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Solaris Benshi (2008)

video/performance, 9'08"

part of The New Talkies: Portland–San Francisco Neo-Benshi Cabaret
organized by Konrad Steiner of kino21 (SF),
Rodney Koeneke, and Spare Room (PDX)
Sunday, May 3, 2008
Portland, Oregon

  • Andrei Tarkovsky: source film — Solaris (1972)
  • Venedikt Erofeev: source text — Moscow-Petushki (1970)
  • David Abel: writing, performance
  • Leo Daedalus: video editing, writing, performance
  • Konrad Steiner: event organization, performance video production

From Konrad Steiner's program notes:

Benshi is a Japanese term meaning roughly "film teller." In Japan, this profession thrived during the silent movie era. . . . with these artists who were both actors and writers writing original scripts. . . . Their job was to learn the films, crank out the texts, and perform them as dramatic accompaniment to the flicks.
[In 2003 Steiner was inspired] to approach several San Francisco filmmakers and writers to try out a slightly altered version of this practice, using modern film clips with the sound muted.

In 2008 The New Talkies came to Portland, with four pieces by San Franciscans and four by Portlanders, including David's and my reworking of Andrei Tarkovsky's astonishing 1972 film Solaris.

We chose the black-and-white film-within-a-film interrogation of Berton (itself containing a film-within-a-film-within-a-film), for its discrete completeness. I edited out all the present-tense cutaways and made a new soundtrack appropriated from different parts of Solaris and other sources.

David assembled his dialogue — for the principal character Berton — from Venedikt Erofeev's 1969 poetic novel Moscow-Petushki. I wrote my dialogue — for the rest of the characters — in response to David's text and to fit the video.

Thanks to Konrad for making the great performance video above.

See also the event program, for which I was pleased to design the cover art, and these links: