A Page of Madness is a film that will take more than a single viewing to fully comprehend. It is a nightmarish fantasy that threatens to overwhelm its audience. Its searing, fevered imagery bombards you from the opening minutes and in an unrelenting wave of bravura filmmaking it refuses to stop until the closing credits. Made in 1926, but thought lost until an incomplete print resurfaced in the early ‘70s, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s surrealist classic is one of the most startling and expressive silent films I have had the fortune of watching.

The story follows a man who takes a janitor’s job at an insane asylum in order to free his imprisoned wife. Foregoing intertitles and utilising a dizzying array of…

This was my essay on Kurutta ippêji (A Page of Madness) for my Film History & Crit class. I left the in text citations in.

Thanks to Adam Cook for the recommendation.

Although Japan’s cultural and artistic history is already considered astronomical and reputable, some early works were never discovered because of World War 2 and the destruction it had on Japanese art. However, out of the destruction there were a few films which had survived the monstrosity and calamity the war had created; one of which being Teinosuke Kinugasa’s, Kurutta ippêji (A Page of Madness), which tells the story of a man who takes a job as a janitor at an insane asylum to rescue his wife who is a…

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…

Hooptober Fest 5.0
Film 13/46
One Silent Film
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The product of a Japanese anti-naturalistic avant-garde art group called Shinkankakuha (School of New Perceptions), what remains in 2018 of the film A Page of Madness is missing a third of that which was initially shown in theaters in addition to lacking any kind of standard silent movie text intertitles, as screenings in Japan would be accompanied with a live in-house announcer/storyteller who would explain what was going on up on the screen.

But from what I gathered from secondary sources quickly pulled up during my viewing, the film is about a delusional, catatonic-yet-dancing woman in a mental institution and her husband who works as a janitor there in order to…

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…

A Page of Madness is perhaps one of the most challenging films from the 1920's, not simply due to the lack of inter-titles (or we modern's lack of benshi accompaniment) nor through the straddling of traditional, experimental and modern storytelling techniques, but also through the freeform use of superimposition, non-differentiation between fantasy sequences and the everyday, rapid and chaotic surrealist associations (heightened by the directors change from 17fps to 24fps some fifty years after the initial production of the film,) and the portrayal of the mad, especially in a time that maintained little formal understanding and treatment thereof. This already complicated film was made even more disorienting in the fact that, according to the preeminent scholar for the film Aaron…