In 1926, Teinosuke Kinugasa transported the audience into a psychiatric asylum and used avant-garde techniques to make us feel the patients’ madness in A Page of Madness.

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness is one of the many films to emerge from the experimental and avant-garde movements of the 1920s, and is often overlooked in favor of European works of the period such as Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923) or Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Yet Kinugasa’s work deserves recognition, as described by Vlada Petric: “A Page of Madness maches the most avant-garde narrative films of the silent era, including Eisenstein Strike, Gance’s Napoleon and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.”[1]  Lost for almost 50 years before being found by its director a year before his death in 1979, A Page of Madness bears witness to an often-neglected Japanese avant-garde movement, and demonstrates the influence of European cinema throughout the world during the interwar period.

In a Japanese newspaper a week before the film’s release, a summary appeared in the following form:

This is the grim interior of a mental hospital, resounding with dancing, shrieking, howling, and yelling. Here a pitiful and tragic tale is born, the drama of a sailor who had mistreated his wife, forgot his daughter, and eventually drove his wife insane. After a few years, the sailor, tired of life, returned to his hometown and learned that his wife had been saved at a mental hospital. He became a custodian there to gain access. His daughter has grown up beautifully and is about to marry a young man, but she worries about her insane mother. The father’s pain, his uneasy fear, is that his insane wife will destroy their daughter’s happiness. In this way, events proceed darkly in relation to the crazy wife.[2]

Despite a summary describing the film as a drama in the normal gendaigeki[3] genre, it isn’t quite as linear as expected. Most importantly, although the film’s rediscovery fifty years after its disappearance has allowed a new generation to discover the work, the version we have at our disposal is cut of multiple scenes. Described in detail by Aaron Gerow in A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan, a study of the script submitted to the censorship department shows scenes not present in the current version. Further proof is provided by the fact that the film’s length is considerably shorter than that submitted to the censorship department at the time of its release, dropping from 2142 meters to 1617, or almost 25 minutes of film.[4]  It’s therefore difficult to establish an overall understanding of the work when more than a quarter is missing. What is apparent, however, is that A Page of Madness is a visual rather than a narrative work, and is experimental from its very first minutes. As a mysterious car arrives, one shot follows another, the continuous stream of water on the ground, rain on the window bars, the shadows of raging trees. Images fade in and out, overlapping each other in fast-moving cuts. The pace quickens to an almost hypnotic pitch, before switching to a dancer sequence where the editing resumes a classic narrative style. Throughout its 71-minute running time, A Page of Madness repeats this pattern several times, alternating between avant-garde and purely traditional styles. In this frenetic style, Kinugasa borrows from a French cinematic influence that was increasingly present in Japan at the time. Characterized by a fast-paced cutting style, often focusing on the interiority of a character or the atmosphere of a place, this type of cutting appeared on a large scale around 1925. Films such as Ushihara Kiyohiko’s The Earth Smiles (Daichi wa hohoemu, 1925) and Shimazu Yasujirô’s The Evening Bell (Yû no kane, 1925) bear witness to a practice that was not unique to our work.

Both as scenery and main subject, the psychiatric hospital and its patients are the focus of Kinugasa’s camerawork. With its concrete walls and bars, the environment around our characters is as austere and hopeless as possible. If the nurses’ white coats didn’t give it away, we could be tempted to think of it as a prison. Inside the cells, the absence of supplies, furniture and personal items are the first signs of progressive dehumanization. Our understanding of the architecture of this hospital is very limited. We’re unable to draw a floor plan, or understand how to get in and out. The corridor and cells presented by Kinugasa seem out of time, out of our world. Everything about the building’s construction indicates a desire for privation, isolation and the suppression of the individual.

These feelings continue when Kinugasa reveals his first close-ups of faces. The sequence occurs when our protagonist comes into contact with a woman, lying on the floor of her cell. With her hair tangled, her eyes crooked and dark, the conversation between the two continues in a traditional shot/reverse-shot style. Yet Kinugasa adds a few experimental elements to the scene. When the man opens the cell door, an overlay leaves the bars in the same place, alluding to the woman’s constant psychological confinement. At this point, the director’s camera takes on a subjective vision, that of a patient who cannot for a second contemplate opening the bars. Her existence is imprisoned in this hospital.

Kinugasa uses experimental processes throughout his work to give us an insight into the patients’ psychological state. Later, during a new interaction between a patient and our man, the filmmaker uses distortion effects to show us the patient’s vision. Speaking from outside the cell to the woman, a shot suddenly shows us his distorted, disproportionate face, provoking hilarity in the woman, alone, crouching on the floor, lit only by the light of the moon. Avant-garde experimentation also allows the madness to be transposed and felt throughout, and this is exactly what Kinugasa does on several occasions. This can be seen right from the start with the dancer in her cell, spinning and throwing her body across the room as the montage cuts to shots of rain on the bars, instruments, or most often both at once. All of this creates a frenzy in the image and in the dancer’s movements, which seem to be taken over and unable to stop, while the pace of the editing accelerates again and again. Here again, Kinugasa uses the camera to put us into the patients’ perceptive, spinning the camera in circles while looking at the floor and the wall. Dementia expresses itself in this sequence of images too fast to digest, in this effervescence of ideas and thoughts.

The list of examples on which to describe the madness in Kinugasa’s directing could go on and on. However, the filmmaker also seems to use traditional narration to convey a certain sadness in the portrayal of these patients. When the man tries to reason with his wife and get her out of the hospital, her gaze remains fixed, raised to the ceiling like some kind of immutable destiny. The place becomes an integral part of her existence. As he tries to force her out, she struggles not to be taken away. Once at the exit door, her vision of the outside world is exacerbated, and she sees nothing but dark nature and barking dogs. Forced by his wife’s almost convulsive fears, the man has no choice but to close the hospital door and stay with her. For her, the hospital has become a place of sanity, calm and normality.

Separated from the world by their environment and their inability to interact with the outside world, dehumanization materializes in a final form as the film draws to a close. Bringing smiling face masks to the patients in a basket, the man distributes and makes the patients wear them. From a hard, threatening or sad face, these patients move on to a frozen, definitive and impersonal expression. The next scene shows our patients walking through the hospital with their faces fabricated. Their sadness, turmoil and alienation are now hidden, definitively separated from the human world for a creation of plastic and fake.

This immersion in A Page of Madness was first and foremost visual, in the way Kinugasa feeds his narrative with his characters’ perceptive, and how avant-garde techniques enable him to retranscribe these mental states. The narrative aspect of the film – in its current version – is naturally secondary. Numerous theories and possible explanations, both political and societal, are put forward, without being conclusive. On more than one occasion, A Page of Madness is uncertain and contradictory. But it never ceases to captivate with its use of technique to suggest and materialize its subject. In this respect, A Page of Madness is a formidable film, bearing witness to an often-overlooked Japanese avant-garde era, and to a cinematic expertise not confined to Europe or the United States in 1926.

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[1] PETRIC Vlada, A Page of Madness: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Silent Cinema, Film Criticism, Fall 1983, p. 86.

[2] Shin eiga, Yomiuri shinbun, 13 September 1926, p. 9.

[3] Gendaigeki films represent works set in Japan’s post-1868 “modern” period. The genre is thus opposed to jidaigeki, or “period films”.

[4] GEROW Aaron, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920’s Japan, U of M Center For Japanese Studies, 2009, pp. 41-42.