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 score on the soundtrack. Some of us — in Chicago, happily, it’s pretty common — have heard a keyboard accompanist or a small-group ensemble, or even an entire orchestra, performing with a silent short or feature.
Then there is the experience, which new to me. And now I have located the shadowy intersection of cinema and theater where a kind of delicate magic happens. And I’m grateful I traveled to the Brooklyn Academy of Music last weekend for the first of four U.
S. tour stops of “The Art of the Benshi.” Direct from Japan, following its New York and Washington, D.
C., engagements, the eight-person ensemble comprising the “Art of the Benshi” company arrives in Chicago for programs April 16-17 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Both nights are sold out.
A few lucky folks will likely squeeze in, via the rush ticket line. Benshi works like this. On the screen, you’re witnessing a long-lost fragment of century-old silent footage of a samurai in action.
Or perhaps the 1918 comedy “Sanji Goto” starring Iwajirō Nakajima (aka “the Japanese Charlie Chaplin”) as a bank janitor who inherits a family fortune. Or, depending on which “Art of the Benshi” program you attend, a silent relic from one of the 20th century masters, Kenji Mizoguchi or Yasujirū Ozu. To the.
