Benshi: Silent Film Narrators in Japan

Project Title: Benshi: Silent Film Narrators in Japan

Description: Benshi: Silent Film Narrators in Japan, a growing digital archive which curates a collection of historical materials related to historical and contemporary benshi performance, explores the interrelation between the digitized world and live performance. During the early nineteenth century, benshi provided live narration of silent films, dynamically voicing different characters and commenting on the plot in order to enhance the film’s storyline for the audience. Supported by Digital Initiatives, Scholarship, and Collaboration (DISC), the website provides a comprehensive overview on the history of benshi performance, which became a uniquely popular art form in the mid-1920s, during which over eight thousand benshi were registered nationwide. The archive compiles a century’s worth of materials, consolidating different iterations of benshi narration and digitally preserving its manifold ephemera, including re-synchronized audio and video clips of historical and contemporary benshi, as well as theater programs, scripts, and fan ranking charts. You can also journey into a virtual-reality theater, a reproduction of the Musashino-kan movie theater which operated in 1920s Tokyo, to listen to the voice-overs of two different benshi, historical and contemporary, accompanying clips of a silent film (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). How do we not just safeguard, but enliven, endangered histories and cultures? The site, which highlights the merging and remixing of disparate art forms that typifies benshi performance — oral storytelling combined with digitized media — offers a possible solution. The enduring legacy of benshi performance underlines the possibility of new art forms to arise from technological innovation, as well as the evolving capability of digitization to spotlight unique artistry. 

Deliverables: Digital Archive

Date: 2010-23