Commingled Art and Commingled Culture
The Benshi and 19th Century Japanese Film Culture
Abstract
From 1896, when the first Kinetoscope was brought to Japan, to the early 1920s, all film screenings were accompanied by a live Japanese narrator called the benshi.Benshi stood to the left of the film screen and—speaking in melodious rhythms—provided narration, character impersonation, explanation of western exotica, and offered general commentary and critique for the then silent films. In late ninteenth-century Japan, film was not seen as an autonomous medium but rather as "commingled” media, comprised of vocal storytelling and projected motion pictures. This was in part due to long-standing Japanese theatrical traditions such as temple and itinerant etoki, the Japanese Buddhist practice in which monks use picture scrolls to expound Buddhist principles. Benshi performers drew upon such theatrical heritage to describe the foreign film apparatus, thereby fragmenting the filmic system of representation and instilling a distinct culture of critical independence in Japanese silent film audiences.
This essay contributes to scholarly debates regarding “commingled” media, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous media, which is reflective of unique Japanese artistic culture. It provides a case study of Benshi Tokugawa Musei’s performance of the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene) recorded at the Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo in 1968.7 This remaining work by Tokugawa Musei, a renowned benshi of the silent film era, offers insight into interactions between the benshi and silent film as it relates to Japanese traditions of “commingled” media.
Downloads
References
Anderson, Joseph L.. “Spoken Silents in The Japanese Cinema, Essay On The Necessity Of Katsuben.” Journal of Film and Video 40, no. 1 (1988): 13–33. Http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687801.
Akihiro, Kitada and Stefanie Thomas. “The Alluring Voice/the Allure of Film (theaters): The Formation of the Voice in the Japanese Cinema of the Prewar Period.” Japan forum (Oxford, England) 30, no. 3 (2018): 352–376.
“Benshi Chart 1919 [Still Image].” Comparative Japanese Film Archive. Hamilton College, New York, 2011. Accessed September 22, 2023. https://cjf.dhinitiative.org/islandora/object/cjf%3A50?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=6620d13fd620e9711618&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=0.
Brecher, W. Puck. “Useless Losers: Marginality and Modernization in Early Meiji Japan.”The European legacy, toward new paradigms 17, no. 6 (2012): 803–817.
Dixon, Wheeler W. and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. A Short History of Film Wheeler Winston Dixon & Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Dym, Jeffrey. “About Japan: A Teacher’s Resource: A Brief History of Benshi (Silent Film Narrators).” Japan Society. Accessed November 9, 2023. https://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/a_brief_history_of_benshi.
Dym, Jeffrey A.. “Benshi and the Introduction of Motion Pictures to Japan.” Monumenta Nipponica 55, no. 4 (2000): 509–536. Https://doi.org/10.2307/2668250.
Fujiki, Hideaki. “Benshi as Stars: The Irony of the Popularity and Respectability of Voice Performers in Japanese Cinema.” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (2006): 68–84.
Fujiki, Hideaki. Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Proquest Ebook Central, https://doi.org/10.1163/9781684170630
Gerow, Aaron Andrew. “The Benshi’s New Face: Defining Cinema in Taishô Japan.” ICONICS - International Studies of the Modern Image 3 (1994): 69–86.
Gerow, Aaron Andrew. “The Motion Pictures as a Problem.” In Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925, 1st ed., 40–65.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp07h.6.
Hase, Kenichiro. “Reconsidering Katsutaro Inabata’s Cinematograph Business in Japan: Based on the Newly Discovered ‘Four Letters by Katsutaro Inabata to Lumière Brothers (1897).’” eizogaku 104 (2020): 51–72. https://doi.org/10.18917/eizogaku.104.0_51
Kaminishi, Ikumi. “Etoki in History.” In Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan, 19–30. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvmxpt.5.
Kaminishi, Ikumi. “Etoki, or Deciphering Pictures, of Buddhist Propaganda.” Word & image (London. 1985) 18, no. 2 (2002): 192–209.
Lee, Laura. “The Pure Film Movement and Modern Japanese Film Style.” In A Companion to Japanese Cinema, 49–66. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2022. doi:10.1002/9781118955352.ch2.
Mason, Penelope E. and Donald Dinwiddie. History of Japanese Art. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005.
Preziosi, Donald. “Globalization and its Discontents.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2009.
Thornton, Sybil. “Review: To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema by Noel Burch, Annette Michelson,” Cinema Journal 21, no. 1 (1981): 59–64. Https://doi.org/10.2307/1225004
Varley, H. Paul. Japanese Culture. 4. Auflage. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999.
Wiene, Robert, director. Karigari-Hakase (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). Sound recording with Benshi narration by Tokugawa Musei. New York: Kino Film International, 2002. Kinokuniya Hall, Tokyo, 1968. 1 min. 39 sec. Comparative Japanese Film Archive, Hamilton College Ontario. https://cjf.dhinitiative.org/islandora/object/cjf%3A118?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=0452f76fe2dd7c87d67f&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=19.
Yasar, Kerim. “Sound And Motion.” In Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945, 192–224. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/yasa18712.12.
Copyright (c) 2024 Miranda Carroll
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors grant ARTiculate first right to publication of their work. Authors retain copyright.
Contributing authors do so under the agreement that they release their essays under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported licence. Under the Open Access policy of the journal, this licence allows anyone to use or share the author’s work, on the condition that they provide proper attribution.
Authors may enter into separate, non-exclusive publication agreements for the same work provided a note is included indicating that the essay was first published in ARTiculate Art History.
