From the invention of the movie media in 1895 to the development of vocal films in the mid-1920s, we call it the silent picture days. In the silent picture days, a narrator played the role of reciting the lines of actors in the film or describing the stories shown on the screen. There were other narrators in other countries, but the popularity of the narrators in Japan was truly tremendous. Japan′s first silent-movie narrator is known as UEDA Hoteiken, who played at the Nanchi Theater in Osaka in 1896. However, those Japanese narrators, who had enjoyed explosive popularity, all disappeared around 1937 with the introduction of talking films.
Talking the Pictures is a tribute to the silent pictures and the silent picture days dedicated by Director SUO Masayuki. The film starts in front of a small movie theater in a rural town, showing a boy and a girl imitating the dialect of a narrator, dreaming of becoming one of them in the future. A decade later, the boy, who grew up as a young man, is working as an assistant to a cinema that has secured a large audience in competition with a cinema in a neighboring village, and the showdown of a full-time narrator of the cinema gives him a chance to enter as a narrator. He gets an enthusiastic response from the audience. Enjoying the high popularity, he is also lucky to be reunited with first love, but involved in a case where thieves seeking to make a fortune and police officers tracking down a fake narrator are conflicting. (Jay JEON)