IMDb RATING
7.3/10
4.7K
YOUR RATING
A man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife.A man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife.A man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife.
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThis film was deemed lost for more than forty years, but it was rediscovered by its director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, in a rice cans in 1971.
- Alternate versionsReissued in Japan in 1973 with musical score replacing original benshi.
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Story of Film: An Odyssey: The Golden Age of World Cinema (2011)
Featured review
A Page of Madness (1926)
Who knew that Japanese directors made weird films even in the 1920s? A Page of Madness is an expressionistic, surrealist silent film monstrosity from director Teinosuke Kinugasa, who had little to no budget at the time, so his stars had to help paint the sets, push the dolly and make props. They even slept on the set or in the front office because Kinugasa couldn't afford accommodations for them. After being lost for about 50 years, it was re-discovered by Kinugasa in his shed in 1971. However, 20 minutes were missing and the film is now incomplete. At the time of its release, it was screened only in cinemas that specialized in showing foreign films and gained mass popularity.
The movie is co-written by and adapted from a short story by Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese man to win a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1968). It's roughly about a man getting a job as a janitor in an asylum hoping to free his imprisoned wife. There are, of course, other characters, but the plot is completely incomprehensible, not only because of the lack of intertitles (Japanese silent films were narrated by actors called benshi), a large amount of unsignalled flashbacks and weird hallucinatory scenes, but also because the movie is kinda distracting in the sense that you never get the chance to quite sink in. Hard to explain.
The soundtrack is quite interesting, sometimes composed solely of mechanical sounds while we watch dissolving images of people, lights and machines. It's a one-of-a-kind film, especially for the time, but it guarantees no emtional attachment whatsoever because it's impossible to deduce what the hell is going on. So, I definitely didn't enjoy it. It's both interesting and boring. Strange, but that sentence best explains it.
The movie is co-written by and adapted from a short story by Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese man to win a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1968). It's roughly about a man getting a job as a janitor in an asylum hoping to free his imprisoned wife. There are, of course, other characters, but the plot is completely incomprehensible, not only because of the lack of intertitles (Japanese silent films were narrated by actors called benshi), a large amount of unsignalled flashbacks and weird hallucinatory scenes, but also because the movie is kinda distracting in the sense that you never get the chance to quite sink in. Hard to explain.
The soundtrack is quite interesting, sometimes composed solely of mechanical sounds while we watch dissolving images of people, lights and machines. It's a one-of-a-kind film, especially for the time, but it guarantees no emtional attachment whatsoever because it's impossible to deduce what the hell is going on. So, I definitely didn't enjoy it. It's both interesting and boring. Strange, but that sentence best explains it.
- mevmijaumau
- Mar 29, 2015
- Permalink
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Details
Box office
- Budget
- ¥20,000 (estimated)
- Runtime1 hour 10 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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