Film still from "The Dull Sword" (1917), directed by Jun'ichi Kōuchi (all images courtesy the Yanai Initiative For Globalizing Japanese Humanities and the UCLA Film & Television Archive) I saw Kataoka ...

As a benshi, Sawato Midori performs alongside silent films, acting out the dialogue and explaining the action. More than a century after the art’s heyday in Japan, the excitement of her live shows ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. NEW YORK — Just about everyone over the age of 5 knows what it means to sit in a theater and watch a movie. Many of us have seen a ...

Benshi, traditional narrative storytellers who accompany silent films, provide verbal components for audiences to further understand emotion in early movies. This Friday at 2 p.m. on the Tempe campus ...

Ichiro Kataoka reads narrations for a benshi performance. Benshi performers came to BYU's International Cinema as part of their "The Art of Benshi" tour. (Maya Taylor) Professional benshi silent film ...

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Long before the tiny, talking heads of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” yammered their brainy commentary over well-worn sci-fi films, there was the benshi. During the heyday of silent films, Japanese ...

Midori Sawato is a benshi, a unique kind of performer who provides live narration to silent films at the movie theater. The benshi brings the characters in films alive using different voices and vocal ...

The silent films screened in Japan from the 1920s to '40s were never completely silent. Katsudo-shashin benshi, or benshi for short, delivered live narration that provided everything an audience might ...

NEW YORK — Just about everyone over the age of 5 knows what it means to sit in a theater and watch a movie. Many of us have seen a silent film — Chaplin, maybe, exhibited theatrically with a musical ...