Benshi: a live voice for the moving image

Voice and accompaniment

A benshi explains action, changes voices for characters and may comment on the scene. Musicians contribute another part of the sound, making volume, pauses and timing a shared task. The screen and live performance work together; different benshi can give the same surviving film different interpretations.

Writing for the images

At the Japan Institute of the Moving Image in 2023, Midori Sawato performed with Ozu’s 1931 Tokyo Chorus. In the discussion afterwards, she described writing a script for the intervals between a silent film’s intertitles and learning from earlier performers’ books and recordings. The task is therefore not simply reading each title when it appears: character voices and explanations must occupy the time in which the images continue.

Early introductory remarks could explain a film’s story and unfamiliar foreign places or customs. As films grew longer and more narrative, speech during the screening became more important. Some Japanese-film presentations divided character voices among several performers. A solo style combining narration, commentary and dialogue later became especially influential.

Popular benshi developed distinctive styles and followings in the Taisho and early Showa periods. A touring poster for Koyo Komada from around 1904, preserved by the national film archive, records an early form of promotion. A screening could be advertised through its film, actors and live narrator alike.

Recorded dialogue, music and effects changed the live narrator’s place in cinema during the 1930s. Heinosuke Gosho’s The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1931) makes the change audible: everyday noises disrupt a playwright’s work and drive the story, while recorded dialogue establishes the comedy’s rhythm. Sound was being designed as part of the film itself. As such films spread, commercial opportunities for benshi contracted, although cinemas did not all make the transition at once.

Recordings and restoration

Preservation extended beyond the film print. In 1954, Musei Tokugawa again narrated Souls on the Road (1921), which he had also presented on its original release. Recordings from the later performance were incorporated into NFAJ’s 2014 restoration, covering fifty-four minutes across its beginning and end. The restored presentation therefore combines older images with a postwar performance, not sound captured at the 1921 premiere.

Live screenings today

Postwar recordings, collections and screening programmes helped carry the art forward. NFAJ’s 2022 programme of rediscovered films included benshi such as Midori Sawato and Ichiro Kataoka alongside musicians. Contemporary performance offers a way to experience older films and a continuing art of vocal timing and interpretation.

Audience participation

A 2025 NFAJ children’s screening of the 1928 comedy Feel My Pulse shows another kind of coordination. Benshi Kumiko Omori led the audience in cheering the heroine as she confronted villains, with Haruka Amamiya accompanying on electronic piano. The audience practised before the film, then joined in at the relevant scene. Those voices belonged to that live presentation, not to a soundtrack recorded for the original film.