Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 264: Sun Sep 24

A Page of Madness (Kinugasa, 1926): Kings College London, 6pm


On the 91st anniversary of its theatrical release, the Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival are proud to host a 35mm presentation of Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji, 1926) with live benshi, musical accompaniment and post-screening panel discussion.

Benshi Tomoko Komura will be narrating the scenes and dialogue (in English) in real time, as would have happened at the film's theatrical release.  Clive Bell, Sylvia Hallett and Keiko Kitamura will provide a live score on the shakuhachi, piano and koto respectively. There will also be a post-screening discussion, with a panel consisting of Japanese cinema specialist Jasper Sharp, silent film expert Pamela Hutchinson and benshi Tomoko Komura. A special video introduction from Professor Aaron Gerow will precede the screening - his book A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan remains the definitive work on the film.

Chicago Reader review:
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. A seaman hires on as a janitor at an insane asylum to free his wife, who's become an inmate after attempting to kill herself and her baby. 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.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract

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