Why the Silver Screen Was Silver｜Screens Coated with Silver and Aluminum, Utsushi-e, and the Benshi

It is hard to imagine in an age when we can watch any number of films on a smartphone or television whenever we like, but films once had an allure all their own, a power to captivate great numbers of people from the heart.

Curiously, that allure was not born from the images themselves. It was a kind of magic worked on the side of the screen that showed them, and within it lies a sensibility peculiar to Japanese cinema. Just as we today, trying to pull back from a digital world gone too far, are returning to a “lost physicality” in vinyl records, film cameras, and printed books, there were people in the past who also longed for “something lost.” What they left behind is the word Ginmaku, the silver screen.

Why “silver,” to begin with? At the source of what led to the birth of cinema was the magic lantern. Its principle, which some say had already appeared in China in the second century, was later developed in modern Europe and reached Japan in the Edo period aboard Dutch ships, by way of Dejima in Nagasaki.

In Rangaku Kotohajime, the memoir of Genpaku Sugita, the physician of Dutch Learning known for the anatomy text Kaitai Shinsho, a “toferu rantan” (from the Dutch toverlantaarn, meaning magic lantern) appears among the novelties that came in from the Netherlands. Accounts differ as to when it was actually imported, but the device itself is thought to have been known in some circles by the late eighteenth century, as Dutch Learning flourished.

Then, in 1801, at the opening of the nineteenth century, the history that leads to film began when a painter named Kumakichi happened to see a magic lantern from the Netherlands on show in Ueno. Taking it as his cue, Kumakichi started a show he named Utsushi-e, “projected pictures,” and charged admission at a rented hall in Kagurazaka. These shows were called Utsushi-e in Edo and Nishiki Kage-e in the Kamigata region around Kyoto and Osaka, and, surprisingly, their roots bear on what makes Japanese cinema distinctive.

Utsushi-e was a show in which glass slides were projected with handheld wooden projectors and accompanied by narration and music, and in it the prototype of cinema, “light cast into a dark room to form images, with a narrator and music,” was already complete. The problem, ever since the age of the magic lantern, was the light source. Early cinema used limelight, in which quicklime was heated to incandescence by an oxyhydrogen flame, and after that the carbon arc lamp became the standard for projectors. The arc lamp brought far more brightness, but projected onto plain white cloth the light still scattered, leaving the image vague and drowsy. Faced with this problem, engineers chose not to tinker with the projector but to raise the reflective efficiency of the screen itself, and after much trial and error, screens mixed with aluminum or silver came into use.

This worked because aluminum and silver are metals that throw light back. Screens painted with these coatings came to be called the silver screen in English, and in time Ginmaku took root as the Japanese translation. Ginmaku, in short, was a term for the screen itself in the early days of cinema, a word that began with a technical device to make up for a dim light source.

Film equipment came to Japan around 1896–97. First, in 1896, the Kinetoscope invented by Thomas Edison in America was imported into Kobe, then Japan’s international port, and the following year the Cinematograph of the Lumière company of France and the Vitascope of the Edison line arrived at the same time. The earliest screenings were held in converted playhouses in Osaka, Kyoto, and Asakusa. Because the legacy of Utsushi-e flowed into film on the Japanese side, cinema in Europe and America went on to become an independent visual medium, while in Japan the narrators known as Katsudo Benshi settled in at the center of the film experience.

Standing beside the screen, they explained the plot, gave each character a voice of his or her own, and stirred the feelings of the audience. Narration was so indispensable in Japan that audiences cared as much about whose narration they would see a film with as about which film they would see. This narration from the age of Utsushi-e, together with the oral, deeply Japanese performing culture of kodan storytelling, rakugo, and kabuki, soon merged with the new technology of the silver screen.

As light struck the silver painted on the screen, the images glowed with an almost sorcerous, dreamlike beauty, while native narration stirred the audience’s emotions. This fusion of technology and tradition became the womb of Japan’s own visual culture. What matters is that in Japan the word Ginmaku was not simply a technical term but feeling itself, the memory of the good old cinema that began with the magic lantern. Entwined in this memory is the Benshi of the silent era. On the silver screen lit by the projector in the dark, narration and music became one, live. This is the “memory of the silver screen,” and it went on to remain as a spiritual residue in Japanese cinema.

In 1931, however, a great fault line opened in the history of film technology, and it met with strong resistance from society. It was the transition to talkies, films with sound. Japan’s first full-fledged talkie was Heinosuke Gosho’s The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1931), and because this change was a technical turning point that made the Benshi unnecessary, disputes and strikes broke out one after another. As a result, while Europe and America moved smoothly from silent films to talkies, in Japan the spread of talkies was held back for some time, and silent films and talkies existed side by side for many years.

This Japanese film world, where silent films and talkies coexisted in a way rare anywhere in the world, gave a powerful primal experience to the young filmmakers who would flourish after the war. As boys, they fell under the spell of a charm only the silver screen possessed, and some who skipped school to haunt the movie theaters later carved their names into film history. The silver screen went beyond a mere experience of film. It was also a place where Japanese and Western cultures mingled.

In fact, by the 1930s the silver screen itself was already giving way to white matte screens and had become a technology of the past. But those whose primal experience of film had been shaped by the feeling peculiar to the silver screen began, as Japanese cinema entered its golden age in the 1950s, to use the word Ginmaku as a word of nostalgia. After World War II, the Japanese had entered an age of mass consumer culture under American occupation, and in their longing for the feelings of the prewar years they projected onto film their primal experience of it.

So it was that, at a time when the silver reflective screen was technically a relic of the past, phrases like “star of the silver screen” and “queen of the silver screen” took on a life of their own, and Ginmaku in time became a beautiful metonym for Japanese cinema as a whole. Put another way, just as people in developed countries today long for the time before digital, before the 1990s, for the Japanese of that era it was a return to Japanese feeling from before America, before 1945.

As silver, the material, finished its work, Ginmaku, the word, only grew brighter. That feeling may be the very bloodline running beneath Japanese cinema.