Kritiken

When's the last time you were surprised by a silent film? Impressed, dazzled, yes, but genuinely surprised? You'd think by 2017, with all the silent-era history scholarship behind us, that authentic, mutant-DNA "Holy Crap" moments would be rare on the ground, and, of course, they are. But there's no amount of buckling up that can prepare a well-versed silent cinephile for the utter unheralded weirdness of Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ichipeiji).

A Page of Madness has historically been overshadowed by the avant-garde sensations of Un Chien Andalou, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Sergei Eisenstein—no doubt in part because it was lost until 1971—but it belongs in that rarified company... Few films have so consciously crafted a purely cinematic language, eschewing title cards and denoting hallucination and memory purely through distorted point of view shots and editing patterns.

...A madhouse riot of a movie. Traumatic and nauseating, it's easily the most horrifying movie made during the Silent Era, a weird and queasy dance of death directed by former female impersonator/future Oscar and Palme d'Or winner Teinosuke Kinugasa and written by future Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata.

There's an undeniable excitement to the filmmaking that makes it oddly accessible to even the layman movie lover. A frenzy of superimpositions, canted frames, whip-pans, zooms, tracking shots, distorting mirror effects, and other flourishes, A Page of Madness is, to put it mildly, not what a viewer would expect from less visually showy Japanese melodrama of its era (or any era before the New Wave extremism of the sixties).

Teinosuke Kinugasa's mind-boggling silent masterpiece of 1926 was thought to have been lost for 40 years until the director discovered a print in his garden shed... The film's expressionist style is all the more surprising because Japan had no such tradition to speak of; Kinugasa hadn't even seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari when he made this. Yet the rhythmic pulsation of graphic, semiabstract depictions of madness makes the film both startling and mesmerizing.