Art of the Benshi (US Import Limited Edition 4K UHD/BLU-RAY Combo)

US Import

Flicker Alley and the Yanai Initiative—a collaborative project of UCLA and Waseda University in Tokyo—proudly present The Art of the Benshi, a limited edition box set that celebrates Japan’s remarkable “film orators.” Talkies famously overtook Hollywood in 1930. In Japan, however, the movies had been speaking all along thanks to live benshi performers who, standing off to the side of the screen, lent their voices to all manner of cinematic works, narrating events as they unfolded and speaking for the characters.

Full-fledged artists in their own right, benshi interpreted and enlivened the cinema experience in Japan through expressive performances that illuminated and extended the emotional and thematic range of the works on screen. The art, today, is carried on by a small number of performers, many of whom have honed their abilities through apprenticeships under benshi of the preceding generation, creating a continuous lineage back to the performers of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s.

Appearing for the first time on 4K UHD and Blu-ray disc are new 4K restorations of Buntarō Futagawa’s Orochi (1925), Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926), and, starring Baby Peggy (a highly popular star in Japan), Captain January (1924), along with Blu-ray releases of a new restoration of Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Water Magician (1933) (presented in both 20fps and 24fps playback speeds), four additional Baby Peggy shorts: Brownie’s Little Venus (1921), Sweetie (1923), Darling of New York (1923), and Our Pet (1924), as well as a surviving fragment of the samurai tale Blood Spattered at Takadanobaba (1928) by Daisuke Itō.

Including 23 audio presentations across nine different titles, The Art of the Benshi features 11 different benshi with newly recorded performances from masters like Sawato Midori (on Orochi, The Water Magician, and Our Pet), Kataoka Ichirō (on Orochi, A Page of Madness, Captain January, and Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba), Sakamoto Raikō (on The Water Magician and Captain January), and Ōmori Kumiko (on The Water Magician, Captain January, Sweetie, and Blood Spattered at Takadanobaba). 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.

For more information about benshi stardom and the history of benshi performance, please check out the Yanai Initiative's companion book, The World of the Benshi.

BONUS MATERIALS INCLUDE:

• Music Only Presentations - When international editions of Japanese films were distributed to Western art-house audiences in the late 1920s, they were shown with translated intertitles only (no benshi) and typically with musical accompaniment by either a pianist or small orchestra. Some of the finest musicians working in silent film music scoring today—Neil Brand, Stephen Horne, Makia Matsumura, and Donald Sosin—offer music-only presentations as a counterpoint to the version featuring benshi, to give a sense how these films would have been exhibited outside of Japan

• Talking Benshi - A brief overview of the oral art form that dates back to the dawn of Japanese cinema

• An Appreciation - A video essay comparing Orochi and A Page of Madness, historian Aaron Gerow provides an overview of jidai-geki, and gendai-geki, Japan’s distinct storytelling eras, and explores their connection to some early French films

• An Interview with “Baby Peggy” Diana Serra Cary - From a never-before-released 2011 interview, Diana Serra Cary looks back on life as “Baby Peggy” and recalls the fiery production of The Darling of New York

• Deluxe 80-Page Book - A detailed guide to the history of benshi and to the artists and films that appear in the collection

• A Page of Madness Program - A reproduction of the original brochure distributed at the very first public screening of the film in 1926

• Limited edition of 3,000 units encased in a hard box with removable obi strip

• Blu-ray Authoring by David Mackenzie of Fidelity In Motion

• English SDH Subtitles