In this tradition, Japanese narrators and musicians transform the silent movie experience. A tour is coming to Chicago’s Siskel Center.
NEW YORK — Just about everyone over the age of 5 knows what it means to sit in a theater and watch a movie. Many of us have seen a silent film — Chaplin, maybe, exhibited theatrically with a musical score on the soundtrack.
To the right of the screen, a four-person orchestra accompanies the action, subtly, drawing out unexpected emotional dimensions not through bombast, but through poetic restraint. “Benshi” translates roughly to “orator,” deriving from katsudō benshi or “movie talker.” In the silent film era in Japan, which lasted well into the 1930s due largely to the popularity of the benshi, the live performance element felt perfectly at home with this newfangled mechanical medium. Japanese audiences were well used to centuries-old oral storytelling and theatrical forms showcasing a reciter as part of, yet separate from, the world of the story.
“Think of the film as the conductor, with everybody else on stage the musicians, looking up at the screen. The movie essentially is conducting us, and we’re responding to it.” That’s how master benshi Ichirō Kataoka describes this nearly lost art. We spoke prior to the April 7 BAM rehearsal, along with other members of the tour.
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