At the recent launch of The Japan Foundation’s Japanese Film Festival 2021, we were given a special screening of director Masayuki Suô’s 2019 comedy Talking the Pictures, and I am here to tell you that it is an absolute must watch.
Talking Pictures?
Talking the Pictures opens in 1915, where we first meet Shuntaro Sometani, as he and his friends show up to a film set and they get their first taste of the movies. Here, Shuntaro meets Umeko Kurihara, and they form a friendship over their mutual love of cinema. She dreams of becoming an actress, and he, a katsubenshi (or just benshi for short), a dramatic narrator for silent movies.
The movie then jumps forward 10 years where we meet up with Shuntaro, now a benshi, with a group of traveling cinema folk, as they make their way through the countryside putting up screenings for the local villagers. Unbeknownst to the locals, however, is the fact that Shuntaro and his merry men are actually thieves, who rob the locals while they are away at the movies.
After coming close to being caught by a police detective, Shuntaro escapes with one of his cohorts’ stolen money, and hides out at a local theater, the Aokikan. Here, he’s put to work doing odd jobs while dealing with the many different residents of the theatre, from the other colourful benshis, to the crabby and cranky projectionist, the in-house musicians, the owner, and his taskmaster wife.
As luck would have it, Shuntaro is given the opportunity to step in to take over from an older benshi and finds himself a natural in the role. Shuntaro then becomes the popular local benshi, earning him the ire of a rival cinema hall (and its yakuza owner), kicking off a whole bunch of narrative hijinks, from a case of mistaken identity, to a kidnapping, missing money, arson, and a police shootout.
Reading Is for Dummies!
Talking the Pictures isn’t a complicated movie. The story it tells is simple, but the way director Masayuki Suô uses writer Shôzô Katashima’s cast of characters is what gives the story its charm. Despite this movie being about Shuntaro and Umeko, Talking the Pictures has a fairly large cast that come in and out of the story, filling the screen with a menagerie of unique personalities. Masayuki Suô’s ability to balance all these different characters and their individual stories is what makes this movie so beautifully engaging.
A big part of what makes Talking the Pictures so unique, is the role of the katsubenshi, a job that was specific to the early Japanese cinema going experience. Unlike the use of text on screen in the early silent movies of the West, the Japanese had individuals on hand – each one a master storyteller and performer – to narrate and voice the stories being told on screen. Not only did the benshis narrate the films, they also created the stories unto themselves, providing dialogue and scene narration where there was none before, assigning pathos and emotion, essentially creating their own version of the movie that was being screened.
Talking the Pictures is an enjoyable day out at the movies. It tells a story that is unique to its time and place, and you should definitely try and catch it during GSC and JFKL’s Japanese Film Festival 2021 happening across the country throughout January 2022.
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