A Page of Madness

An old man takes a job as a cleaner in an asylum so that he can see his wife, who is held there. She tried to drown their children years ago. He plans to get her out, and the film leaves no boundary between his mind and the minds of the other patients. Teinosuke Kinugasa made it without a single intertitle, relying on the benshi tradition of a performer narrating films in the hall in Japan at the time. The fast cutting, double exposure and distorted images were produced in the same years as the expressionist and abstract movements in Europe and independently of them. The film was considered lost and was only found in 1971 in the director's own storehouse; the print we have is still incomplete. Who it is for: anyone curious about silent-era experiment and the Japanese avant-garde. Who it is not for: viewers wanting a story they can follow.