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This April, the Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour offers audiences a rare opportunity to experience the mesmerizing artistry of three of Japan’s celebrated benshi—“movie orators”—who, since the days of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, have been breathing life into silent film. Joined by an ensemble of musicians from Japan, these masters of their art will transport viewers back to the golden age of silent film, when every movie screening was also a live performance.  

The Dull Sword (Namakura gatana) 
An overly confident samurai looks for unsuspecting victims on which to try out his new sword, but neither his targets nor his weapon prove willing to play along. The Dull Sword is the oldest known surviving example of moving image anime, simply drawn but highly expressive in its satirical take on period genre conventions. So that audiences can experience more directly how a benshi’s specific style can influence a film, The Dull Sword will be repeated over the course of this series with a different benshi narrating each time. DCP courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan. (Dir: Kōchi Junichi, Japan, 1917, 5 min., DCP, silent, tinted) 
 
An Unforgettable Grudge (Bakumatsu kenshi: Chōkon) 
Only the final reel of this samurai melodrama from director Daisuke Itō survives today, which is enough to suggest the enormity of the loss. An Edo-set story of samurai brothers who fall in love with the same woman, it culminates with a ferocious sword fight between the spurned brother and an army of warriors, as action-packed a film fragment as you’re ever likely to see. DCP courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan. (Dir.: Daisuke Itō, Japan, 1926, 15 min., DCP, silent, tinted) 
 
Blood Spattered Takadanobaba (Chikemure Takadanobaba) 
Star Denjirō Ōkōchi and director Daisuke Itō helped remake the chambara genre in the late 1920s, infusing it with visual flash and mythic power. Sadly, the films of theirs that survive exist mostly in fragmentary form. Such is the case with Blood Spattered Takadanobaba. In this brief scene, the rōnin Yasube comes home drunk to a letter from his uncle requesting assistance fighting off a band of villainous samurai. Yasube races to his uncle’s side and joins the battle— already in violent progress! Print courtesy of the Toy Film Museum. (Dir.: Daisuke Itō, Japan, 1928, 12 min., DCP, b&w, silent, intertitles in Japanese with English subtitles) 
 
Orochi 
Tsumasaburō Bandō, one of Japan’s earliest screen idols, plays a masterless samurai forced to become a gangster’s bodyguard in this dazzling jidaigeki (period drama). Japanese film critic Junichiro Tanaka praised it in 1952 in the pages of Kinema Junpo, particularly its climactic chase scene, in which the “cinematic beauty of light, shadow, and movement flows into the screen along with Tsumasaburo’s sword fighting.” (Dir.: Buntarō Futagawa, Japan, 1925, 101 min., DCP, b&w, silent, intertitles in Japanese with English subtitles)