Flicker Alley

[andyli]

It’s funny people’s first reaction towards a set called The Art of Benshi is finding it annoying and asking if it could be turned off.

[domino harvey]

I mean, it is really annoying, at least based on the Mizoguchi ones I’ve seen. I doubt many people make it to the end without switching tracks or muting and reading the subtitles, descriptions of it don’t really give perspective on what it’s like to sit through something so counterintuitive to how we traditionally watch films

I will point out that Flicker Alley did pick the far superior of the two Mizoguchi features in this style to restore here, so that’s great news for everyone

[mteller]

Sadly, doesn't look like the 70's score for A Page of Madness is included. Oh well.

[kindaikun]

I may be missing something but does it state anywhere whether the benshi narration is in English or Japanese? Or does it vary with each feature?

It mentions English SDH subtitles which would generally imply English audio, yet at the bottom it also lists: "Language: Japanese"

I got the chance to watch some silents with benshi narration in Japan ("I was born but..."), but I'm not sure how well it would work in English.

[domino harvey]

The Mizoguchi ones were in Japanese and subtitled on the Japanese DVDs, and there weren’t intertitles (or they weren’t subbed if there were, can’t recall exactly) so you needed the subs for the spoken narration otherwise you’d be completely lost on the plot

[Lowry_Sam]

Flicker Alley's product description on its website is more detailed than the initial blurb I saw. It states:

23 audio presentations across nine different titles, The Art of the Benshi features 11 different benshi with newly recorded performances ...With multiple benshi performances and historically inspired musical performances on every film, audiences can fully experience the degree to which different performers transform and deepen the moviegoing experience.

And then

THE FULL LIST OF BENSHI PERFORMERS IS AS FOLLOWS:
Bunazawa Ken’ichi - Sweetie
Kataoka Ichirō - Orochi, A Page of Madness, Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba
Murayama Kenji - Captain January
Mutō Kenji - Brownie's Little Venus
Oda Takatora - Our Pet
Ōmori Kumiko - The Water Magician, Captain January, Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba
Sakamoto Raikō - The Water Magician
Sawato Midori - Orochi, The Water Magician, Our Pet
Yamashiro Hideyuki - Orochi, Darling of New York
Yamauchi Nanako - A Page of Madness, Darling of New York
Yamazaki Vanilla - Brownie's Little Venus

So it looks like most (though not all) have 2 Benshi options and at least from the Youtube sample for A Page Of Madness, one is in English (the other probably Japanese?), not exactly Criterion's Brand Upon The Brain, but some options. But with 23 "23 audio presentations" across 9 films, it doesn't sound like there's much more than 1 musical option for each, which is too bad. There were a number of scores composed for A Page Of Madness alone: Teinosuke Kinugasa, Muraoka Minoru, In The Nursery, Aonno Jiken Ensemble, Alloy Orchestra, plus several live improvisational performances.

I must have misremembered seeing it for the first time with a few intertitles. The clip on Youtube has scenes that segue much more seemlessly & rapidly into one another, whereas I remember them broken up much more. I am certain that the print I saw did not have blue tinting like the clip. Anyone know if some prints were ever struck up that added intertitles to account for lack of benshi? Wikipedia/Google says no.

[Michael Kerpan]

If I remembetr what I heard from Aaron Gerow (and Donald Richie) -- Intertitles were initially written for Page of Madness -- but these were never actually used for any print. When Kiunugasa re-edited (irreversibly) the rediscovered film , no intertitles were crreated.

[denti alligator]

They may have been written, but the re-edit is not, as I understand it, a revisionist version. Kinugasa was inspired by Murnau's Last Laugh, which had premiered in Japan before the final edit of Page of Madness.

[Michael Kerpan]

There are apparently at least partial copies of the benshi scripts that had to be approved by Japanese censors. These show some significant changes from what Kinugasa finally released after the "long lost" film had been recovered. One would need to look at Aaron Gerow's book for more precise details. My memory is a bit "generalized" at this point.

I think Aaron is a bigger fan of Kinugasa than I am overall. I do find him interesting as a Japanese film maker of the era who was relatively unaffected by Hollywood films -- and was much more reliant on both earlier Japanese cinema and avant-garde European films. His 1930s (after Crossroads) films are far more "conventional" (and not at all avant-garde).

[pistolwink]

Very neat set. I'm assuming the benshi narration will be subtitled?

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

If I remembetr what I heard from Aaron Gerow (and Donald Richie) -- Intertitles were initially written for Page of Madness -- but these were never actually used for any print. When Kiunugasa re-edited (irreversibly) the rediscovered film , no intertitles were crreated.

According to Gerow's book, Kinugasa's original cut had intertitles, apparently of a very basic nature that mostly just identified new characters as they appeared. He removed these before release on the advice of his co-writers.

There are apparently at least partial copies of the benshi scripts that had to be approved by Japanese censors. These show some significant changes from what Kinugasa finally released after the "long lost" film had been recovered. One would need to look at Aaron Gerow's book for more precise details. My memory is a bit "generalized" at this point.

The script submitted to the censors (two copies of which remained in Kinugasa's possession) was not strictly speaking a benshi script, but such scripts (including this one) were often written in an "oral" style to provide a template for benshi, who had very little time to prepare and were usually only able to screen a film once before it opened. These scripts had to follow the released version closely, since police were actually dispatched to theaters to make sure they conformed to what was actually screened.

In the case of A Page of Madness there is also a partial copy of an actual benshi script, which like the censorship script includes scenes not in the currently-circulating version. This version is also more than 500 meters (or around 22 minutes at 20fps) shorter than the three prints submitted to the censors in 1926, hence the speculation that Kinugasa re-edited the film after rediscovering it in 1971, possibly to excise some of the more "melodramatic" sections. It's also possible the film was recut at some point prior to its rediscovery, but Gerow says this is unlikely because there's no indication the film was screened at all between 1928 and 1971, and if it had been recut in the 1920s it would've required a resubmission to the censors, something else for which no evidence exists. He also argues that the current version doesn't show the disjointedness one would expect if footage had been lost more or less at random due to damage. Film historian Mariann Lewinsky makes a more detailed argument for Kinugasa's culpability here, and says he also recut Crossroads—apparently referring to a version with a synchronized soundtrack shown alongside A Page of Madness in 1975 and running just 47 minutes, which would imply substantial excisions even at an excessive 24fps. (The English-titled print preserved by the UK National Film Library, which was sent to Japan in 1967 and is the source for all existing copies, runs around 65 minutes at 24fps.)

[Walter Kurtz]

They also have The Black Pirate (1926) coming as it's currently playing at the LA Silent film festival

Doug Fairbanks led me to religion. Ever since I saw The Mask of Zorro, I’ve been a Zoroastrian.