The Art of the Benshi (Limited Edition)

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THIS 4K UHD / BLU-RAY DISC RELEASE IS LIMITED TO 3,000 COPIES

4K UHD / BLU-RAY DUAL-FORMAT LIMITED EDITION

Flicker Alley and the Yanai Initiative—a collaborative project of UCLA and Waseda University in Tokyo—proudly present The Art of the Benshi, a limited edition box set that celebrates Japan’s remarkable “film orators.” Talkies famously overtook Hollywood in 1930. In Japan, however, the movies had been speaking all along thanks to live benshi performers who, standing off to the side of the screen, lent their voices to all manner of cinematic works, narrating events as they unfolded and speaking for the characters.

Full-fledged artists in their own right, benshi interpreted and enlivened the cinema experience in Japan through expressive performances that illuminated and extended the emotional and thematic range of the works on screen. The art, today, is carried on by a small number of performers, many of whom have honed their abilities through apprenticeships under benshi of the preceding generation, creating a continuous lineage back to the performers of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s.

Appearing for the first time on 4K UHD and Blu-ray disc are new 4K restorations of Buntarō Futagawa’s Orochi (1925), Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926), and, starring Baby Peggy (a highly popular star in Japan), Captain January (1924), along with Blu-ray releases of a new restoration of Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Water Magician (1931) (presented in both 20fps and 24fps playback speeds), four additional Baby Peggy shorts: Brownie’s Little Venus (1921), Sweetie (1923), Darling of New York (1923), and Our Pet (1924), as well as a surviving fragment of the samurai tale Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba (1928) by Daisuke Itō.

Including 23 audio presentations across nine different titles, The Art of the Benshi features 11 different benshi with newly recorded performances from masters like Sawato Midori (on Orochi, The Water Magician, and Our Pet), Kataoka Ichirō (on Orochi, A Page of Madness, Captain January, and Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba), Sakamoto Raikō (on The Water Magician and Captain January), and Ōmori Kumiko (on The Water Magician, Captain January, Sweetie, and Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba). With multiple benshi performances and historically inspired musical performances on every film, audiences can fully experience the degree to which different performers transform and deepen the moviegoing experience.

BONUS MATERIALS INCLUDE:

• Music Only Presentations - When international editions of Japanese films were distributed to Western art-house audiences in the late 1920s, they were shown with translated intertitles only (no benshi) and typically with musical accompaniment by either a pianist or small orchestra. Some of the finest musicians working in silent film music scoring today—Neal Brand, Stephen Horne, Makia Matsumura, and Donald Sosin—offer music-only presentations as a counterpoint to the version featuring benshi, to give a sense how these films would have been exhibited outside of Japan

• Talking Benshi - A brief overview of the oral art form that dates back to the dawn of Japanese cinema

• An Appreciation - A video essay comparing Orochi and A Page of Madness, historian Aaron Gerow provides an overview of jidai-geki, and gendai-geki, Japan’s distinct storytelling eras, and explores their connection to some early French films

• An Interview with “Baby Peggy” Diana Serra Cary - From a never-before-released 2011 interview, Diana Serra Cary looks back on life as “Baby Peggy” and recalls the fiery production of The Darling of New York

• Deluxe 80-Page Book - A detailed guide to the history of benshi and to the artists and films that appear in the collection

• A Page of Madness Program - A reproduction of the original brochure distributed at the very first public screening of the film in 1926

• Limited edition of 3,000 units encased in a hard box with removable obi strip

• Blu-ray Authoring by David Mackenzie of Fidelity In Motion

• English SDH Subtitles

• All Region Encoding (A,B,C) 

THE FULL LIST OF BENSHI PERFORMERS IS AS FOLLOWS:

Bunazawa Ken’ichi - Sweetie

Kataoka Ichirō - Orochi, A Page of Madness, Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba

Murayama Kenji - Captain January

Mutō Kenji - Brownie's Little Venus

Oda Takatora - Our Pet

Ōmori Kumiko - The Water Magician, Captain January, Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba

Sakamoto Raikō - The Water Magician

Sawato Midori - Orochi, The Water Magician, Our Pet

Yamashiro Hideyuki  - Orochi, Darling of New York

Yamauchi Nanako - A Page of Madness, Darling of New York

Yamazaki Vanilla - Brownie's Little Venus

THE COMPLETE LIST OF FILMS IN THE SET IS AS FOLLOWS. ALL 4K TITLES ARE MIRRORED ON THE FIRST BLU-RAY DISC:

Orochi (The Serpent) | Japan, 1925 - 4K UHD & BLU-RAY

Tsumasaburō Bandō headlines director Buntarō Futagawa’s tale of a lonely samurai. The film was restored in 4K by Jidaigeki Senmon Channel in 2022 with technical assistance from the NFAJ, from the 35mm nitrate original camera negative and from surviving release prints.

A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji) | Japan, 1926 - 4K UHD & BLU-RAY

Director Teinosuke Kinugasa’s intense exploration of a mental institution is an avant-garde masterpiece and the avant-garde approach still feels cutting edge, even a century later. At one time believed lost, A Page of Madness has been restored in 4K by the NFAJ from an analog restoration of the original blue-tinted nitrate print.

Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba (Chikemuri Takadanobaba) | Japan, 1928 (Fragment) - BLU-RAY

Although the complete film is tragically lost, 12 minutes survive thanks to Tokyo’s Toy Film Museum. From director Daisuke Itō, the film stars Denjirō Ōkōchi as 17th century rōnin Horibe Yasubee Taketsune.

The Water Magician (Taki no shiraito) | Japan, 1931 - BLU-RAY 

The Water Magician is presented in a new digital restoration in two versions with variable framerates. The 24fps version was specially created to pair with the benshi performances, which were recorded before the 20fps restoration was complete; the 20fps version, accompanied by Stephen Horne’s piano score, aims to replicate director Kenji Mizoguchi’s original exhibition plans.

FIVE FILMS STARRING BABY PEGGY

Especially popular in Japan, Diana Serra Cary began acting as “Baby Peggy” in Century Studios shorts when she was just two years old. Collected here are a selection of Baby Peggy’s most popular shorts, including the 4K UHD debut of Captain January (with Japanese intertitles) and the recently-discovered Our Pet.

Brownie’s Little Venus | USA, 1921 - BLU-RAY

One of her earliest surviving Century Comedies shorts, directed by Fred Fishback. Long thought lost, a 35mm nitrate print of this Century Comedies short, was discovered at the Cinémathèque Suisse in Switzerland, and preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Sweetie | USA, 1923 - BLU-RAY

Another surviving Century Comedies short, directed by Alfred J. Goulding, which was pieced together from multiple international film sources, including the Filmarchiv Austria, Lobster Films (Paris), and the Museum of Modern Art. It was preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding from historian David Stenn and Packard Humanities Institute.

Darling of New York | USA, 1923 - BLU-RAY

This is “Baby Peggy’s” feature film debut, a Universal Pictures release directed by King Baggot, presumed lost except for this surviving 14 minute fragment of the climactic final reel found by a private collector. It was preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding from historian David Stenn and Packard Humanities Institute. The traumatic experience of the surviving scenes became one of Diana Sera Cary's most vividly remembered childhood experiences in the industry.

Captain January | USA, 1924 - 4K UHD & BLU-RAY

Produced by Sol Lesser, and directed by Edward F. Cline, this is Baby Peggy's best-known starring vehicle, later remade with Shirley Temple. It is one of a small handful of her features to survive and co-stars Hobart Bosworth as lighthouse keeper "Daddy" Judkins and Irene Rich. Although long available in the public domain in independent film prints, this unique version was released in Japan with narration by benshi Murayama Kenji in 1935 by Tokyo Cinema Shōkai. This new 4K scan was prepared by the Yanai Initiative in 2026.

Our Pet | USA, 1924 - BLU-RAY

Directed by Herman C. Raymaker, Our Pet finds Baby Peggy facing off against a late-night intruder. Once thought lost, a nearly complete 9.5mm print surfaced at a Japanese auction in 2016, where it was acquired by benshi Ichirō Kataoka. It was subsequently scanned in 3K, cleaned, and stabilized frame-by-frame.

“It's one of the finest theatre and movie experiences, separately and together, that I've ever had,” wrote The New Yorker’s Richard Brody in 2024 of the Yanai Initiative's touring The Art of the Benshi program, “...In my embarrassing ignorance, I didn't know that such an art even existed, let alone that it's being renewed… This is what repertory is for, at its best: expanding the very map of the (familiar) history of cinema and of the arts overall.”