Orochi & shorts

Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series The Art of the Benshi. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.

During the silent film era in Japan, which extended into the early 1930s, film screenings were accompanied by live narrators, called benshi. Full-fledged artists in their own right, benshi familiarized and enlivened the cinema experience in Japan through expressive performances that illuminated and extended the emotional and thematic range of the works on screen. Benshi such as Tokugawa Musei, Ikukoma Raiyfi and Nakamura Koenami became stars, drawing loyal audiences and commanding high salaries from exhibitors. The art, today, is carried on by a small group of specialized performers who have been apprenticed by the preceding generations of benshi, creating a continuous lineage back to the original performers. Pairing rare prints and new restorations of Japanese classics, this weekend-long series features three of Japan’s most renowned contemporary benshi, Ichirō Kataoka, Kumiko Ōmori and Hideyuki Yamashiro, performing their unique art live on stage in Japanese with English subtitles. Every performance and screening will be accompanied by a musical ensemble with traditional Japanese instrumentation.

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.

DCP, silent, tinted, 5 min. Director: Junichi Kōchi.

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, silent, tinted, 15 min. Director: Daisuke Itō. Screenwriter: With: Daisuke Itō. Denjirō Ōkōchi Yayoi Kawakami, Yuzuru Kume.

Star Denjirō Ōkōchi and director Daisuke Itō helped remake the chambara (sword-fighting film) 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! So that audiences can experience more directly how a benshi’s specific style can influence a film, Blood Spattered Takadanobaba will be repeated over the course of this series with a different benshi narrating each time.

Please note: This title will play twice as part of this program with separate benshi performing each time. 

DCP, b&w, silent, intertitles in Japanese with English subtitles, 12min. Director/Screenwriter: Daisuke Itō. Cast: Denjirō Ōkōchi, En'ichirō Jitsukawa, Harue Ichikawa.

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 the pages of Kinema Junpo in 1952, particularly its bravura, climactic chase scene, in which the “cinematic beauty of light, shadow, and movement flows into the screen along with Tsumasaburo’s sword fighting.”

DCP, b&w, silent with Japanese intertitles, 101 min. Director: Buntarō Futagawa. Screenwriter: Rokuhei Susukita. Cast: Tsumasaburō Bandō, Misao Seki, Misao Tamaki.