By age 30, Teinosuke Kinugasa was already a cinema veteran, having broken into the business as an actor for Nikkatsu in 1917, playing in over a hundred silent films and directing over thirty. With his film credentials firmly established, the director formed the Kinugasa Motion Picture League and financed an independent production that would be photographed in Shochiku’s Kyoto studio. Working with future Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata on an original scenario, Kinugasa developed A Page of Madness, later described by critic Michael Atkinson as “a monster out of time, perhaps the most psychotic Japanese silent film ever made.” Set in an insane asylum where an ex-sailor works as a janitor to keep tabs on his wife who’s been committed there, the filmdeploys a panoply of avant-garde techniques (and techniques atop and within techniques) to suggest derangement and dislocation. A sui generis work that effectively treats the audience as just another inmate, A Page of Madness had little in common with the silent samurai pictures that otherwise defined Japan’s film industry. It opened in Tokyo art house theaters that played foreign fare and scarcely traveled outside of Japan until 1971, when Kinugasa discovered a print in a rice barrel in his shed and unleashed his radical fossil upon the world. A century later, it’s still ahead of its time — and ours. (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society)

35mm from George Eastman Museum

Preceded by: “Seance IV” (Don Cooper, 1968) – 4 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society