URBANA – The Ebert Center for Film Studies is set to host The Japanese Paper Film Project on Friday night at the Spurlock Museum in Urbana.
Eric Faden, the project lead, started working with Kyoto’s Toy Film Museum in 2019 to cultivate the film preservation project based at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Where most film is made from celluloid, these films are printed frame-by-frame on paper in both anime and live-action formats.
Originally created in the 1930s, Faden said these films were thought to be printed on paper due to their small-scale showings, meant for households and neighborhoods.
“These were made on giant sheets of paper. An entire movie would be printed line-by-line,” he said. “Those columns would then get cut and glued together every 40 frames.”
Not only unique in their format, Faden said these films were in color and accompanied by soundtracks, which was unusual for the time.
Unfortunately, some of these soundtracks have been lost to time. This is where Duo Yumeno steps in.
Duo Yumeno is a New York-based husband-and-wife music duo consisting of Hikaru Tamaki, a cellist, and Yoko Kimura, who plays the Japanese koto, a dulcimer-like instrument.
Kimura said she composed most of her scores through improvisation based on the stories and characters of the films.
“The live performances of the Japanese Paper Film Project are lively and we can feel the audience feedback very organically,” Kimura said.
Faden said that while their musical collaboration began with only Kimura and her koto, he found that later including Tamaki’s cello added an interesting quality to their work.
“The combination of koto and cello is really this beautiful combination between Japanese music and more Western music,” Faden said. “And sometimes the koto is played in a more Western way and the cello in a more Japanese way.”
Due to their age, these films have become so delicate that their original projectors cannot project them without immensely damaging them. Consequently, though many museums and film archives own these films, they have not been seen.
Faden and his team set out to find a solution, ultimately creating a new scanner called the Kyorinrin, named after the Japanese Yokai spirit who protects lost or forgotten scrolls.
The scanning machine allows the paper film to be fed through carefully yet rapidly while a camera captures the frames in quick succession.
Upon scanning a film, Faden and his team found another film on the backside of the filmstrip.
“This was a film that was created by whoever owned that film at the time. They handdrew their own movie,” Faden said. “And the movie is their memory of seeing an American film noir being projected at a local cinema.”
In order to scan their new discovery, the team decided to take apart their machine to be able to feed this film in reverse.
“Suddenly you’re connected to… somewhere there was a human being in Japan at this time period who saw this movie and felt that they had to make their own movie,” Faden said.
The hand-drawn film will also be shown at the event Friday.
The Japanese Paper Print Project Film and Live Music Event takes place at 7 p.m. Friday, March 28, and is free and open to the public.