The Japanese Paper Film Project
@kamifirumu
The Japanese Paper Film Project preserves 1930s Japanese paper films (紙フィルム or "kami firumu") and promotes research into these rare movies. kamifirumu.scholar.bucknell.edu
The sound cue ("ハジメ" or "begin") is just a single frame that appears after the opening title.
After live shows & studio recording last month, we're back to work on film preservation. We've posted about Sarutobi Satsuke before on our Insta account. We just finished the Edo Episode, part 2 which features Satsuke in some serious shapeshifting battles! #anime #Japan #cinema #filmpreservation
Japanese Paper Films at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival May 8 at 5pm! We are delighted to play at the amazing @castrotheatre.bsky.social with live music by Duo Yumeno #anime #japan #koto #film
This week is my office's humble "hanami" season when a small 90° turn to the right moves from editing Japanese paper films to the beautiful 桜 cherry blossoms. (Next week the blossoms will all be on my carpet from walking through them to get to my office!).
Kachi Kachi Yama is a Japanese folktale about a mischievous tanuki who torments an elderly couple only to be tricked by their friend, the rabbit. This film reshapes the story as wartime propaganda. The tanuki and rabbit continue their battle complete with a climax of flying Japanese daikon radishes!
Our scanning system is super gentle on the films. But some films need repairs before scanning. _Monkey & Tanuki_ was so brittle that it fell apart at the slightest touch. Owner Yo Sato-sensei generously let us bring it to Bucknell for repairs. Enjoy the time lapse (4-hour surgery!) & final result!
"Silver Comes Through" is a 1927 Hollywood film that made its way to Japan & then copied to paper in the 1930s. The original 35mm film is lost thus making the paper copy some of the film's only surviving footage. Star Fred Thomson is largely forgotten now because so few of his films were preserved.
Our next show will be Jan. 31st at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the "To Save and Project" festival. A big "thank you" to Dan Streible for including Japanese paper films in the @orphanfilms at MoMA program. As usual, Duo Yumeno will provide live musical accompaniment.
Thank you Brisbane & QAGOMA for hosting our screening! What an amazing audience. A special note of appreciation to curator Robert Hughes for organizing our visit. Duo Yumeno were fantastic & we loved the James Turrell artwork outside the Gallery. Sydney is up next for the Japanese Film Festival.
Come to our Yale screening by car, boat, train, hot air balloon, turtle, tanuki, horse, motorcycle, skis, rocket or just run! As always, Duo Yumeno (Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto and Hikaru Tamaki on cello) provide live musical accompaniment. Details: film.yale.edu/events/2025-...
Some of our favorite photos from our performance at The Pordenone Silent Film Festival. The photos were shot by the amazing Valerio Greco (@silentvalerio on Instagram). Duo Yumeno played from the orchestra pit. #Japan #film #anime #paper
Hello from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival! We loved seeing Japanese paper films projected onto the Teatro Verdi theatre to promote our screening. Props to Phoebe for b-roll of Yoko, Hikaru, & Eric capturing the moment! A big THANK YOU to the Yanai Initiative for supporting our screening here.
I love paper films' materiality, especially in an age where digital streams have largely replaced physical media. When color grading, I always look at the beginning of the filmstrip and darken it to reveal the ridges and spirals of fingerprints from those who handled the films 90+ years ago.
Land ho! Tonkichi's Adventure is a charming anime where nothing is as it seems.
Sharing from Instagram: we're beyond thrilled to play the Pordenone Silent Film Festival next month in Italy. A truly magical venue and event. #japan, #anime, #silentcinema
Philly, New Jersey, and NYC friends: new program premiering next week at Lafayette's Williams Center for the Arts on Sept. 12 at 7pm. Ticket's here: williamscenter.lafayette.edu/event/japane... As usual, Duo Yumeno joins us for live musical accompaniment!
In case you weren't up at 2am last night to catch the live broadcast from Japan, here's a link to the English news segment from NHK World broadcast on the Japanese Paper Film Project. Thank you to journalist Takatoshi Murakami & his amazing filming crew! www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/...
This summer NHK (Japan's national TV network) produced a great news segment on our project that broadcast in July & re-aired in August. They've now made an English version for NHK World. If you find yourself awake tonight at 2am (EST), then watch it live: www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/...
Beware of speedy turtles! Suihō Tagawa's Norakuro was a popular manga character in the 1930s who also appears in several paper films. We scanned an incomplete version of this film in 2024 but collector Natsuki Matsumoto found a complete version which we scanned this summer in Japan.
New 2025 cut of our live roadshow program is done! New subtitles, fixed a lot of little (and sometimes big) mistakes, typos, random frames that crept into the cut, improved the Japanese, and incorporated several new films and/or better preservations of films already in the program!
Like so many paper films, this one begs for more research. This film - along with several others - targets (in an admittedly stereotyped way) 1930s Japanese girls & young women. Other films (like the Sutakora Sacchan films), however, upend gender norms. A book chapter/journal article awaits!
Back to work on new films. We scanned Prof. Yo Sato's collection this summer including the Japanese folktale "Battle of Monkey & Crab." Like most Japanese folktales ... it's complicated: there's onigiri, persimmons, a crustacean tragedy, & vengeance with bees, chestnuts, and a quasi-human mortar.
We always travel with musicians Yoko Reikano Kimura & Hikaru Tamaki but our Japan tour also had benshi Ichiro Kataoka & Kumiko Omori. Benshi were star Japanese film narrators popular in the 1920s & 1930s. Some paper film soundtracks include benshi so it was an honor to have live benshi on the tour.
The current issue of MUBI's NOTEBOOK magazine (issue #7, "Threshold of the Visible") features a GEORGEOUS profile on our project. NOTEBOOK is a print-only, biannual magazine where each issue is a bespoke design and layout based on the content. Pick up a copy or subscribe: mubi.com/en/notebook/...
One of the film's screened during our summer tour was Seven Little Lambs. Here's a G-rated part of the film but things turn dark quickly when the wolf eats the lambs and then the mother sheep seeks revenge. 1930s fairy tales don't pull any punches!
Whoa! It's been awhile! We've been super busy this summer touring Japan and scanning new films. We'll start with this amazing picture drawn by our research students Yara Polusmak and Mikaru Plankenhorn for Kyoto's Toy Film Museum's guest book. We were visiting the museum's new location!