[KineJapan] Festival reports of benshi

[Roger Macy]

Dear KineJapaners,
Looking at the recent festival reports at ‘Senses of Cinema ’, I read Daniel Fairfax’s report from Pordenone, as I was only there for two days this year, going on to cover Yamagata.  In the penultimate paragraph, Fairfax reports on “the emotional climax of the festival”, a benshi performance by Ichiro Kataoka.  Needless to say, I was very sad to miss it.
Fairfax duly records that the performance was in untranslated Japanese but enthuses rapturously, “guided as I was by the benshi’s mellifluous vocal intonations. In the end, I could only weep for this lost art,”.
For me, that calls up the point that a major driver of demand for benshi in Japan was to translate foreign language into an understandable language.  There have been a number of benshi performances outside Japan in recent years but, with the honourable exception of a performance at the Barbican by Tomoko Komura, in London, these seem to have been in Japanese.  Clearly, there are Japanese-speakers abroad who could appreciate a Japanese benshi performance just as they might, say, appreciate a performance of rakugo.  But at Pordenone, the Japanese-speaking audience would have been, I think, singular.  So the rest of them were assuredly appreciating art but were they really hearing the art that was lost?
There’s no definitive answer to this, of course, but I would be interested to hear some other opinions or reports.  I think it’s worth, at the minimum, keeping in focus  the target-language function of benshi performance.  This need not prevent a benshi performance being appreciated as art.  The Barbican performance was sold out  and a repeat was scheduled.  This run into problems with the rights for the Matsuda material that was being used, and had to be cancelled.
Incidentally, there’s my own report from Yamagata in the same issue, although this only glances at Japanese film through Hara-san.  I’d be interested in hearing of other reports from there, also.
Roger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20131231/174c2fa1/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
KineJapan mailing list
KineJapan at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan