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.
© James Travers 2016
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