A Page of Madness is a visually extraordinary silent film directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa in 1926. Lost for many years, the film was rediscovered in the seventies in a truncated 60 minute version. (Originally, the film was about ninety minutes long.) Apparently influenced by Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the picture is wildly inventive and pictorially beautiful -- it is also maddeningly confusing. As far as I can tell, the picture's story involves a janitor at an insane asylum. The janitor seems to be in love with a catatonic patient. There are images that I construe as flashbacks suggesting that the woman may be the janitor's wife. Another woman, young and dressed in a traditional kimono, flits around the asylum and, sometimes, interacts with the old janitor. Intercut with the asylum images are scenes showing the janitor and the woman, pictures of a boy with a dog, and a sequence involving some kind of procession with musical instruments and people in elaborate costume. The viewer interprets the characters as family members, although the status of the young woman in the geisha outfit is unclear: is she a ghost, a flashback to the catatonic woman's youth, or the janitor's daughter? (Wikipedia information about the film clarifies that the janitor is, in fact, the husband of the catatonic woman; the girl is the woman and the janitor's daughter. I don't who the boy and the dog and a baby briefly shown are supposed to be.) The plot has something to do with the janitor attempting to free the catatonic woman from the asylum. At one point, the janitor leads the woman from her cell to the gateway or door to the asylum, but she is terrified by the trees and space outside the place and refuses to leave. The movie ends with the janitor wandering around with his mop in the corridors of the madhouse, the catatonic woman back in her cell, lying on the floor and motionless.
Everything about this film is extreme: the cinematography is either blinding with flares of light or so dark that you can scarcely see the figures moving through the gloom. The editing is jarring -- either the camera is being pushed aggressively into frenzied mobs of crazy people or it is whipping violently right and left, briefly framing insane patients who stand like saints in lit niches. Much of the editing is so fast that the images bombard the viewer and have only a machine-gun flickering and subliminal effect -- parts of the film involve montages of three or four frame images, much like some of the fast cutting in Abel Gance's films of the same era. Many images are optically distorted: there are multiple exposure -- the janitor seems to move through forests of iron bars in front and behind him. Faces are distorted by funhouse lenses -- half of a visage will be swollen with enormous bulging eyes while the other half of the face is shrunken and wizened. Mirror effects create weird symmetries in which bodies wiggle like Rorschach ink-blots melting into one another. There are no intertitles and the entire experience, although fascinating, is remarkably disorienting. Many of the images are simply beautiful -- but they blast by the viewer so quickly that you can't figure out what they mean or how they fit together. At one point, we see a Marienbad-like panorama of the asylum's lawn, small figures exposed and motionless below us as if beheld from a tower. A following shot shows us that we are seeing the grounds of the madhouse through the eyes of the janitor who is looking down from a window in an upper story of the building. A film conventionally edited would first establish the point of view and, then, provide the perspective seen from that vantage -- in this film, we are disoriented by seeing the view from above first, an unmotivated bird's eye image, followed later by the establishing shot. At one point, the janitor drags the comatose woman down the corridor while madmen in their cells cavort and leer. He reaches the end of the corridor and, then, simply turns around drags the woman back toward the camera -- the image shows him coming and going over the same corridor. We sense that the image means that the corridor is lengthy and that the motion must be in one direction although it is reversed in the middle of the shot. The emotional effect is nightmarish -- the janitor and mad woman can not escape; they make no progress, space is expressionistically conceived. A description of the film's bravura opening scenes demonstrates the movie's bizarre imagery and construction: we see what looks like a stylized tree (it's shaped like an upright coat-rack) in an intense downpour. This is intercut with images of wind-whipped trees as shadows moving across lighted window-panes. We see waterfalls and vortices in rivers, water spewing over boulders, rain pouring down on rocks. Then, we see a goddess dressed in sparkling raiment dancing in front of a bulging disc of scintillating light. This image is intercut with shots of a mad woman wearing a ragged smock dancing with the same histrionic gestures. The camera whips down a corridor showing the Arabic numbers on the cells: 20, 19, 65 -- the numbers glower against darkness. It the pitch gloom a figure moves pushing a broom, rim-lit against lightning flashing in the typhoon at the windows. Later, we see huge close-ups of slack-jawed, gaping madmen -- some of the crazy people look like images of emaciated hungry ghosts in Buddhist mythology. The film is wildly politically incorrect -- madness is exploited for its horror: we see crazy people standing like statues, gyrating, making weird gestures: one woman keeps picking up a button putting it on her head and, then, when it drops inevitably, to the floor repeating the process. Much of imagery of the madmen looks like images from Peter Brooks' Marat/Sade -- we see people leering and grimacing. A riot occurs at one point and the screen fills with groping hands.
Apparently, A Page of Madness, like many Japanese films of its time lacks intertitles because a Benshei or professional storyteller would have stood next to the screen narrating the movie. This explains some of the weird narrative disjunctions and lacunae that characterize the film -- we are also seeing only 2/3rds of the picture; the rest is lost. In the seemingly naturalistic procession scene, we see a kind of marching band and, then, people moving ceremonially in the courtyard of what may be temple. Three huge and impassive trees loom in the foreground, mute and ominous spectators to what may be a wedding march. The trees are like the bars in the asylum -- even in this film's scenes that objectively document the world everything seems askew, uncertain, and eerie.
Kinugasa worked slowly and made only about a dozen or so films. He directed the first Japanese color film in 1953, Gates of Hell, often characterized as one of the most ravishing films every made. Gates of Hell is a staid pageant-like costume drama. By contrast, the lurid and horrifying A Page of Madness shows us a film avant-garde that will be perpetually new and astonishing to viewers, but, like Dr. Caligari, a dead end, a way of making movies that could not be sustained.
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