Movietelling, also known as neo-benshi, is the art of (mis)narrating a film. I encountered it for the first time in January of 2007, when I saw David Larsen’s “Paris of Troy.” The setting was Philadelphia’s Powel House, named after the city’s first mayor, Samuel Powel, who bought it in 1769, four years after it was built. George and Martha Washington dined there. So did John Adams. Projecting 11 minutes of the film Troy (2004) onto a dining room wall, including its windows and yellow velvet curtains, David Larsen narrated this Hollywood version of the Iliad, book 3:
It is the clitoral tip of Asia.
You don’t believe me?
that’s a Hittite word, Assuwa
for the windy NW corner of Anatolia
where stood gleaming Tarawissa
the Hittite word for Troy

[…]
She stands there for 60 seconds exactly
which you would know if you were
sitting there with me
watching and re-watching this scene from Troy
wearing out the remote control
That’s Paris on the right, the
dreamy abductor
his brother’s trying to tell him something
Yeah whatever
[…]
oh wow
what a bad scene
I just realized I’m going to die learning
about myself in the hardest way
this is no pony party
actually it kind of is, is
what makes it all so horribly real
as if the sound were cutting back in
how much more time is this
going to take
my heart is in my ears
its every report a separate agony
the fight is in my heart
my heart is upside-down

[…]

When I emailed Larsen, he explained that “benshi” is a Japanese word referring to the “interpreter” who performed a live narrative accompaniment to silent movies, in lieu of showing intertitles with dialogue, etc. In Korean the practice is known as pyônsa. “Neo-benshi” is the name that’s been popularized by Konrad Steiner and others for the current practice/genre/game of producing alternate voice-overs for “talkies.”
Linh Dinh: How long have you been doing it? Where did you get this idea?
David Larsen: I was approached by Konrad Steiner through Roxi Hamilton back in 2005. At first I said no because it sounded like so much work (and sure enough it took 3 days solid to write that 11-minute piece you saw). Without their urging it never would have occurred to me to do it.
LD: How many people are employing this method? Can we call it a trend? A fad?
DL: The same night I performed it in Philly, there were eight people in San Francisco doing exactly the same thing. Among experimental poets in the Bay Area it’s definitely a fad, and they’re doing it in Los Angeles too. I performed it the next night at Betalevel in LA’s Chinatown, where they do a series called “Da Benshi Code.” New problems with sound & projection come up every time it’s performed, but that just adds to the “live” effect. The only thing I’ll never try again is a throat mike. I’d rather perform with no amplification.
LD: Who are the better practitioners of this?
DL: Hard to say as I haven’t seen more than one performance by a single performer. The best neo-benshi performance I’ve seen was Mac McGinness’ reading of a script by Norma Cole along with a segment of the film JUDEX (1963) by Georges Franju.
Larsen then steered me towards Walter K. Lew, who has been performing movietelling pieces since the 1980s. He also introduced the method to his students at Mills College in Oakland. Although Lew’s excited by the increasing popularity of this technique, and applauds many of the performances, he’s uncomfortable with the term “neo-benshi,” since it exoticizes and orientalizes, he feels, a method that had to be widespread during the silent film era. Lew explains:

A fascinating, oft-neglected fact of world film history is that nearly everywhere movies have been regularly shown there was an era in which they were screened with live speech by orators or voice actors. The katsuben of Japan and pyônsa of Korea were the most celebrated forms of this once-global practice. Sometimes praised during their heyday as “poets of the dark,” in Korea the most iconoclastic “movietellers” risked imprisonment or worse to share their interpretations of films with local communities.
Perhaps they would have approved of the wit and freedom with which [contemporary] poets have chosen to recast the 20th century’s most powerful and oppressive artistic form.

Vietnamese-American writer and critic Thuy Dinh (no relations) talks about this practice in the Vietnamese context:

I have heard about orators reading/narrating films. Theaters showing foreign films in Vietnam in the 30s through the 50s had done this. Back in 1996, when we did the Vietnamese Film Program for the Asian American Film Festival, I invited Mr. Than Trong Ky to be one of our guest speakers. Mr. Ky was chockful of both Vietnamese and Western film knowledge, he himself a film director in pre-1975 South Vietnam. (His claim to fame was a wartime melodrama called Chân Tr�?i Tím [Purple-Hued Horizon]). He said in the old, old days, prior to his UCLA film training and short career as a Hollywood film extra (he appeared as a VC in the Green Beret), he worked as an orator for theaters in Saigon during the 50s. His job as orator wasn’t limited to silent foreign films, but also extended to “talkies” which occasionally ran into technical difficulties in theaters that were not sufficiently organized to keep track of their reels or equipped with a good sound system. Sometimes, the second reel of film would be missing, and if he had seen the film before, he would simply narrate what happened in the second half for those who were interested in staying and finding out the ending [...] those who preferred seeing [and not just hearing about] the second reel would get a refund on their ticket and had to come back the next day, or whenever the second reel could be located.

More recent antecedents to movietelling include Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and Beavis and Butthead. As a relatively new and evolving genre, movietelling is in its exploratory (and perhaps most exciting) stage, with almost no critical attention yet. To paraphrase Kent Johnson, its aesthetics haven’t caught up with the practices.
In February of 2008, Walter Lew staged in New York an event called Poets of the Unreeled: CinePoetry & Performance Extravaganza. Having seen these performances, I’d say that a movietelling artist’s two main tasks are, in order of importance, A) Compose a narration B) Perform this narration in public. He or she also has the option of recutting the film and/or inserting new footage and/or soundtrack, which requires a third set of skills, that of the filmmaker’s. Pivoted on a film, a successful movie telling narration surprises and enlightens viewers with a series of verbal tangents that riff on, play with, subvert the shown images. A weak narration insults us with obvious observations. Literalness annoys. The thrill is in the divergence.
As curated by Walter K. Lew, most of the performances were actually not movietelling per se, although they still depended on an interplay between the verbal/audio and visual. Four strictly movietelling pieces were presented by Kate Ann Heidelbach, Jeremy James Thompson and dennis M. somera. Of these, somera’s “WEstsiDESTROY,” a deft and hilarious narration of U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico superimposed onto West Side Story, was most powerful thanks to its sharp writing and well-rehearsed and nuanced performance, its manipulation of the voice revealing acting and even singing skills. I won’t analyze my own movietelling piece, but those interested in seeing it can click here.

[Photo: Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Ohio Theater, Ohio," 1980.]

04.26.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

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