Popular reviews

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  Review by kársten ★★★★

  to the joker it’s just a page

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 1

  an unnerving, guilt-ridden and surreal silent era nightmare that is stripped of title cards that might help balance you and instead drops you head-first into the horrifying images of masked faces, expressionist dancing, torn photographs and literal dreams/fantasies trapped within concrete walls and prison bars. the uncanny use of non-linear editing and shifting, subjective perspective creating this stylish psychological fracturing effect as these past lives lost in time try to come to violent terms with the tangible reality of their current institutionalized surroundings. this should be as well-known and studied as the german expressionists.

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  Review by cookie ★★★★★ 2

  this is björk’s favorite movie i just know it is

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★½ 15

  As Part Of The Collab

  Sometimes in history, things happen that make you wonder, "How could that have happened?"? There are many people who claim that Christianity and Jesus were greatly influenced by cultures that never crossed paths with each other around the time X religion and Christianity were being developed. History also shows that several individuals have come up with the same idea at the same time but without physically meeting.

  Why am I bringing this up? The reason is that many of the theories of revolutionary director and editor Sergei Eisenstein can be found here. The way the footage is spliced into each other along with the quick cuts, as well as the use of dutch angles and…

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  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★★ 2

  I wasn't prepared for this - but to be fair I don't suppose it would be easy to prepare for the sort of experience that A Page of Madness is set to provide within how brief it may be. Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness is an insane film, but in such a sense that would much better be experienced for oneself rather than described. After having been lost for nearly forty-five years, Teinosuke Kinugasa's surrealist experiment still remains one of the most baffling films to have ever been made, a film to define its time for it is simply something that we are unlikely to ever stumble across once again. Essential surrealist cinema? I would not be one to…

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½

  One of the landmarks of silent cinema, and like Joan of Arc, seems to combine all the various silent film techniques from Germany, Russia, France, and the United States into one final hurrah of silent cinema. Vlada Petric notes in his 1983 article in Film Criticism that it was still mostly off the radar of even the most scholarly studies of Japanese cinema (even by Noel Burch’s famous study). It’s certainly a hard film to grasp onto plot-wise, and there are disagreements to whether the benshi script is lost, or it was meant originally to be played completely silent as Kinugasa stated when the print resurfaced in the 1970s. Re-watching it, I found it surprisingly easy to follow the narrative…

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  Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★★½ 8

  Pairing this silent movie with Bell Witch’s monolithic 1+hour Funeral Doom dirge Mirror Reaper makes for a comfortless, despondent experience.

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 5

  ***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

  A one-hour nightmare with jaw-dropping remnants of the German Expressionism that you'll wish you never had in your lifetime.

  100/100

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★ 1

  Silent Summer

  A Page of Madness is beautifully chaotic. It is an affront to naturalism, embracing instead atmosphere and style. We open with an asylum in a rainstorm, jagged lightning stuck onto the print. Then comes the tale of abuse and madness. The film uses madness to showcase all kinds of abstract cinematic visuals. It presents the terror of uncertainty, as what is fantasy and what is reality becomes harder to distinguish. The images show us a dance without reason, the fake smiles of masks, and faces pressed against bars as the camera presses towards them. A Page of Madness plays with the traditions and prejudices of 1920s Japan to show madness as contagious. It's a bizarre and energetic film, representing art designed to challenge us. Nothing is quite as it seems, which is the exact nature of cinema.

  My Top Films of the 1920s
  My Top Horror Films
  My Top Silent Films

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  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★½ 5

  Viewed with the Amazing Edith’s *Collab Film Group*.

  After brainstorming over fantastic music for a silent film with the Collab, I ended up just buckling in for the music that was recorded by the Alloy Orchestra in 2016. While not the most dynamic of pieces, it was a trip to experience a silent film in the throes of a non-ragtime or piano-centric piece. The percussive element is very much alive and well, and drives the eclectic and frenetic mania A Page of Madness strives for. Additionally, there is not a single intertitle card which makes the film stick out all the more, coincidentally adding to the blurred and incoherent narrative. 

  As this is silent film 60+ for me (I did not…

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  Review by russman ★★★½

  That dancing riled up more people than in Footloose

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★★ 19

  1st Teinosuke Kinugasa

  CW- Suicide, Ableism

  A Page of Madness: A Review in Three Parts

  Part 1- History

  Page of Madness comes at a very interesting time in Japanese cultural history, one where the influence of Western modernism was actively welcomed into the country before the abrupt shift to Imperialism in the 1930s. This gave rise to many movements like Shinkankakuha, of which Page... is an artistic product. Meaning 'new impressions', the group was interested in 'peeling back the layers of reality' to emphasise the subjective experience, much as in European modernism. The primary writer of this movement was Kawabata, now something of a national icon for 'Snow Country' and 'The Dancing Girl of Izu'. Interestingly, Kawabata prepared the treatment…