Word: silents
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...military uniform, Prince Regent Hirohito in 1921 watched the making of a movie in Tokyo. Amazed at this novel way of capturing his country's way of life, the Emperor-to-be gave the new medium official approval, spawning a government-sanctioned industry that created thousands of silent motion pictures. After the rise of Japanese militarism led to the havoc of World War II, most of the country's silent movies were considered lost to history. "Some of the surviving films were destroyed by American occupation forces," says Joseph Anderson, author of the 1983 book, The Japanese Film. "Only fragments...
...thought. In fact, a handful of silent films did survive and, after a hibernation of nearly half a century, they are back on the screen. Over the past decade some of the leading film festivals and archives?Cinematheque Francaise, the National Film Center in Tokyo and the Pordenone International Silent Film Festival?spent years locating and refurbishing them. Last week the 26th Hong Kong International Film Festival featured the newly restored 1928 epic Town of Love. "After the uproar the films caused in Italy, we knew we had to have one," says festival director Peter...
...miracle they can be seen at all. Most Japanese silents were destroyed in Tokyo's 1923 earthquake. Others burned up in World War II firebombing. Since the movies were shot on inflammable nitrate stock, which disintegrates over time, many simply crumbled away. "There was no effort to save silent films in Japan since they were seen as representing the obsolete, feudal way of life," says Anderson...
...During these more feudal days, theaters sprang up throughout Japan, and people of all walks of life filed in to see what had caught the Prince Regent's eye. While Western audiences had their favorite silent-screen stars accompanied by music and intertitles, the Japanese stars were not on the screen?but on the stage in front of it. Benshi, or film narrators, had followings of their own; a big-name benshi could pack a house. Throughout the silent era, they mimicked the voices of different characters and provided plot narration to musical accompaniment, in a style familiar from Japan...
...During the U.S. occupation of Japan, Anderson read and heard about silent films, but was unable to view one. When Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and opened in New York to critical acclaim, Anderson hoped it would spur interest in its silent predecessors. It did. Cineasts found some films in katsu kichi, private salons showing silent films held in private collections. The groups were organized by Shunsui Matsuda, a benshi who died in 1987. The clubs re-created the original conditions of silent screenings. Last fall, the Pordenone festival invited...