A Page of Madness

Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (Japanese title: Kurutta Ichipeiji) is among the most unsettling, visually striking, and criminally underseen films of the silent era.

Set inside an insane asylum, the film centers on a man (Masao Inoue) who takes a job as a janitor with hopes of freeing his wife (Yoshie Nakagawa), who is imprisoned as a patient there. A series of fragmented, hallucinatory flashbacks relate the events that caused the woman's descent into madness—including the loss of a baby—and her husband's subsequent feelings of guilt and responsibility. As the man attempts to reconnect with his mentally unstable wife through the bars of the asylum, his own sanity begins to waver and an unexpected encounter with his daughter may be the thing that pushes him over the edge.

Throughout the film, the impending sense of a descent into madness is amplified by inventive cinematography by Kōhei Sugiyama, who uses double, triple, and even quadruple exposures to disorient, disturb, and delve the viewer into memories, madness, and subjective subconsciousness. 

According to Michael Atkinson in an essay for the 2017 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, A Page of Madness "may be the best—that is, the most fascinating and the most terrifying—madhouse movie ever made and makes all other efforts at visualizing the subjective experience of mental and emotional disarray look childish and campy by comparison."

Part of our "Altered States in Silent Cinema" series. Courtesy: Lobster Films

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