Hollywood cinema and the coming of sound would irrevocably change the
style and form of Japanese cinema; the benshi became redundant and the use of
single fixed shots was supplanted by the mobile camera, tracking shots, quick
editing and cross-cutting, while the close-up was added to the Japanese filmic
vocabulary. The first Japanese film to show the influence of American cinema
directly was the ‘realist’ melodrama, Souls on the Road (Murata), in 1921. Souls
on the Road introduced the close-up to Japanese cinema, bringing with it a
sense of intimacy and humanism that was new to audiences, used to the static
shots and presentational perspective of the fixed camera along the imaginary
fourth wall. Freiberg writes: