silent films accompanied by benshi narration and live music, often using historical scores. He was actively involved in planning the Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour. 

Makiko Kamiya is a Lecturer at Tamagawa University, Tokyo, and an adjunct Researcher at The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University. She worked at the National Film Archive of Japan as an Assistant Curator from 2017 to 2020. Her research focuses on visual culture with an emphasis on Japanese cinema. Her recent works are “The Intertextuality of Sadism and Masochism in the Popular Culture in the Late Meiji to Early Taisho Period: Goro Masamune Koshi Den (1915) as a Starting Point,” Eizogaku: Japanese Journal of Image Arts and Sciences, No. 110, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, July 2023 (in Japanese), “Thoughts on the Imperial Household Movies in Early Cinema: Focusing on the Films of the Japanese Prince Takehito Arisugawa Visiting Europe,” Bigaku (The Japanese Journal of Aesthetics in Western Language), The Japanese Society for Aesthetics, March 2023 (in English). 

Fumito Shirai is an associate professor at Keio University who currently teaches German, musicology and German cultures. He is investigating the global and transnational relationship of music among Japanese, US and German silent films from the 1920s to the 1930s. He completed his PhD at The University of Tokyo with a doctoral dissertation about Arnold Schoenberg and film music. His papers have been recently published in The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era (2024), and Beethoven to taishu bunka [Beethoven in Mass Culture] (coeditor, 2024, in Japanese). 

  Benshi:

Ichiro Kataoka is among the most prominent and highly regarded contemporary benshi, celebrated not only in Japan but around the world for his dynamic, nuanced performances. He first embarked on his career in 2002 when he asked the pioneering benshi Sawato Midori to take him on as an apprentice. In the intervening years, he has performed in more than eighteen countries, creating and enacting scripts for approximately 350 silent films (Japanese, Western, and Chinese) of all sorts of genres, including documentaries and animated works. 

This event is co-presented by The Yanai Initiative.

Cooperated by JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles