The Art Of The Benshi (Tsumasaburo Bando Baby Peggy) Blu-ray Presale

The Art Of The Benshi (Tsumasaburo Bando, Baby Peggy) Blu-ray

***** This is a preorder for a new release item that is not yet released. The release date for this item is 11-12-26. This item will be shipped from our Melbourne Warehouse within 5 days of the release date *****

***** PLEASE NOTE - THIS ITEM CANNOT BE GUARANTEED TO BE DELIVERED BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2026*****

This is NOT a normal DVD and will NOT play in a standard DVD player. This is a Blu-Ray Disc. The disc is playable only in Blu-Ray Disc compatible players.

Please note this is a Region A Blu-ray

Region A: Region A titles are suitable for USA and Canada. To play this Blu-ray in Australia you must have a Blu-ray player that can play all Region A,B and C Blu-rays

Please note image may vary

4K UHD / BLU-RAY DUAL-FORMAT. Flicker Alley and the Yanai Initiative-a collaborative project of UCLA and Waseda University in Tokyo-proudly present The Art of the Benshi, a limited edition (3,000 copies) box set that celebrates Japan's remarkable "film orators." Talkies famously overtook Hollywood in 1930. In Japan, however, the movies had been speaking all along thanks to live benshi performers who, standing off to the side of the screen, lent their voices to all manner of cinematic works, narrating events as they unfolded and speaking for the characters. Full-fledged artists in their own right, benshi interpreted and enlivened the cinema experience in Japan through expressive performances that illuminated and extended the emotional and thematic range of the works on screen. The art, today, is carried on by a small number of performers, many of whom have honed their abilities through apprenticeships under benshi of the preceding generation, creating a continuous lineage back to the performers of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Appearing for the first time on 4K UHD and Blu-ray disc are new 4K restorations of Buntarō Futagawa's Orochi (1925), Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness (1926), and, starring Baby Peggy (a highly popular star in Japan), Captain January (1924), along with Blu-ray releases of a new restoration of Kenji Mizoguchi's The Water Magician (1931) (presented in both 20fps and 24fps playback speeds), four additional Baby Peggy shorts: Brownie's Little Venus (1921), Sweetie (1923), Darling of New York (1923), and Our Pet (1924), as well as a surviving fragment of the samurai tale Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba (1928) by Daisuke Itō. Including 23 audio presentations across nine different titles, The Art of the Benshi features 11 different benshi with newly recorded performances from masters like Sawato Midori (on Orochi, The Water Magician, and Our Pet), Kataoka Ichirō (on Orochi, A Page of Madness, Captain January, and Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba), Sakamoto Raikō (on The Water Magician and Captain January), and Ōmori Kumiko (on The Water Magician, Captain January, Sweetie, and Blood-Spattered Takadanobaba).

Zone Region: A

Region A: Region A titles are suitable for USA and Canada. To play this Blu-ray in Australia you must have a Blu-ray player that can play all Region A,B and C Blu-rays