film-telling vs. movietelling: (no subject)

Linh Dinh's recent post on Harriet Blog is about Movietelling. 

He shares his exchange with David Larsen, as well as excerpts of Vietnamese-American writer and critic Thuy Dinh conveying her thoughts on historical film narration in Vietnam.

See Linh Dinh's movietelling piece, A Smooth Life.

In other movietelling news...

Konrad Steiner goes Northwest with Neo-Benshi, along with David Larsen & other Bay Area poets. They're joining up with a group of Portland-based artists and writers to put on: The New Talkies: Portland-San Francisco Neo-Benshi Cabaret. (May 3rd)

Just when I was about to give up my regular google search for various film narration activities, this one comes along. Sadly, I won't be able to make it out to Portland this week, but perhaps someone will be kind enough to archive some of the event on-line. 

As excited as I am just to know this event is taking place, I was disappointed upon reading Konrad Steiner's "Curator's Statement." As I'm going to write about its specifics, I'll post it here:

The "benshi" is the name for the accomplished actor/writer who wrote scripts to narrate live to projected films in Japan, where the profession reached its commercial and popular apex in the 1920s, more than in any other country, mainly because of a prosperous and prolific Japanese film industry.

There have been many variations of talking during a movie over the global history of film. The long tradition behind this current wave of interest in the form includes hecklers in theaters, dads in living rooms with their home movies, professional narrators of silent documentaries, the reknowned film-tellers in Europe and Asia, right up to TV shows like Jay Ward's Fractured Flickers in the 1960s and Mystery Science 
Theater in the 1990s.

The task of accompanying silent film is usually left to musicians. It becomes the task of writers to silence the talkies and revive the image whose meaning has been controlled and even restricted by the corporate culture of mass entertainment and mass profit. The benshi can take back the cinema, and anyone with a DVD player and a remote can give it a shot.

First off, I appreciate his anyone-can-do-it conclusion, as well as mentioning that there are ways in which a kind of spectator film narration is frequently taking place as part of a casual practice (i.e. home movies, hecklers etc). But in general, these qualities are spliced with a contrary agenda, as he opens his statement with a "benshi" definition that spends more time qualifying its dominance as a practice than it does actually wrestling with its definition. 

In an attempt to diffuse the exclusifying effects of the previous paragraph, he begins the second paragraph with a statement that translates something like: Even though the "benshi" were the predominant and most popular of the film narrators, many other people have "talked during a movie." The humor is more insulting than insightful. He may as well have begun that first sentence, "Of course, there have been many variations..." 

Among those who talk during movies, he counts "film-tellers in Europe and Asia." 

"film-tellers" vs. "movietellers." Is this similar to the semantic implications implied by saying "I've just screened a film" vs. "We went to the movies?" Or is there some other distinction? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference, but why the distinction?

As a side note, some of those early practitioners of film narration in Europe and Asia were the Gavrilov Translators in Russia (a tradition maintained even into the 1980's), the Pyonsa in Korea, the Benzi in Taiwan, the Lector in Poland, as well as orators in Vietnam, France, and the Southern United States. All of this was happening at the same time, prompted by the influx of new mediums and technology (films), and the necessity of translation. 

In his final paragraph, Steiner heralds the subversive nature of the benshi. "The benshi can take back the cinema..." This is preceded by "It becomes the task of the writers to silence the talkies and revive the image whose meaning has been controlled and even restricted by the corporate culture of mass entertainment and mass profit." Let me juxtapose this with a more constructive quote from Linh Dinh's recent post on Harriet Blog: "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 image." 

Subversion is built into the function/form of movietelling. Subversion is there in the act of altering the script, reissuing personalities, and crossing over from one medium to the next, but it's not always done well. Sometimes the effect is weak as a result of literal depictions, & sometimes the entire experience is an unpleasant collision between the filmmakers directed images and the film narrators trying to erase the effects of those images. Steiner claims, without providing any exception, that the images used by film narrators are dead of meaning and constrained by corporate culture, there value being primarily entertainment and profit. Steiner works for the SF Cinemateque... are the films they sponsor also considered waste to be recycled by a film narrator? 

One mark of a good film narrator/ movieteller/ neo-benshi, what have you, is a respect for the material being used: the film. I understand that some films are used because of their accepted lack of value, and that is a fine form of subversion, but that does not define the intent of film narration in general. 

The (katsuben) benshi were not subversive. They were not against the predominant culture or mass sentiments. More often than not, they were exceptionally pro-mass sentiments, in that pro-imperialist "popular apex in the 1920's" kind of way. Their performances, more so than their international contemporaries, maintained a definitively traditional practice, and most of the modern Japanese benshi continue to do so.

Walter Lew who heads up shadoWord (a contemporary production of movietelling and cinepoetics) provides an alternative perspective:

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.

I continue to explore movietelling as a practice. I spend an equal amount of time in search of instances of live film narration or creative dubbing. Though sometimes treated as a fad, this practice has roots around the globe, and its continued practice has the potential to bring together the cultural nuances and practical techniques behind each. It has also begun to provide a creative space where filmmakers, poets, performance artists, and musicians collaborate and improvise. I don't want to take back the cinema. If it was lost to me, I don't think I'd feel compelled to practice film narration. I want to confront cinema. I want to subvert specifically, rather than demonstrating my capacity to subvert a medium in general. 

For more information on movietelling and related subjects, follow the Movieteling label of this post to several previous posts pertaining to the subject(s).

Teaching at the University of Miami (& writing again)

I've just returned from my trip to Miami, where I taught an undergraduate and a graduate course on self-publishing and book making, focusing on chapbooks, page layouts, and the politics of publishing within a specific community. 

I stayed with Walter Lew, who was also responsible for presenting me with the opportunity in the first place. Borrowing from the New York Center for Book Arts, as well as my own extensive collection, I hauled down with me a vast variety of chapbooks and book models. Several such models were constructed in class, and each was discussed. 

In short, it went quite well, and I hope to post some of my class notes in subsequent entries. Walter & I also took the opportunity to have several in depth discussions about movietelling, and, more specifically, potential directions for shadoWord productions. Thoughts concerning these discussion will also be present in soon-to-be posted subsequent entries. 

As a final note, I've begun working on a chapbook of my own. The working (& potentially permanent title) is "MIAMI Anxiety & SENSE." I haven't written anything new in more than a few months. This somewhat lengthy work has been and will continue to be a divergence from nearly all of my previous directions, with the exception of some of the themes I began to tamper with just prior to my no longer writing. If anything, I promise it to be very fresh and new. Stay tuned. 

Mashinka Firunts on Movietelling

Mashinka Firunts recently posted some insightful praise for the still somewhat recent shadoWord movietelling events I took part in. Being my wife, and loving all things related to me the most, the article is largely comprised of her account of my performance, and is preceded by several excellent observations and analogies pertaining to the visual spectacle and the evolving spectator into and throughout the 20th century. 

Movietelling on the Internet: a query

Goooaaalll!!! (part 1) by Mathew Timmons and Stan Apps is something like Movietelling Flarf. At first I was disappointed by what seemed to be a tone of sarcasm, delivered as commercials segue into a soccer match (channel surfing). I was bracing myself for a line-up of punchlines. The humor is certainly there, but the repetition and re-working of lines, the constant reapplication of 'products' being misrepresented, finally gets to me. I'm sucked in. It's also the first instance I've seen of multiple speakers providing the narrative and character voices, which is further complicated by something I read about Stan Apps contribution being played as a recording while Mathew Timmons performed live at their performance at Betalevel for Da Benshi Code in Los Angeles. (Though I think this had more to do with Stan Apps being out of town). 

Since there isn't much ambient sound on the recording, I'm guessing they made this performance privately, primarily intending, I assume, to post it online. Currently, there are no youTube listings for "Movietelling." For "Neo-Benshi," there are two excerpts of David Larsen's  performance "Paris of Troy." For "Benshi," there are some postings in Spanish which I don't believe have any relevance here, as well as one old news broadcast explaining the function of 'katsubenshi," and the performances of Stan Apps and Mathew Timmons. 

That's it. I find this surprising considering how many folks I know of who've performed in this medium, and how many times a video recorder was present. 

There are a variety of Movietelling performances I've heard or read about that I would very much like to see, but may never have the chance unless someone were to post them online. 

Walter Lew's shadoWord productions, who I continue to perform with, is planning an online release, of one kind or another, this summer. At the very least, I know it will involve the digital publication of many of our scripts, as well as vidcaps and photographs from the performances. 

(EDIT): As I was making the links for this post, I stumbled upon Da Benshi Code's website, where one can find no less than 8 video recordings of live Movietelling.

Movietelling: for a more practical avant-garde

The practice of Movietelling seems so fresh and unexplored. It's so rare to come upon a medium that is both relatively untapped, as well as somewhat resistant to being a novelty. For anyone not yet privy to the term Movietelling, let me begin by saying that it's a term coined by Walter K. Lew, in reference to the revived and renovated practice of the traditional Pyonsa (Korea), Benshi (Japan), Benzi (Taiwan), Lector (Poland), Gavrilov Transltor (former USSR), and other historically and culturally specific live narrators of film. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to sum up the specific function of each of these in a single description, but if we focus on the practices that are most commonly derived from today, the task becomes more reasonable. To that end, Pyonsa and Benshi, among the performances I have been associated with, seen, or read about tend to be the most common. Toward the beginning of the second decade of the 20th Century, silent foreign films were making their way to the countries of Asia (coming mainly from Europe and the United States). As the countries of Korea and Japan already possessed a rich history of stage performance (puppetry, mimes, theater and more), film might have been perceived as a similar art. And like many of the other stage performances, a narrator became a part of the film watching experience. In many cases, long before film narration, a narrator was responsible for far more than general narration; he or she may express the dialogue of each character, adopting a wide range of voices, as well as sound effects and singing. Another important note is the visual presence of the narrator: generally off to one side, as if their range of sight were to fill the gap between performance and audience. Among our current Western traditions, instances of narration are often intentionally hidden from view: a retrospective voice in a film, an announcer at a sports event, or one might even include the dubbing of a pop-singer's performance.

The Pyonsa and Benshi, as with the narrators of many other Asian genres of that period, were always exposed, though in some instances (following several decades of the practice(s)), the narrator presented (amplified) from behind the audience. The narrator often became inseparable from the film watching experience, often to the point of gaining celebrity on par (if not greater than) that of the actors. People often went to see a certain film as a result of it being narrated by a certain Pyonsa or Benshi. This tradition continued even after actors were given voices, but eventually the practice became increasingly esoteric (perhaps as a result of the technologically influenced spectacular scale of later films) and was relegated to the event listings of preservation societies and museums.

I've provided a significantly abridged version of one very small facet of the history of live film narration, and merely for the purpose of briefly contextualizing the contemporary practice of Movietelling. The broadest definition of Movietelling I could give is any instance where a human contingent mediates between an audience and an image. I say this very literally, as I understand that taken relatively it may encompass more than half the pastimes and art forms of the later part of the 20th Century. The following is a quote from my contribution to the Wikipedia "Benshi" page: "While some have adopted the term "Neo-Benshi," other performers have chosen to adopt the title "Movieteller" as an alternative to "Benshi," as they believe it emphasizes both the multicultural past and future(s) of the form, while also inviting further experimentation with the medium, such as a live narration of one's own films, the implementation of instruments as narrative devices, or any instance where a human contingent mediates between an audience and an image."

I think that Movietelling is an ideal form for emphasizing the collaborative process, reinventing the recognizable image, and contributing to a more practical avant-garde, in that it draws together an attentive group, creates new specifications from more general sources, and provides an entertaining, educating unexpected experience. It seems an appropriate medium for those interested in seeking out and/or creating new spaces wherein the distance between artifact, artists and audience is less daunting, and therefore more conducive for building community, which is itself a social art.

I've put all this down because I intend to refer to this practice often, and I hope it will assist in providing some initial context.

Wiki Wiki and What I read

I recently updated the Wiki listings for both Benshi and Neo-Benshi. 

I added a section to "Benshi" entitled "New Benshi Practice(s)." I was surprised not to have found more information pertaining to contemporary practices of live film narration. Eventually, I'd like to begin posting individual pages for each new Movietelling tradition I stumble upon. 

On today's to & from work subway commute, I began to read Today I Wrote Nothing, the selected writings of Daniil Kharms. And several weeks ago I read Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland. These books have cleansed my palate and shocked my imagination. Soon, I think I'll have to write something specific about Kharms.