A Page of Madness (1926)
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa

Film Review

If Teinosuke Kinugasa is remembered today, it is most likely for his lavish jidai-geki, Gate of Hell (1953), which won him the top prize at Cannes and two Academy Awards.  Kinugasa was not particularly proud of this film and it is probably of far less merit than his earlier silent films, made at a time when he was less constrained by the demands of his studio bosses.  Perhaps the only reason why Kinugasa is not as celebrated today as other gifted Japanese filmmakers is the regrettable fact that virtually all of his early output no longer exists.  Indeed, it is a sad statistic that only about one per cent of Japan's films from the silent era have survived to this day.  Thankfully, Kinugasa's most inspired film - indeed the most fantastically inspired Japanese film of the 1920s - does still exist and in remarkably good condition, albeit in a somewhat truncated state.

A Page of Madness (a.k.a. Kurutta Ichipeiji) was Kinugasa's determined attempt to bring the avant-garde aesthetic of European cinema of the early 1920s to Japan at a time when its film industry was almost exclusively commercially oriented.  The two strongest influences are German expressionism (most notably Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari) and the French impressionists (in particular Abel Gance and Marcel Lherbier).  Gance's influence is mostly strongly felt, not only in Kinugasa's confident use of rhythmic and accelerated montage, but also in his impressionistic technique (for example, distorting mirrors to suggest extreme mental aberration) and use of visual metaphor.  The latter is most evident in the haunting dream sequence near the end of the film and the ensuing flight of fancy in which the main character places theatrical masks on inmates of the asylum in an attempt to give them a complete identity.

The single most recurrent image in the film is that of water, which acquires a menacing power suggesting unending grief and a stifling sense of confinement. The film opens with an intensely harrowing depiction of a downpour - the whole world seems to be in a turmoil of mourning - and it is soon revealed that water is a key part of the narrative.  It was a mother's attempt to drown her infant daughter that led her to be placed in the asylum.  Later on, it becomes apparent that what drove the woman insane in the first place was her estrangement from her husband, who abandoned her through his love of the sea.  To a young man encumbered with family responsibility too soon, water offers a passage to freedom and escape, but it ultimately leads him to a lifetime of regret and imprisonment.  His decision to work in the asylum as a caretaker owes as much to his need to punish himself for his act of folly as it does to his need to be physically close to the woman he abandoned.

Kinugasa began his career as an actor, playing mainly female roles on stage and in film, before he started forging a career as a film director at Makino Productions in the early 1920s.  He had been working at Makino for only a few years before he acquired ambitions of becoming an independent filmmaker.  He bought himself his own equipment, set up a film lab in his house, and hooked up with an avant-garde group of Japanese artists, the Shinkankakuha (School of New Perceptions) to make his first self-financed film.  With future Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata providing the story, Kinugasa crafted one of the strangest films ever made - one that sought to represent as realistically as possible the psychological states of mentally disturbed people, unfortunate souls condemned to dwell in the terrifying nether world between sanity and oblivion.

With a third of its content now missing, A Page of Madness undoubtedly now lacks the coherence it had when it was first seen.  But it also lacks something else, a live narration performed by a professional storyteller or benshi who would have helped to make the film more intelligible to an audience.  In its present, incomplete state, the film is bewildering and requires two or three viewings to make any kind of sense, but, despite this, it does have a surprising degree of coherence.  With the narrative switching repeatedly, almost seamlessly, between the drab external world of normal life and the inner world of the imagination, we find it increasingly difficult to decide which of these two 'realities' is more real, and we are left with a chilling sense of what it must be like to live with a fractured mind that cannot tell apart the world of the senses and the shadow reality that exists only in our heads.

Employing superimposition, slanted camera angles, wildly distorted images and dramatic whip pans (include a vertiginous 360 degree pan), A Page of Madness is nothing less than a supremely inspired tour de force from a young filmmaker keen to explore the artistic possibilities of the new medium of cinema.  The film was rapturously received by Japan's leading film critics of the day but it failed commercially, and so it was soon forgotten and, after a second independently made flop, Crossroads, Kinugasa made his way back to the mainstream.  The film was thought to have been lost for four and half decades until, by chance, its director unearthed the negatives in forgotten rice cans in a storehouse at his home in 1971.  Re-released not long afterwards, A Page of Madness was once again hailed as an auteur masterpiece, and justly so - it is possibly the greatest piece of Japanese film art of the 1920s that has miraculously survived to this day.

Film Synopsis

In a state asylum, an old man works as a janitor so that he can be near to his wife, who is incarcerated as one of the patients.  Her mind broken beyond repair, the unfortunate woman has no awareness of her surroundings and lives in a dream world.  She has no doubt long forgotten the events that led her to be committed to the asylum, including her attempt to drown her infant daughter.  Now a grown-up young woman, the daughter visits the janitor with the good news that she has become engaged.  This prompts the janitor to look back on his past life and relive the tragic chain of events that would separate him from his wife forever...