On the 14th of September, between the hours of 7 and 9 pm, I determined that I liked silent movies a lot better with a Japanese man shouting over them.

The Benshi who performed said rite, Kataoka Ichiro, translates silent movies for a living. It is insane how well he portrays how the characters are feeling to the audience through tone of voice and other inflections, despite all his words being in a language that I don’t understand. People laughed in unison at a movie they didn’t understand a word of, because the Benshi’s voice portrayed perfectly that it was time to laugh. But the other side to this is the fact that we definitely missed a lot of information that couldn’t be portrayed through tone of voice or the subtitles under the intertitles: the extra commentary that the Benshi was giving about the social significance of the film that we only got a taste of from the ten minutes of Professor Nornes performing the same role in English.

Nornes performed the beginning of the feature film, “I Was Born, But…” before the professional Benshi took over. Before that film, however, Ichiro performed his role for two English movies: a silent film called “The Cook” and a Laurel and Hardy talkie clip, shouting over it to translate it into Japanese.

The Benshis are known to have so much power over audience opinion in Japan that the police forbade them to provide commentary on rebellion videos. So, when Professor Nornes hinted at what Ichiro would be saying in the commentary of the feature film, it got me thinking about what he might be saying at the more obviously social activist bits. But there was no way I could have any idea what he was actually saying, even with subtitles.

And this brings me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past week: the loss of content in cinema through translation into subtitles. I noticed during the Japanese feature film that the intertitles were always shorter than what the Benshi said, and the subtitles were always shorter than the intertitles. So much was being lost in the translation from silent to a tiny bit of the dialogue, and just as much from Japanese dialogue into English. I used to think that subtitles were the best form of translation. Now, I believe that the best kind of translation is a Benshi shouting over the music in a tiny theater, conveying things silence can only hope to convey to an audience of people willing and able to translate, in their own way.