I seriously need some benshi<\/i> movies. <\/p>\n
\nBack in the days of silent movies, the soundtrack to the movie (if there was any) was performed live. In America, usually this would be in the form of pipe organ music, which had been composed specifically for that feature… sometimes the restored theaters here (the Paramount<\/a> and the Stanford<\/a>) in the bay area show silents with the original scores, performed live on a Wurlitzer organ, a piece of machinery so huge it was built into the walls of the theater. It’s extremely cool, and if you bring a date I can almost gaurantee you will get laid.<\/p>\n\nIn Japan however, they didn’t have pipe organs- they had shamisen<\/a><\/i> (a really funky 3-string guitar now usually played by old ladies) and koto<\/a><\/i>. And they had benshi<\/a><\/i>– commentators who would narrate the title cards (the slates with the dialog written on the screen) in the different voices of the characters. They were extremely skilled and some, like “Tokugawa Musei<\/a>,” became quite well-known.I love Clara Bow<\/a>. Snarkout’s author, Steve, mentions that although at one point she was the “it girl,” her career was ruined by the advent of the talkies… her voice was just too annoying for most audiences. But one thing Steve doesn’t mention is that she was the original<\/b> “it” girl- the one who was first associated with that slang phrase. An “It girl” today means the girl of the moment, someone who is recently very popular, who is getting incorporated in seemingly everything… Originally, “It” was sex appeal<\/u>, but the newspaper reviews could only allude to this due to the social standards of the day (the 1920s).<\/p>\n\nHe also left out Valentino<\/a>! That guy was great.<\/p>\n I seriously need some benshi movies. And I need some Clara Bow movies. And so do you!<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I seriously need some benshi movies. Back in the days of silent movies, the soundtrack to the movie (if there was any) was performed live. In America, usually this would be in the form of pipe organ music, which had been composed specifically for that feature… sometimes the restored theaters here (the Paramount and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}