La mélodie de l’ombre

Silent cinema never actually existed! There were always musicians and narrators performing, chatting and singing during screenings, appearing wherever films were shown, in fairs, theatres, circus tents… These “cinema storytellers” (as the writer Gert Hofmann calls them in his novel of the same name) read the intertitles, sang songs or introduced the actors to the audience, all accompanied by orchestras. In 1920s Japan, these storytellers were known as “Benshi”. Their art was so popular that filmmakers made films especially for them. In some of these films, the lyrics to popular songs would appear on screen so that the ” Benshi” and the audience could sing along together—nothing less than karaoke!

This is the tradition that inspires La mélodie de l‘ombre: a “modern” benshi (Eva Schwabe) and an orchestra of eleven instrumentalists interact with Japanese animated shorts from the first half of the twentieth century, most of which were made precisely to be accompanied by “benshis” and orchestras. The programme is completed by a silhouette film by Lotte Reiniger, a German animation pioneer.