NEO-BENSHI: The latter day art of live film narration

A benshi was a film-teller, someone who wrote a script to narrate and act out from the stage what is happening on the movie creen. This was a major profession in Korea and Japan in the silent film era. Sometimes the benshi ventriloquized the characters in the movie, sometimes just narrated the action, sometimes remained silent. They always wrote their own scripts.

Neo-benshi warps that format to a modern entertainment-art of taking back the movies for ourselves. Screenplays are tossed, subtexts are revealed and genres are transposed to another key. In this festival of alternate readings, six scenes from major films are wrested from the studios by turning the sound off, and re-telling them in real time.

Making use of a form of the Kuleshov Effect, writer/performers from the Bay Area will re-present the following genres:

Sci-Fi Horror: eSNAIL (1979)
by Stephanie Young
Historical Epic: O TRY (2004)
by David Larsen
Bollywood Melodrama: PYAASA (1957)
by Rodney Koeneke
Hollywood Melodrama: ROUT TWICE, HEAL, BE USA (1955)
by Roxanne Power Hamilton
French Crime Drama: EX JUD (1963)
by Norma Cole & Mac McGinnes
Serial Western: THE NH PRIMATE POEM (1935)
by Brandon Brown

Neo-benshi is the karaoke of cinema.
-- Konrad Steiner