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 "title": "The Page of Madness",
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 "excerpt": "The Page of Madness (狂った一頁, Kurutta ichipeiji, aka A Page of Madness) is a 1926 Japanese silent avant-garde film by Kinugasa Teinosuke with a script by Kawabata Yasunari, set in an asylum, shown without intertitles, lost for 45 years and rediscovered in 1971.",
 "snippet": "The Page of Madness (狂った一頁, Kurutta ichipeiji, aka A Page of Madness) is a 1926 Japanese silent avant-garde film by Kinugasa Teinosuke with a script by Kawabata Yasunari, set in an asylum, shown without intertitles, lost for 45 years and rediscovered in 1971.",
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 "markdown": "# The Page of Madness\n\n**The Page of Madness** (狂った一頁, *Kurutta ichipeiji*, also romanized *Kurutta Ippēji*; released in English as *A Page of Madness*) is a 1926 Japanese silent experimental film directed by Kinugasa Teinosuke, set in a mental asylum and made with the involvement of the avant-garde [Shinkankaku-ha](https://www.edgepedia.org/shinkankaku-ha) writers' group. It is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema and one of the first experimental films in Japan.<sup>[1](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[3](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/a-page-of-madness/)</sup>\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Original title | 狂った一頁 (*Kurutta ichipeiji*), also printed as 狂つた一頁 in period orthography<sup>[1](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)</sup> |\n| Director | Kinugasa Teinosuke, who also produced and co-adapted the script<sup>[1](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)</sup> |\n| Script | Original story and screenplay by Kawabata Yasunari, later winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, with adaptations by Inuzuka Minoru and Sawada Gyojin<sup>[1](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[4](https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Page-of-Madness)</sup> |\n| Production | Shinkankaku-ha (School of New Perceptions) Film League with National Art Film Company, 1926<sup>[1](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup> |\n| Format | 35mm black-and-white silent film, shown with benshi narration and without intertitles<sup>[1](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[5](https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/bunron/article/download/855/2485/4908)</sup> |\n| Loss and recovery | Deemed lost for 45 years; Kinugasa rediscovered a print in a shed at his home in 1971<sup>[3](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/a-page-of-madness/)</sup> |\n| Surviving length | About 70 minutes in current circulation; the NFAJ print measures 78 minutes and the tinted restoration 79 minutes<sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[1](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[6](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/program/hakkutsu202204-10/)</sup> |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Story and style\n\nThe film takes place largely inside a mental asylum. A former sailor works there as a janitor while his wife is confined as a patient; when their daughter arrives to announce her engagement, memories of the past surface, events come to a head, and chaos ensues. The mother had once tried to drown herself with her baby and survived, and the husband tries to free her by causing chaos in the institution.<sup>[3](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/a-page-of-madness/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup>\n\nBecause the film has no intertitles and uses restless, experimental editing, a conventional plot is hard to discern; side stories and flashbacks reveal why the wife is a patient and why the daughter does not know her father works at the asylum.<sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup> The film refuses the usual cinematic cues that separate subjective vision from objective reality: it features reversals between dream and reality and blurs the line between daydream and recollection, at times implicating the viewer through camera position and movement.<sup>[5](https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/bunron/article/download/855/2485/4908)</sup> Its famous images include a double exposure superimposing a wedding car onto a funeral hearse, along with lens distortions, multiple exposures, and jarring camera movements.<sup>[5](https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/bunron/article/download/855/2485/4908)</sup>\n\n### Interpretation and scholarship\n\nThe film has been read as a pillar of the close relationship in the Taisho era (1912–1926) between film and artistic modernism, and as a marker of the distinctiveness of prewar Japanese film culture; the film scholar Vlada Petric wrote that it \"matches the best avant-garde films of the era\".<sup>[4](https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Page-of-Madness)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[8](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.9340131)</sup> Aaron Gerow, a scholar of Japanese cinema at Yale University, has drawn on the film's shooting script and shooting notes, made available only recently, to draw a new picture of the work: a film divided between experiment and convention, modernism and melodrama, the image and the word, and cinema and literature, conflicts that play out in its story, structure, and context. His book also translates contemporary reviews and shooting notes for scenes missing from the current print.<sup>[4](https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Page-of-Madness)</sup>\n\nThe film's afterlife extends beyond scholarship. It has been restored in HD with a new score by the Alloy Orchestra, and it continues to be screened with live benshi performance, as at a Nippon Connection event with the narrator Ichirō Kataoka.<sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[12](https://db.nipponconnection.com/ja/film/1099/a-page-of-madness-58-min-version)</sup> Kinugasa himself went on to a major career: at Shochiku he directed period films starring the matinee idol Hayashi Chojiro (later Hasegawa Kazuo), including the hit *Yukinojo Henge* (1935–36), and in 1953 his Eastmancolor *Gate of Hell* (*Jigoku mon*) brought Japan its first Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix.<sup>[14](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/TeinosukeKinugasa/index.html)</sup>\n\n## Production and the Shinkankaku-ha\n\nKinugasa Teinosuke began his career as an *onnagata*, an actor specializing in female roles, first in kabuki theater and then at the Nikkatsu studio; when Japanese cinema began using actresses in the early 1920s he switched to directing, worked for producers such as Shōzō Makino, and then went independent to make *A Page of Madness*, his best-known early film.<sup>[3](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/a-page-of-madness/)</sup> The production drew on the writers of the magazine *Bungei Jidai*, including [Yokomitsu Riichi](https://www.edgepedia.org/yokomitsu-riichi), Kawabata Yasunari, and Kataoka Teppei, the group known as the Shinkankaku-ha, or School of New Perceptions, which sought to overcome naturalistic representation.<sup>[6](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/program/hakkutsu202204-10/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup> Kinugasa was so underfunded that even his stars helped paint the sets, make the props, and push them.<sup>[7](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017048/trivia/)</sup>\n\nThe film was produced and marketed on the border between independent and studio structures, between the artistic avant-garde and commercial narrative cinema.<sup>[8](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.9340131)</sup> It opened in September 1926, shown with benshi narration, the live storytelling that accompanied silent film in Japanese theaters, but without intertitles; it was Yokomitsu who recommended removing them.<sup>[5](https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/bunron/article/download/855/2485/4908)</sup> The film critic Iwasaki Akira hailed it as \"the first film-like film produced in Japan\", closer to absolute film than *Der letzte Mann*, and predicted that plot would no longer be cinema's main concern.<sup>[5](https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/bunron/article/download/855/2485/4908)</sup> It placed fourth in Kinema Junpo's best Japanese films of 1926 (Taisho 15).<sup>[9](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=41817)</sup> Commercially, though, the movie did not achieve the success Kinugasa hoped for.<sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup>\n\n## Loss, rediscovery, and restoration\n\nThe film was considered lost for 45 years, like most Japanese silent films, until Kinugasa found a copy in 1971 in a storage shed at his old house; one account places the film cans in a tin rice chest in his garden shed.<sup>[3](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/a-page-of-madness/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[10](https://petersonreviews.com/2021/05/07/a-page-of-madness-is-a-movie-in-a-dream-state/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[11](https://www.t-bunka.jp/onmyaku/pdf/onmyaku_vol96.pdf)</sup> The recovered print was a 35mm flammable nitrate positive with blue tinting, the film's first print; a \"sound version\" had been made from it the same year, and restorations since had been presented in black and white. The National Film Archive of Japan's 2022 program reproduced the blue tinting, which emphasizes the chaotic world unfolding in the psychiatric hospital.<sup>[6](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/program/hakkutsu202204-10/)</sup>\n\nThe film that exists today is not the one originally released: scenes are missing from the current print, and the film was received at the time in different versions and with varying interpretations.<sup>[4](https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Page-of-Madness)</sup> Surviving versions run from about 58 to 79 minutes, and circulating restorations run about 70 minutes.<sup>[2](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[12](https://db.nipponconnection.com/ja/film/1099/a-page-of-madness-58-min-version)</sup> A new restoration from the National Film Archive of Japan premiered at UCLA Film & Television Archive on the film's centennial.<sup>[13](https://cinema.ucla.edu/events/page-of-madness-2026-12-05/)</sup>\n\n## References\n\n1. [狂った一頁, National Film Archive of Japan film collection database](https://nfad.nfaj.go.jp/det.php?data_id=66794)\n2. [A Page of Madness, mk2 Films](https://mk2films.com/en/film/a-page-of-madness/)\n3. [A Page of Madness, Cinémathèque québécoise](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/a-page-of-madness/)\n4. [Aaron Gerow, *A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan*, University of Michigan Press](https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Page-of-Madness)\n5. [Bunron 4 (2017), Heidelberg University Publishing, on *A Page of Madness* and the Shinkankaku School](https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/bunron/article/download/855/2485/4908)\n6. [発掘された映画たち 2022, National Film Archive of Japan program notes](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/program/hakkutsu202204-10/)\n7. [A Page of Madness (1926) trivia, IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017048/trivia/)\n8. [Aaron Gerow, *A Page of Madness*, JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.9340131)\n9. [狂った一頁, KINENOTE](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=41817)\n10. [A Page of Madness is a Movie in a Dream State, Peterson Reviews](https://petersonreviews.com/2021/05/07/a-page-of-madness-is-a-movie-in-a-dream-state/)\n11. [東京文化会館情報誌 オンミャク vol. 96](https://www.t-bunka.jp/onmyaku/pdf/onmyaku_vol96.pdf)\n12. [A Page of Madness (58 min version), Nippon Connection](https://db.nipponconnection.com/ja/film/1099/a-page-of-madness-58-min-version)\n13. [A Page of Madness, UCLA Film & Television Archive](https://cinema.ucla.edu/events/page-of-madness-2026-12-05/)\n14. [生誕110周年 衣笠貞之助の世界, National Film Archive of Japan exhibition](https://www.nfaj.go.jp/FC/TeinosukeKinugasa/index.html)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1914 to 1926*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n",
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