Wouldn't it depend on how you approached the material with the students? The absence of a benshi would probably produce some very interesting ambiguities. As an exercise in examining how moving images communicate meaning I think The Water Magician would be a fine choice (benshi-less--sorry couldn't resist that one) and the question of misrepresentation would be an interesting part of the discussion in class.
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From: Film-Philosophy Salon on behalf of Frank, Michael
Sent: Fri 15/02/2008 9:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: pedagogical query: silent cinema
ravi's note, reproduced below, raises a fascinating question . . . if my purpose in this silent cinema course is to examine how moving images can work to communicate meaning in the absence of spoken dialogue, and if my circumstances [shared, i venture, by most of us] do not permit me to provide a benshi, how honest a representation of a film like this one can i offer? . . . if in some sense the film was made presupposing a benshi, is showing it without one a significant misrepresentation? . .
of course i understand that the circumstances of viewing in our modern institutions are never the same -- probably cannot be the same -- as they were originally . . . still i suspect that some changes are more radical than others . . . perhaps, just by way of illustration/suggestion, we might say that watching "maltese falcon" on a TV screen rather than projected in a theatrical space misrepresents that film less than would watching it in a theater but with the sound track turned off . . .
put differently, unless we buy into the romantic essentialism of the new critics - that every work [of "art"] is an organic whole and that any change at all is deadly -- we're likely to want to say that some changes do more to harm and/or misrepresent some original version more than others
in more practical terms, would i be doing my students a disservice by showing mizoguchi's film without a benshi?
thoughts???
mike
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Mike,
You might like to include -- Kenji Mizoguchi's 'The Water Magician'
In July 2007 the Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian Cinema, New Delhi showed this
rare film accompanied by an extraordinary benshi performance (by a woman benshi
from Japan). The presence of the benshi totally transformed the experience of
this masterpiece of a silent film - that's how the audience must have seen the
film when it was made, not as it happens with silent film screenings these
days, in a kind of deathly silence.
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