As I mentioned in my tag-line for this tidbit, the benshi were the not-so-silent side of Japanese silent film. Before we jump right in to the benshi and all their gritty details, let’s just paint the basic background.
Film came to Japan in the 1890s and by 1920 there was already a fledgling industry. By 1925, film was tremendously popular. In that year there were 813 theaters in Japan and 155 million admissions. Not bad for a country with a population of less than 60 million. The domestic products dominated their imported competitors (an anomaly on the international scene) and the Japanese directors and even the audiences were resistant to the new talkies. Ozu famously felt that he was nearing perfection of the art of the silent film and didn’t want to start over with a new medium. The first successful talkie was Heinosuke Gosho’s The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1932) but before that there was a very long history of what some of dubbed “talking silents”
The benshi used to sit to the left of the screen and narrate what was happening on screen. More than just describe, they would invent, embellish, explain, even sing or chant if they saw it fit. In their heyday they received first billing–before the stars, the directors, sometimes even in larger characters than the title. Recordings of their narration were turned in to best-selling records, even without the film. They held on quite tenaciously to their positions in the face of sound but ultimately all their unionizing and threatening couldn’t save them from the sinking ship that was silent film. When sound came, they fought hard and at times even comically. (The Japanese Film: Art and Industry
The benshi had been thrown into complete confusion by the coming of sound. At first they kept silent, hoping that the talking films would go away. Then they decided to take the offensive and tried to narrate over the sound. This was difficult because they had no public-address systems and were forced to shout as loud as they could. Soon they learned to cut down the volume to let themselves be heard, and, finally, some benshi turned off the sound altogether, showing the film as though it were silent and, as always, faithfully narrating. Some even narrated strictly musical shorts which had only songs.
To understand this phenomenon better, we must consider the Japanese storytelling tradition. In all three of the major theatrical trends of the 19th century (kabuki, noh and puppet theater) it was common to have someone like a benshi at the side of the stage explaining, commenting or singing as the case may be. Functionally, he seems to have fulfilled a role similar to the choruses in the ancient theater. In contradistinction to the European tradition, the Japanese aesthetic tradition has throughout had great tolerance for textual information alongside its images. Perhaps it is a consequence of the importance of calligraphy to an ideogram language, that’s beyond my ability to say. But consider the famous Zen artists, like Shubun, or the print-artists or painters of the Edo period. It is not at all infrequent to find passages of poetry, religious texts or whole stories printed alongside the image. Indeed, by the time the world of the ukiyo-e (perhaps a subject for another tidbit) was reaching its end, we see prints like the following, from Yoshitoshi’s series ‘Mirror of Beauties Past and Present (1875-1876):’
The combination of textual information alongside the visual is downright dizzying in Yoshitoshi's 'Tomoe onna.' (1875-6)
So when film came to Japan at the turn of the century it was only natural for it to be accompanied by a textual, if you will, accompaniment. There are for more intricate connections to be made, and Anderson’s “In Praise of Benshi” in the appendix of The Japanese Film: Art and Industry
As far as the progress of cinema as an artform goes, the benshi were an impediment. The very textuality undermined the visual artform as well as the unity of vision of the film’s creator(s). This is never easy to maintain in an essentially collaborative product but imagine the situation with benshi: You could see the same film twice with different benshi and get a totally different interpretation of what happened.
And yet, there is something so quaint, so transitionally modern about them that you can’t but feel just a tinge of regret that you’ve never seen a film with one.
Stars scattered across a lavender sky
Blossoms Fallen like snow on the green earth
Spring, ah, spring
It is Spring and romance is in the South.
[Fade out. Over The End:]
The title is ‘Southern Justice’.
Complete in five reels.
A benshi”s narration from the end of ‘Southern Justice,’ a Universal picture (under the Bluebird Photoplays name) from 1917, when the two lovers are at last united in the hills of Kentucky. As quoted by Anderson p.449.
The next tidbit will actually not be about film at all but rather about evil conspiracies and secret societies. I will, once and for all, uncover the truth about everything.
May 8, 2009 at 7:36 am
Very interesting. I never knew anything about the benshi.
May 8, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Very interesting, indeed.
Looking forward to the uncovering of the truth about everything.
May 15, 2009 at 2:59 am
i find it interesting that you draw upon the japanese inclusion of calligraphy in art as a parallel to the benshi’s involvement in the silent film.
the japanese are not “literate” in the way we know the word. literacy, in my understanding, does not extend to ideograms because the effect that the characters produce are totally different. the ideogram is integrative, experiential, and synaesthetic while the phonetic letter is specialist, emotionally removed, and tends to homogonize all senses into one (the visual).
now take this highly visual medium, the film, and shove it in the face of a culture steeped in “ideocy”. chaos! confusion! and a general inability to make sense of it at all. it is attractive, and exciting for sure, but incomprehensible culturally.
the pairing of calligraphy and image in japanese art is much more seamless to an idea culture than to an alphabetic one. to the japanese, the interplay of image and glyph is dynamic and natural and is interpreted in the same way that ideograms are understood solely based on the juxtaposition of many separate characters. only in western art does it seem strange to see words incorporated into art (with the exception of modern trends, we must put captions in boxes and corall words into speech/thought bubbles and so on). to us, words serve to explain a picture or a picture illustrates the words. the role of “text” in japanese art plays a very different role.
your post suggests that the japanese had a precedent of explanatory commentary to art, so licho’ra the benshi alongside a silent movie is nothing new. what i see, however, in the phenomenon of the benshi is the rebellion against the western culture of linearity and sequentiality that pretty much defines a film and the futile attempt to convert it into something experiential and synaesthetic.
a side note that is kind of related but also not: an older israeli once described to me watching movies before the implementation of subtitles with what was called “targum batzad”. this was the projection of the hebrew translation on a separate screen next to the movie. often, the synchronization would be off and you’d find interesting new dynamics that the moviemakers probably did not intend.
May 15, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Thank you for your comment. It is difficult for me to place myself in the position of a Japanese and to really say how the experience of ideograms is different from the experience of phonetic letters. To further complicate things, the Japanese written language has two systems of writing, both were grafted on to the language at a fairly late time in its development and both are derived from the Chinese characters. There are the kana (two different alphabets of syllabic characters) as well as the kanji ideograms lifted directly from the Chinese. One could write exclusively in kana (though it is almost never done) but the same cannot be said for kanji, since all articles and conjugations are expressible in kana alone.
To a certain extent what you are saying about the way an “ideotic” culture relates to text is irrefutable. The very art of calligraphy which takes such a radically different form in the East would prove your point. But in day to day life, when a Japanese person reads the newspaper or the ingredients list on the side of a food label, I’m inclined to believe that their experience is very similar to ours. I would imagine that the brain cuts out most if not all of the connections to the “picture” aspect and gives just the meaning. Similar perhaps to the way we read–we see words, not letters. Our words are more easily deconstructed to letters than the kanji and our letters have long ago lost their connection to anything concrete but I would expect that the necessity of information transfer quickly drowns out the idea part of the ideogram.
In the early days of foreign films in Japan there were similar experiments, see this paragraph in Anderson and Richie.
I think that the right way to pursue the deepest understanding is via the different conceptions of naturalism. Western drama demands realism in that you couldn’t have one man voicing everything, and that the costumes and props must look “realistic” but histrionic responses that are far from what any real person would say are du jour. Japanese drama allows for much more liberal reality (think of noh masks, to start with) but the acting itself is often much closer to life. Richie suggests that this is because Japanese life is so histrionic by nature–hiding feelings, etc. is much more integral there than in the West. Unfortunately, I don’t yet possess enough understanding to be able to really discuss this point further. Thanks again and keep checking back for more updates!
May 17, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Hi Mike,
I’m not sure where else to post this, so I’ll do it here. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the film Synecdoche, New York.
Thanks!
May 17, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Hi Eva, Thanks for the request. I’ll look for it and see what I can do. “The Dark Knight” topped the latest poll I posted and I’ve already watched a couple others that I’m waiting to post reviews of so it might take a while. Thanks for reading! md
July 13, 2009 at 11:17 pm
[...] mentioned the Japanese print once before to help understand film paradigms and I’ll probably do so again in the future. The [...]