[KineJapan] On a silent film, and a JCP debate w Kurosawa

[Anne McKnight]

Thanks, Roger. No, I wish…

Nothing that would indicate decisively what theatre, what year, etc. Here’s the paragraph that goes before, which mentions films from the early 20s. I might be able to look at what played at some specific theatres, should I really really choose to go down that rabbithole and can spend a LOT of time in the library via ILL…but was hoping it was at least mildly familiar to someone out there? I already posted on Domitor and asked a couple of people who research around this field of early silents/mixed media performance, and no leads...
My brother was closely associated with Tokugawa Musei. My brother chose to follow the path of the benshi, and he became fairly famous under the stage name Suda Teimei. He worked in Tokyo until right before the talkie era, and he chose foreign films as his specialty, when there were theatres that booked really good foreign films. The theatre where my brother worked as a benshi, the Kanda Cinema Palace, was one such theatre, and Tokugawa Musei’s Tōyō Palace was especially renowned. The modern benshi of that time were different than traditional benshi because they were expected to cover all the different roles of presentation—from skillful explanations of foreign film content and performing, to program selection, to advertisement. Their posters, too, were great, very inventive—. For example, when they did Doctor Mabuse, the title characters read from bottom to top. And with Blood and Sand (1922, Fred Niblo), at first glance the poster seemed to be a sheet of pure red, but if you looked closely, you could make out the small characters “blood” and “sand.” [draft]


> On Aug 28, 2022, at 16:02, Roger Macy <macyroger at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Anne, alas,  I've only got a question on your question 1.
> 
> Is there anything in the context that would say the film in question is definitely Japanese, or the reverse ??
> 
> Roger
> 
> On Sunday, 28 August 2022 at 23:49:51 BST, Anne McKnight via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi everyone~
> 
> As some of you know, I have been working on a translation project involving Kurosawa Akira’s taidans and essays. I’ve run into a couple of references that have stumped me—one on a silent film narrated by Tokugawa Musei, and one on a debate he, apparently, got into with a JCP member at some unspecified time.
> 
> I would be curious if either of these items ring any bells…IDs or larger contexts.
> 
> a) here is the passage in a Kurosawa essay (or, more precisely, his daughter’s ventriloquization of his voice from memoirs, conversations, ephemera, etc.). Does this sound vaguely familiar? It is always possible it is a mis-remembered account, of course…though the gothic and perhaps Expressionist scent is strong...
> Musei-san, like other benshi, was in charge of coordinating the accompaniment as well as the narration of the film. For instance, this is how one film went. A drunken guy approaches the sumptuous house of a wealthy man, carrying another man, and asks if the rich man will let the man on his back [?] spend the night, and leaves him. Musei doesn’t say a peep during that part, no accompaniment whatsoever. As time passes, the man keeps not waking up, and just as the rich man waves his hands [?] to revive the man he thinks is sleeping, Musei suddenly lets out a scream—kyaaa~~: the tragic cry of the man who discovers that the body lying underfoot belongs to his own son. Then the accompaniment suddenly begins, and the scene switches over to a lively carnival. Musei’s staging was incredibly skillful. I learned a lot from these productions, and spectators were really trained to watch films by Musei-san’s way of looking at things. For movie fans, Musei-san played the role of a guide. That’s just the kind of ideal movie theatre I want to create. (This is kind of long and I think the English description can suffice.)
> 
> 
> b) Kurosawa (him, actually, this time) makes reference to some sort of debate he got into with a JCP person. The essay is 1993, so it could have been at any point in the middle or late 20th century, though for obvious reasons, probably closer to the 50s-70s than the 1993 date of this essay. This one almost sounds like it might be related to JCP debates after people abandoned socialist realism—people like Abe Kobo or Hanada Kiyoteru. Does this “dispute” seem familiar to anyone, from film, art, or general debates about art and politics?
> 
> At one time in Tokyo, the Japanese Communist Party had a lot of clout, and there was a split between artists and artisans <>. There was one person who insisted that he was an artist, not an artisan, and I butted heads with him many times. In my view, the very idea that you could skip over the craft of being an artisan to just declare yourself an artist is ridiculous.
> 
> 一時、東京でも共産党が牛耳ってた時代があるけれども、そのときに、アルティストとアルチザン、つまり芸術家と職人というのでね、「俺は
> アルティストだ、アルチザンじゃない」という人がいて、僕はすごくやり合ったんです。職人を突き抜けて芸術になるんであって、職人ではない芸術家なんてないんだ、と。
> 
> If anything occurs to you, by way of intuitions or resemblances, I would love to hear about it. Thanks for any leads!
> 
> Anne
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