A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ippeiji)

October 8 - 10, 2004
Broadway Performance Hall
1625 Broadway
Seattle, Washington

December 12, 1998
Broadway Performance Hall
Seattle, Washington

A Page Of Madness walks a fine line between sanity and madness, reality and delusion, imprisonment and freedom.  The story, co-written by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country, A Thousand Cranes), concerns an old man who works as a custodian in an insane asylum.  His wife is an inmate there, having been committed after the drowning of their infant son.  She tried to drown herself as well but was prevented by the couple's daughter.  Like the wife's state of mind, the family is fragmented.  Alternately hostile, oblivious, and child-like, the wife lives in her own world haunted by the memory of her baby.  The daughter is growing away from her parents as she works at a train station and deals with her own marriage.  The guilt-ridden old man, friendless except for a playful neighborhood boy, meekly works and lives at the asylum under the scrutiny of the head doctor but secretly plots to help his wife escape.  However, when he is unable to convince his wife to leave, the old man becomes desperate.  His family's splintering, combined with the lowly status of his job and the oppressive atmosphere of the asylum push, the old man over the edge.

A Page Of Madness unfolds in purely visual terms.  Unlike most films of the silent era, this film eschews the use of title cards to explain the story.  The film also did not make use of the Japanese silent movie tradition of the benshi, or narrator, who sat at the side of the screen and delivered a running commentary on the action.  A Page Of Madness enhances conventional storytelling techniques by emphasizing state of mind and subjective point of view to create a stream of consciousness that seems to come from the minds of the asylum's residents.  Unique among Japanese films of the time, A Page Of Madness uses an array of technical innovations.  Dynamic use of flashbacks, propulsive camera movements, fast paced editing, optical effects and symbolism are employed.  In addition to the film's reputatuion as a surreal, avant-garde masterpiece on par with similar European classics like The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, A Page Of Madness tells a strong and poignant human story that still retains its power today.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896-1982) ran away from home to join a troupe of itinerant actors and became a star of the popular theatre.  He began his career as an oyama, or Kabuki actor of female roles.  He began his film career in 1918 doing the same.  In the very early days of Japanese cinema, women's roles were played by men in a carry over from stage traditions.  Kinugasa became part of a movement to modernize Japanese films which included bringing women to the screen.  Kinugasa then moved behind the camera and started his own independent production company, with a make-shift studio and laboratory in Kyoto.  A Page Of Madness was his first production.  The screenplay, written by a young Yasunari Kawabata, was originally set in a circus.  Kinugasa changed the setting to an insane asylum and spent several months studying this kind of institution.

Reminicent of the famous German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which had not yet been seen in Japan, Kinugasa struggled with a low budget, small set and not enough people and film lights.  Through the ingenious use of creative camera angles and effects, as well as alternating the use of shadows with the painting of much of the set with silver paint (creating an eerie luminosity), Kinugasa overcame his limitations to create a unique work of art.  Accounts of the critical and commericial success of the film on its release differ with some stating that it was a failure, while others note that the film was very successful, thus enabling Kinugasa to continue making more films.  Crossroads, his next film in 1928, would be another landmark avant-garde work which when shown abroad became a sensation in Europe -- the last Japanese film to do so until Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon in 1950.  Kinugasa went on to make many more films in a more conventional style, and his career stretched into the 1960's.  His 1952 film Gate Of Hell became Japan's first color production and won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

During World War II much of Japan's early cinema was destroyed in fires.  A Page Of Madness escaped this fate.  Kinugasa had stored a copy of the negative at his country home which was discovered hidden in a rice barrel in the 1970's.  When the film was reprinted and shown again in Europe and Japan, it was hailed as an early masterpiece of Japanese cinema, with Kinugasa lauded as one of its first great innovators.

ABOUT THE SCORE

The new score for A Page Of Madness came about after several years of searching for a print of the film.  The currently available prints of A Page Of Madness have an experimental, heavily electronic score that was added in the 1970's when the film was rediscovered.  Unable to find any information about the original score and taking cues from the film's unconventional approach and unique style, Aono Jikken Ensemble set out to create a new score.  By balancing Eastern with Western influences, composition with improvisation, and innovation with traditional approaches, they produced a continuous flow of music and sound that not only worked with the film's avant-garde stylings but also brought out the human story at the heart of the film.  To create a highly textured soundtrack the group employed over fifty different instruments.  These ranged from a battery of traditional Japanese drums and percussion; Chinese and East Indian stringed instruments like the erhu and dilruba; Turkish and Indian horns; Irish, African, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Indian and Tibetan drums and percussion; Thai, Indian and Japanese reeds and flutes; to Western instruments like the tympani, harmonica, autoharp, accordian and flute.

Also important to the overall sound was the use of unconventional instruments.  Modified children's sound toys; found objects such as cans, pots and pans, scrap metal, glass bottles, saw blades, bamboo logs and 2X4 wood pieces were also used.  In addition, specially created instruments made by sound sculptors like Ela Lamblin (the bell wheel), Richard Waters (the waterphone), and Susie Kozawa (a variety of kelp horns and a large plastic bass baliphone) were woven into the mix. 

AJE first presented A Page Of Madness in a workshop production at the 1997 Seattle Asian American Film Festival.  The midnight screening at The Speakeasy sold out with many people turned away at the door.  AJE later received a grant through Jack Straw Foundation's Artist Support Program to record the soundtrack for a CD.  The group reworked the score, striving both to maintain the integrity of their original score as it related to the visual imagery of the film and to expand on themes only hinted at previously.  A Page Of Madness was the first in a series of Japanese silent films/live music presentations by AJE.