(1926)
4
Jonathan Crow
Written by future Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata and directed by master filmmaker Teinosuke Kinugasa, Page of Madness is a landmark of world cinema. Not only is Page the first mature Japanese experiment film, making deft use of such cinematic devices as flashbacks, double exposure, and rapid camera movement, but it also synthesizes a number of stylistic trends seen in European avant-garde cinema. The film's eerie, painted sets and stark lighting create an exterior manifestation of the patient's interior turmoil, recalling Robert Weine's expressionistic masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1913). The film's crisp, elliptical editing is reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein's use of montage in such classics as Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927). As Donald Richie has noted, Page of Madness creates an impression of an insane asylum much as Eisenstein paints an impression of a massacre in Battleship Potemkin's famous Odessa steps sequence. All of these stylistic innovations merge to form a striking exploration of the nature of madness. This masterpiece was long thought lost, until the early 1970s, when the director found a print in his garden storeroom.
A Page of Madness on AllMovie
A Page of Madness (1926)
