The Japanese Paper Film Project
@kamifirumu.bsky.social
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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
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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
Thanks! Discussions are underway to bring the program to the UK.
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
PlayTime. Students initially hate it. But when discussing why they hate it, they mention details the other students missed & then they all realize they each saw a “different” PlayTime and then want to rewatch it to see the details they didn’t think were in the film & then realize Tati is a genius.
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.
Reposted by The Japanese Paper Film Project
Lehigh Valley, NYC, Philly Friends: Lafayette College's Williams Center for the Arts will host the Japanese Paper Film Project on Friday, September 12 @ 7pm! Prof Eric Faden will intro the program. Live musical accompaniment by Duo Yumeno. Please join us! williamscenter.lafayette.edu/event/japane...
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!
I use Victor Fleming’s Bombshell (Jean Harlow).
A Meta Hollywood classical film about classical Hollywood. Interesting feminist angles, interesting commentary on precode movies. And surprisingly interesting commentary on publicity and marketing.
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.
Love this film and have taught it with surprising success. Students were quite engaged.
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!
Reposted by The Japanese Paper Film Project
For more information on Dr. Faden’s Japanese Paper Film Project ( @kamifirumu.bsky.social), please visit its webpage: kamifirumu.scholar.bucknell.edu And check out the work of the group he partners with, the Media Archaeology Research Team of the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences! 🎬
Our 2025 Japan summer tour (details coming soon!) needs high resolution images of paper film strips for the theatrical posters. So we shot some tests using a 100 megapixel camera. The paper film frame is just 27mm but the 100MP image reveals individual paper fibers!