Los Angeles Filmforum: The Cinema Cabaret

with 

Neelanjana Banerjee, Robin Sukhadia, Jen Hofer, Douglas Kearney, Nicole McJamerson, Janice Lee, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Jen Nellis, Konrad Steiner, and Jackie Wang performing live!

Sunday October 5, 2014 

7:30 pm 

Tickets $10 general admission, $6 students/seniors/VPES members

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Tonight ten poet-performers take on the movies by writing scripts that re-tell scenes from sevenfeature films, using them to repackage aspects of the history of our continent. The practice of counter-dubbing films with alternate soundtracks became ubiquitous in the 20th century. But almost from the beginning of cinema live orators and narrators were available to mediate the image on the screen, either for documentary films without inter-titles, or for imported films whose titles were in a foreign language, or indeed in Japan where the film industry grew around the star status of the benshi narrators, creating films designed to be narrated live by the actors who wrote the tale and voiced the characters. Sometimes called "movie telling" or "neo-benshi" or glossed as performance art, the seven pieces tonight will take scenes from different feature films and torque them with sometimes comic, critical, or poetic interpretations, all relating in some way to the history, or alternate history, of North America.