Art Benshi Water Magician, Blood, Shorts Blu-ray (Rental)

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 (1931) (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.