Dir: Teinosuke Kinugasa
1926
Japan
60min (Rating: TBC)
Silent with original music written and performed by The Observatory
Date: 11 Dec (Sat), 7.30pm
Venue: The Gallery Theatre, National Museum of Singapore
Synopsis
Based on a story by Nobel Prize winning writer Yasunari Kawabata, A Page of Madness is the most modern and audacious masterpiece of early Japanese silent cinema and a landmark in avant-garde filmmaking. With its bold aesthetic and subversion of cinematic structures and conventions, the film stood out defiantly against the kabuki and jidai-geki films of the same period in Japan.
Set in an insane asylum, the film tells the story of a retired sailor who takes up a job as a janitor to look after his wife who was locked up after attempting to drown their child. The film takes a startlingly perspective of the world as viewed by the mentally ill, and the man’s fantasies to liberate his wife blend in with the mad, confounding visions of the other inmates. Told without inter-titles, the narrative relies purely on visual expressions to convey the storyDirector Teinosuke Kinugasa boldly synthesized every available experimental technique known at the time to create a surrealistic and frightening nightmare of a world gone mad. His use of superimpositions, flashbacks, rapid montage and complex subjective camerawork rivalled the innovations of masters like Abel Gance, F.W. Murnau and Sergei Eisenstein.
Long believed to be lost in the bombings of World War II, the negatives of A Page of Madness was rediscovered by Kinugasa in the 1970s and the film was screened again with international acclaim half a century after its completion.
The screening will be accompanied by original music written and performed by The Observatory.
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