A Page of Madness 狂った一頁 (1926)
A Page of Madness is a silent film by Kinugasa Teinosuke. I have been wanting to see this film for years and finally managed to get it. Easily the most challenging and artistic silent film I have seen, it originally came out in 1926 but was lost and wasn’t found again until 1971. In its state from 71’ it is missing a third of its story, and yet it still manages to come off concise.
The story itself is a tough one to follow due to the lack of intertitles and style that is hyper edited that I will touch on later. Roughly, it is about husband who works as a janitor at an asylum where his wife is kept. It is apparent the doctors don’t know about their relationship, and one day the couple’s daughter comes to visit the mother to announce her marriage. We see the daughter harbors much hostility toward the father which triggers flashbacks that put the story into perspective. We see that he had abandoned his wife, causing her to drown their baby (the daughter’s younger sister). Explaining how she became insane, the guilt expressed by the husband, and the daughter’s hostility toward him.
The summary of the film seems straightforward enough, but the way this is all shown is truly original. Nothing of this is ever made obvious instead it has to be almost subjectively understood. With that said, this is the only Japanese film I have seen to incorporate German Expressionism into its own, and oddly it really works, although I always thought expressionism was the best suited medium for silent film. So with this nothing is given instead it has to be taken in such a subjective manner, that it becomes difficult. Take for instance the opening scene, rain falls outside, lightning strikes, an image of a dancing woman in a cage is superimposed, taiko drums are shown to what we conceive is the pace of the rain and girl dancing, soon the girl collapses as her feet are bloody, the taiko becomes heightened, she listens from the floor and gets up and dances again, we see blood on the floor. This woman is entirely irrelevant to the story as she is never seen again. What it does simply is express the atmosphere and not only the experience of an asylum, but the feverish pace of the film. This film has some of the most rapid cutting I have ever seen in Japanese film, and yet the resonating feeling is still entirely Japanese. Even German expressionist films were cut anywhere near as fast.
The film was really created by a group of advant garde artists at the time that even included Kawabata Yasunari, with him even being credited as a writer for the film. This I found interesting, because the first time I read his novel The Sound of the Mountain, I felt the literary devices he used were expressionistic. It wasn’t until looking further into him I found that it the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, but for Kawabata to me it underlied expressionism. So this film comes of interesting to me because I hadn’t known he was associated with group that was decidedly expressionistic. Kawabata at this time had pointed out that the German medium was the best anti-thesis to realistic naturalism, and the best medium for perceiving subjectivity. This all comes full circle with A Page of Madness a film entirely dependent on the viewers own subjectivity. It is really an unforgettable film, that today seems oddly modern.
