General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Page of Madness

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 writers' group. It is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema and one of the first experimental films in Japan.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	狂った一頁 (Kurutta ichipeiji), also printed as 狂つた一頁 in period orthography¹
Director	Kinugasa Teinosuke, who also produced and co-adapted the script¹
Script	Original story and screenplay by Kawabata Yasunari, later winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, with adaptations by Inuzuka Minoru and Sawada Gyojin¹^•⁴
Production	Shinkankaku-ha (School of New Perceptions) Film League with National Art Film Company, 1926¹^•²
Format	35mm black-and-white silent film, shown with benshi narration and without intertitles¹^•⁵
Loss and recovery	Deemed lost for 45 years; Kinugasa rediscovered a print in a shed at his home in 1971³
Surviving length	About 70 minutes in current circulation; the NFAJ print measures 78 minutes and the tinted restoration 79 minutes²^•¹^•⁶

Spoilers

Story and style

The 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.³^•²

Because 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.² 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.⁵ 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.⁵

Interpretation and scholarship

The 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".⁴^•⁸ 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.⁴

The 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.²^•¹² 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.¹⁴

Production and the Shinkankaku-ha

Kinugasa 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.³ The production drew on the writers of the magazine Bungei Jidai, including 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.⁶^•² Kinugasa was so underfunded that even his stars helped paint the sets, make the props, and push them.⁷

The film was produced and marketed on the border between independent and studio structures, between the artistic avant-garde and commercial narrative cinema.⁸ 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.⁵ 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.⁵ It placed fourth in Kinema Junpo's best Japanese films of 1926 (Taisho 15).⁹ Commercially, though, the movie did not achieve the success Kinugasa hoped for.²

Loss, rediscovery, and restoration

The 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.³^•¹⁰^•¹¹ 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.⁶

The 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.⁴ Surviving versions run from about 58 to 79 minutes, and circulating restorations run about 70 minutes.²^•¹² A new restoration from the National Film Archive of Japan premiered at UCLA Film & Television Archive on the film's centennial.¹³

References

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