CWC Global: The Art of the Benshi

Ichiro Kataoka is among the most prominent and highly regarded contemporary benshi, celebrated not only in Japan but around the world for his dynamic, nuanced performances. He first embarked on his career in 2002 when he asked the pioneering benshi Sawato Midori to take him on as an apprentice. In the intervening years, he has performed in more than eighteen countries, creating and enacting scripts for approximately 350 silent films (Japanese, Western, and Chinese) of all sorts of genres, including documentaries and animated works. In 2024, he served as lead benshi in the Yanai Initiative’s The Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour.

Makia Matsumura, a New York City-based silent film accompanist, has been captivating audiences for two decades with her live piano improvisations in front of the silver screen. As an alumna of the Pordenone Masterclasses, a distinguished program for emerging silent film accompanists, Makia’s music has played an integral role in silent film events at renowned venues internationally. Demonstrating remarkable musical talent from a young age, she has become a sought-after presence within the silent film community. In addition to her live performances, Makia has provided recorded scores for silent film releases from Kino Lorber, some of which have been featured on Turner Classic Movies and Netflix. She was also featured in the Yanai Initiative’s The Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour.

Naoki Yamamoto specializes in film theory, Japanese cinema, Marxist criticism, documentary films, avant-garde art, post-colonial studies, and Japanese cultural history. His book Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in A Global Frame explores Japan’s active but previously unrecognized participation in the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the twentieth century. He has published widely in both English and Japanese, covering topics such as the reception of early American cinema in 1910s Japan, wartime Japanese-German film co-productions, Japanese New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s, and recent Hollywood blockbuster films.