Kinugasa + In the Nursery, Barbican… A Page of Madness (1926)

Masuo Inoue

Just when you think you’ve seen it all a silent film comes along and knocks lazy preconceptions into touch or rather, in the case of this film, disorientates and then beats them severely around the head with a mop!

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (狂った一頁 or Kurutta Ippeji) is so accomplished, so fully formed, that it appears to have come from nowhere – standing apart from American and European sensibilities it borrows elements and then re-interprets them in the most technically proficient and – naturally – Japanese way. It’s an uncomfortable and searingly honest film featuring a dazzling array of camera trickery and a structure that places considerable demands on the audience.

Think David Lynch meets Abel Gance via FW Murnau (Kinugasa chose The Last Laugh as his favourite film…)   and you’d be part of the way there but there’s an narrative integrity that you wouldn’t find in some contemporary avant-garde cinema… a clear storyline that just needs to be interpreted and without the aid of a single inter-title.

Much effort has been devoted to interpreting the film and yet watching it cold and without fore-knowledge of the story you have to make sense of what you can in those moments. I’ve subsequently re-watched it and read a bit more around the plot which feels very much like cheating… the film works on a number of levels and first impressions sit the deepest.

Viewers in 1926 may not have had to work so hard. There has been debate over whether the film would have been accompanied by a Benshi – a film narrator, but a 1977 interview with Kinugasa confirms that one was used: there is a specific meaning and the story isn’t a purely “surreal” or impressionistic tale.

There’s also a suggestion from scholar Alexander Jacoby, in his book A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan, that the director re-edited the film on its rediscovery to remove more traditional narrative sections and to conform more precisely with contemporary avant-garde perceptions. (A review of the book can be found on the Midnight Eye site. Not everything is ever as it seems, it seems…).

Screen shot: Yoshie Nakagawa

The film was playing as part of the London Barbican’s wonder: art and science on the brain season of events and featured expert  live accompaniment from Sheffield electronica duo In the Nursery – who provided such a memorable soundtrack to Elvey’s Hindle Wakes - they’re nothing if not versatile, as this film could hardly be more different.

A Page of Madness is based on a story treatment by future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, probably amongst a number of others… It is set in a mental asylum where Kinugasa sets out the interior lives of the tormented inmates alongside their external realities.

Eiko Minami

There’s a ballet dancer (Eiko Minami) who furiously dances in her cell whilst in her own mind she is on an elaborate stage with the strangest set design: a giant furry ball that spins continuously behind her. She’s the signal for emotional shifts in the story: almost like a choreographic Greek chorus of one.

In the next door cell is a middle aged woman (Yoshie Nakagawa), tortured by her murder (or near murder – opinions seem to differ) of her child. She’s in contorted agony and unable to help herself even when offered the chance.

Unbeknownst to all, the woman’s husband (a truly amazing performance from Masuo Inoue) is employed as the asylum’s janitor. He took the job to help his wife but she looks beyond salvation and yet naturally, being a film audience, we hope for something...

Yoshie Nakagawa

Their daughter (Ayako Iijima) arrives to inform her mother that she is getting engaged and yet she didn’t know her father was working there… there follows arguments and dreams and what may be an attempted break out. But the wife will not leave and the Janitor is frustrated…drifting into a reverie that may be the continuation of an earlier dream.

Ayako Iijima

What happens and what is merely dreamt and… does it matter? One of the clearest signals in the film is when the Janitor calms some of the inmates by attaching Noh masks to their faces. In an instant they are calmed and, like the masks, you feel they are smiling. Without the mask of a smile inner thoughts are revealed all too readily.

The cast is a very strong one with Nakagawa presenting an especially harrowing take on the desolate mindscape of this woman who has, literally, lost everything.

But it is Masuo Inoue who holds the film and encapsulates the meaning… a very naturalistic performer his technique is one of the purest expressions of Lillian Gish’s stated aim to be never caught “acting” by the audience. He anchors the story and provides us with an identifiable “hero” and his shifts into hysteria are all the more shocking for this.  But does he lose it or does he dream it?

Kinugasa directs with great invention and dexterity. He borrows from everyone he could in order to show these tormented “inner lives”, deploying the full range of his influences in his own unique manner… There are extensive dolly shots, montage and double/triple exposures, “whip pans” – you’ll know the instant you see one what that means - and spotlighting. As the writer Vlada Petric stated, the film’s “cinematic structure includes virtually every film device known at the time…”

Triple exposure

It is so well controlled and serves the story well but, as Kinugasa said later, this “…was less important than technical experimentation: tracking shots, close-ups, rapid montage, flashbacks, dissolves, irises, etc. In this film I used almost every avant-garde technique.” 

Given the problems of understanding the story in its present form – even the 75 minute 2007 restoration - musical accompaniment takes on an additional importance. In the Nursery did a sterling job of “explaining” the action, the shifts from reality to dream… guiding our emotional response to actions that may be random and may be fantasy. This takes finesse and the delicate touch of experience – you can imagine all kinds of free-form “solutions” to A Page of Madness’ soundtrack but this film demands a disciplined response.

As it was, the boys provided the perfect musical “Benshi”.

A dream winner

Sadly A Page of Madness is not available on DVD except in a cheap-shot 3D version which bills it as a horror film. Hopefully this longer restored version will be available in more respectful circumstances at some point – c’mon Criterion!

In the meantime you can watch the 60 minute version on grainy YouTube and try to sync the In The Nursery CD as best you can!


There's a fascinating interview with Kinugasa expert Mariann Lewinsky also on the Midnight Eye site.

Some hope by the end?

William Haines, Arts Theatre, London… Tailor Made Man (2013)

Faye Tozer and Dylan Turner

Tailor Made Man is not just the best silent-movie-gay-love-story-interior-design-musical in London, it's maybe the best musical?

William Haines story is one of the most extraordinary of all in old Hollywood. Winner, along with Eleanor Boardman of Samuel Goldwyn Company‘s New Faces of 1922 contest in 1922, he went on to star in over 20 films over the next decade before Louis B Mayer pulled the plug in dramatic fashion.

Haines was always himself and, startlingly, this meant he never tried too hard to hide his homosexuality not just off-duty but even in his films. He was an honest actor with a decent range who was naturalistic but also knowing and inclusive.

Billy Haines

This spritely musical grew out of Claudio Macor’s stage play of the same name dating from the 90’s, at a time when few of Haines' films were ever seen let alone available on home video – so great was his fall from Mayer’s good grace.  For this production, Macor wrote the book, along with Amy Rosenthal, and also directed.  The music was composed by Adam Meggido with lyrics from Duncan Walsh Atkins

The result is a joyous celebration, which allows Haines’ sense of humour to shine through and for a rapid connection to the visceral spirit of the times – a decade of decadence and dance.

Dylan Turner and Bradley Clarkson

A musical is a contrived art form in many ways but it serves this kind of story surprisingly well. Biographical dramas can get bogged down in the facts and strain underneath the weight of sequencing known chronology but with a musical you can just sing the story onwards as required. There’s dancing too with classy choreography from Nathan M Wright, making the most of a relatively small stage. And, of course, there’s  interior design!

Dylan Turner plays William Haines and has the right amount of good looks, charm and cock-sure confidence to convince as the man who seemed to breeze through to stardom. Bradley Clarkson plays Jimmy Shields, Haines’ life-partner who stuck with him through his rise, abrupt fall and subsequent re-emergence as an in-demand designer to the stars.

Vivien Carter and Clive Ward

The story begins with the elder Shields (Clive Ward) being interviewed by an architectural journalist, Betsy Dawson (an eye-catching Vivien Carter) not long after Haines’ death from lung cancer in 1973.

We move back to the early twenties as William travels to Hollywood with Eleanor Boardman (played by Holly Easterbrook)  -  another  great talent from the era who deserves more attention.

He meets Jimmy cruising through New York and their life-long affair begins, just as Billy’s silent career starts to take off, albeit after a few years worth of supporting roles.

Macor cleverly avoids too much film-by-film detail and prefers to use Billy’s relationship with Marion Davies to encapsulate his many leading lady friendships.

Faye Tozer looks very little like Davies but she puts in a memorable shift as William Randolph Hearst’s girlfriend – a fun loving party animal who finally found her niche alongside Haines in King Vidor’s classic Show People. Tozer’s voice is stage-strong and she carries off the peroxide playfulness very well.

Davies accepted Haines for who he is as did Anita Page, Boardman and Joan Crawford who famously described his relationship with Shields as the best marriage in Hollywood.

Faye Tozer and Mike McShane

But Haines’ paymasters were less forgiving. Mike McShane gives an almost show-stealing turn as the bluff hetero bully Louis B Mayer. LB was just about willing to tolerate Haines when he was good box office but he was quick to cut him down once his behaviour led to scandal.

Billy was caught cruising with a sailor and refused to marry his way to a PR alibi. In this version of events Pola Negri is suggested as the prime candidate for the lavender wedding. I’m not sure if this is true but it’s a good excuse for a routine with Kay Murphy excelling as a humorously-clichéd version of the Polish star.

That’s another thing about musicals… accuracy is less important than “feeling” and a good tune. I’m very happy to see anyone sing about silent film and in this case to accept a Negri from a parallel universe… conflated with Cyd Charisse’s Brooks’-inspired dancer in Singing in the Rain and still grieving her “Rudy” a decade after his death…

Billy goes off the rails as his career collapses and Jimmy deserts him temporarily. He returns just as his lover has hit rock bottom and the two begin to build their lives anew: We’ve Got Time is their anthem and beautifully expressed by both actors.

Marion also stands by the boys especially when they are driven from their LA beach front home by hoards of white supremacists intent on meting out rough justice after they believe that one of their sons was propositioned. In real life the case was dropped due to a total lack of evidence but no charges were brought against their attackers…

With Marion and WRH’s help, William begins to build a reputation as an interior designer, sprucing up some of her many properties before being commissioned to work on other stars’ houses.

I’d read about this aspect of Haines’ career but never appreciated just how successful and influential he became over the ensuing decades. For more details check out his company website and an interesting article in Architectural Digest. You can still buy Haines’ furniture but you need deep pockets!

The show ends with Design a song about matching your exteriors to your interior life: "...the life you live is all about design!" ...something William Haines did with style and persistence!

At the end my wife pretty much started the standing ovation and as I joined in we were clapping not just a great show from the talented cast but also Mr Haines himself.

Tailor Made Man runs until the start of April in the intimate Arts Theatre (home to some of the friendliest front of house staff in the Capital!) - if you’re anywhere near London I’d heartily recommend it. Hopefully it will tour and get the longer run it deserves.

Diving for meaning… The Pearl (1929)

Watching this minor surrealist masterwork I was reminded of my English teacher’s response to an attempt I’d made at composing a dada-esque poem (i.e. one without any poetry…), “is this deep - how can I mark it?” I’d been rumbled, but how to judge any work of attempted surrealism – there’s a fine line between the charlatan and the champion (although it was fairly broad in the case of my teenage verse…).

Directed by Henri d' Ursel, The Pearl (1929) owes an obvious debt to Buñuel, Dali and Man Ray… not to mention Louise Feuillade, it’s stylishly done and may well mean something.

Written and starring Georges Hugnet as Le Jeune Homme, The Pearl could signify possession or it could mean love… it may even be just a pearl. I don’t think it matters to any forensic degree, you can overlay your own interpretation according to mood: the key thing is that the film draws you in and makes you think. This properly defies any constraining interpretations and, by the rules, your guess is as good as mine.

All we know for certain is what happens on screen. A pearl is made and extracted from the sea. A young Lulu (Mary Stutz) waits in her garden for her fiancé and he sets off to buy her a pearl necklace.

Waiting for her man...

Here is the films funniest joke as Lulu looks out and we see her man running through woods, rowing across a river then running through town getting distracted by a street game… You expect her to view him directly but he’s far away, initially heroic and then just distracted.

But he has it in mind to buy his girl a pearl necklace.

Georges Hugnet

At the jewellery store, a pretty shop assistant (Kissa Kouprine) steals pearls and carelessly hides them in her stocking top which is all too visible as she sits chatting on a ledge. The girl has no name and is only referenced in the title sequence as La Voleuse – The Thief.

Kissa Kouprine

The young man reports her to the manager and she is fired. He leaves the shop with his pearls and she follows him, hitching a ride on his bike. The man crashes his bike and the string of pearls is broken… the man searches but there is still a pearl missing. It rolled directly to La Voleuse who walks off with it leaving him fatuously pawing the ground...

Georges Hugnet and Kissa Kouprine

As in a dream the young man journeys to a hotel. Here La Voleuse is everywhere, appearing in a tight-fitting silver-grey cat suit – an updated, sleeker version of Irma Vep - from every corridor, pursuing the man and his pearls. She is not alone and there are other women all wearing the same costume. Are all women looking for “The Pearl”?

La Voleuse shares a bath with one of her doppelgangers and the two play dice. Is this a celebration of chance or an actual game to decide a winner?

The man and La Voleuse share a room and clearly more as they wake the next day. Decisions need to be made. Who gets the pearls now?

He's just a boy who can't say no...

Then the Man is disturbed by a sleepwalker (Renée Savoy) who he follows through the building and onto the roof. It feels like leading somewhere but, as Ursel cuts back to Lulu… it’s not clear whether she’ll ever get the intended present…

The man returns to Lulu with a letter explaining his purchase and his sorrow…the somnambulist casually deposits the pearls around Lulu’s neck and she is united with her fiancé… but too much distance is now between them. The young man walks off and spots La Voleuse…giving chase…

Renée Savoy

We’ve all had days like these, distracted from our purpose by random chance and the subsequent emergence of new possibilities.

This is how The Pearl ultimately works well containing enough reality and enough dream to hold together as a narrative: vaguely familiar…

Georges Hugnet looks suitably perturbed throughout whilst Mary Stutz is patiently engaged. Most of the genuine expression comes from the beguiling Kissa Kouprine who offers the only emotionally connected character. She was the only professional actor on show and featured in a number of Marcel L’Herbier’s films.

Kissa Kouprine

Special mention should also be given to the superb cinematography from Marc Bujard who had worked on Gance’s  J’accuse! (1919) as well as Raymond Bernard’s The Chess Player (1927) both featured elsewhere on this blog.

I watched the Surrealism and Experiment  in Belgian Cinema  DVD available from Cinematek.

Distant voices… Of Time and the City (2008)

Terence Davies’ memorial montage of Liverpool was commissioned as part of the city’s 2008 Capital of Culture celebration. The organisers were looking to get a take on the “new” from someone who had left the city and in Davies’ case this had been in 1973 when he was 28. The director felt that he’d already had his say on his home town with his stunning Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes and had to be persuaded into making a documentary.

He was finally convinced by a vision of Everton Valley high-rise flats accompanied in his head by Peggy Lee singing The Folks Who Live on the Hill. The Lord sings in mysterious ways…  

Of Time and the City emerged as an unique description of growing up amidst post war decline with Davies as the sardonically poetic narrator of his own emergence from this wreckage. Institutions, architects, pop music and, above all, the Catholic Church all let him down but he came through.

Filming St George's Hall

It’s a totally honest film and one without artifice or sorrow – he may not sound it now but Davies is a Scouser alright. One of ten children crammed into a terraced house in Kensington (not the same as London’s version…), he is one of that glorious generation who made something of themselves as the city’s education system contributed to an accelerated social mobility of a kind we’re unlikely to see again.

My parents’ were similarly enabled and moved out from Anfield and Wavertree to the leafy commuter town of Lydiate, damning me forever to be an out-of-town “woollyback” but we move on… Liverpool and transience go hand in hand, but it’s my family’s city and some live there still.

They say that the only people who love Liverpool are the ones that have left…  Davies is not necessarily amongst them and leaving his rose-tinted camera at home, remembers to bring his poison pen. That said, he clearly retains affection for his family and the community he grew up in.

St George's Hall - scale and splendour...

The film opens with lingering shots of the massive classicism of St George’s Hall – the largest contained space in any municipal building of its era and a statement of civic architectural arrogance unrivalled anywhere else in Yorkshire or Lancashire - a fair reflection of the city’s economic importance at a time when it was pretty much second only to London.

Liverpool's Pier Head

There are frequent shots of the overhead railway which ran along the river front giving a south Manhattan appearance to this most American of British cities. As a silent film aside...this was the scene of the World’s first tracking shot with the Lumière brothers placing their camera on the train in 1896 to record the dock side past the old Customs House and long disappeared warehouses signifying Liverpool’s true nature as a port of empire.

The Lumière's 1896 train ride - Princes and Albert Docks

The footage isn't in this film but you can see it here. Sadly, like many Liverpool landmarks, the railway fell victim to short-term planning decisions and was demolished in the mid-50’s disappointing Davies and many other schoolboys.

Davies post-Catholic confessions are emphatically rendered as he describes his “thousands of hours of wasted prayers” and a futile wait for forgiveness from a God that had no time for deviations from the norm. There’s a painful counterpointing showing a deconsecrated church being used as a bar… graven images still in place looking down incongruously on the revellers.

Then he shows the opening of the city’s Catholic Cathedral, an impressively ambitious construction in cold concrete, locally termed Paddy’s Wigwam, bishops in their flowing red dresses struggling against the Irish Sea wind on an unwelcoming mid-60s day.

Not "Betty and Phil"

Davies is also impressively dismissive of the “Betty and Phil show” with his voice over to Elizabeth II’s 1947 wedding detailing the royal couple’s extensive and mind-numbingly prosaic list of gifts… Barely a pause and he details the even greater “waste” at her coronation in 1954. And so it goes… with a quick cut to less well-fed working people eking out their living on rations in austerity Britain… and so it goes.

Davies’ was sustained by creative appreciation with movies his particular passion alongside arousing trips to oggle the wrestlers tight shorts at the Liverpool Stadium. We’re shown a premier at Birkenhead’s Ritzi cinema, as Gregory Peck helps make this "the Hollywood of the North".

Davies’ fondness for popular music did not extend to rock and roll and his sneering  “yeah, yeah, yeah…” tells you all you need to know of his opinion of The Beatles: “…more a firm of North-western accountants than a pop group”. Liking the Mop Tops isn't a legal requirement for Liverpudlians and,as elsewhere, Davies is totally honest - beat music's rough visceral charm evaded him and he much preferred the well-honed popular classics.

But Davies real passion is with classical music and he reels off a string of exotic European names with relish as Hippy Hippy Shake plays over manic scenes from The Cavern. The film begins with the screen being elevated in the Liverpool Philharmonic and you can hear a section from Mahler’s 2nd later in the film (sadly not performed on this occasion by my uncle's former band, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra - the most recorded orchestra in Britain).

Davies with producers Solon Papadopoulos and Roy Boulter at the Phil

On a strictly limited budget, Of Time and the City is a masterpiece of cost-controlled collage with film acquired on a miniscule budget and seamlessly strung together in support of the director’s commentary. Davies shows the demolition of the old Victorian terraces and their replacement by high-rise homogeneity. For families like the Davies’ it meant the enforced exchange of one unsatisfactory way of life with another, more isolated but with arguably better views...

There is disappointment at Bold Street booze-culture but Davies doesn’t appear overtly judgmental of today's city. His ire is reserved for those who forged his difficult years and for the myopic planners who blighted the area for decades. Possibly in spite of himself, the film is dominated by the 40's and 50's of his childhood, until everything comes crashing down in the 60's to be replaced by concrete isolation.

Davies’ culture worked in part because of his family and not circumstance.  He is rightfully proud of the man he has made and his journey beyond. Returning now he feels estranged: it’s not the place that he knew and – presumably – his people have also moved on too. And it’s people that make the place.

He’s not alone and Liverpool has almost halved in population over the last half century as it has evolved into something new. It’s still a place with extremes and beauty... and it endures.

Davies concludes by saying “goodnight ladies” to the “Three Graces” that dominate the Pier Head – these are at least unchanged in spite of all behind them…

I watched the BFI DVD which comes with a wealth of extras including Humphrey Jenning's documentary Listen to Britain which inspired Davies’ approach to the film. I don’t think you have to come from Merseyside to connect – this is a universal take on the nature of change and identity – and whilst Davies knows where he came from he is also a man who truly knows himself best of all.