Masking… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026, Day Five

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness or Kurutta Ippeji stands apart from American and European sensibilities even as it borrows elements and then re-interprets them in the most technically proficient way. It’s powerfully disturbing and addresses the human condition in timeless ways, placing demands on the audience few films ever do with an unconventional narrative structure plus the absence of intertitles…

 

Kinugasa later said that “… story 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.” It’s a puzzle to unravel and the meaning creeps up on you prompting wrong-footed self-reflection in an age when we know so much more about the difference between our inner selves and the aspects we present to the world: we know all about “masking” and in the film actual masks are put on everyone’s face to hide their true feelings.

  

Not for nothing did Kinugasa chose The Last Laugh as his favourite film and here it’s the magnificent performance from Masuo Inoue which holds the film and encapsulates the meaning… his face is its own mask with naturalistic reactions to the disorientation all around. He anchors the story and provides us with an identifiable “main character” but is he a reliable witness to what is apparently on screen. Is his character someone we can base our interpretations on?

 

Masuo Inoue

In terms of meaning, having previously seen the 2007 restoration with only musical accompaniment, it’s less specific than what we saw today. Firstly, this is a new restoration that is slightly longer than previous versions and which looks amazing for a film once considered lost. There was also the added dialogue provided by tirelessly expressive benshi, Ichiro Kataoka, alongside music from Matsumura Makia (piano), Katada Kisayo (percussioni), Kiyomoto Nobuakira (shamisen) which was very well worked adding more layers of counter-point to the experience.

 

This is not a new thing as in a 1977 interview, Kinugasa confirmed that a benshi was used on the original run with Aaron Gerow writing that legendary benshi Musei Tokugawa narrated the film at the Musashinokan theater in Tokyo*. There is a specific meaning if not a script and a story isn’t a purely “surreal” or impressionistic tale although from memory it’s interesting how much of the story I recognised from watching at the Barbican in 2013!

 

Just to confuse things, there’s also a suggestion from scholar Alexander Jacoby*, 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…

 

Whatever the truth, it doesn’t matter because what we saw tonight was stunning silent cinema an Le Giornate at its considerable best. A tough tale but as my neighbour said, it was exhilarating!!

 

*Both from A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan ((2008), Centre for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan.

 

Weimar Uncensored: Blondes Gift (1919)

 

Hubert Moest’s Blonde Poison tried its best to be some kind of pre-code Weimar saucepot and yet despite the best efforts of Blondie Loni (the fizzy Hedda Vernon) it didn’t quite work out due to her lack of chemistry with the hapless Ernst Deutsch as Rolf Roem, her lovelorn first boyfriend who was somehow enthralled by her he was willing to blow his entire inheritance on making her happy when clearly she had an appetite for darker pleasures with the cruel and monocled Georg (Paul Hartmann).

 

Good cameos from Reinhold Schünzel as her nasty dad Adolf as well as Eduard von Winterstein as her Chauffeur who only drove in 4^th gear… and fun accompaniment from Mauro Colombis!

 

Phantom Tram Ride of the Day Award: Today we were travelling mindfully along the street SPÅRVAGNSINVIGNINGEN I KARLSKRONA (SE 1910). Fun facts about Karlskrona! It is known as Sweden's only baroque city and also has the country’s largest naval base – so, hello sailors!

 

Gösta Ekman and Pauline Brunius

Swedish Comedy: GYURKOVICSARNA (SE 1920)

 

Now here was a film I could certainly do business with as those two ugly mugs/Not Lars Hansons, Gösta Ekman and Nils Asther played twins the eldest in a large family who were starting life as adults. Nils is Bandi (snigger…) who takes over as the master of the house whilst the slightly younger Geza (Gösta) sets off to join the army after having to be forced to show how smart he is in the school exams.

 

He makes for an interesting comparator with William Haines as the uncouth raw recruit in yesterday’s Tell it Too the Marines, being just about likeable even as he messes up time after time. The difference could well be in the script as Geza romances the Colonel’s daughter Jutka (Violet Molitor) and then elopes with the Field Marshall’s wife, Baroness Hetvics-Janky played by Pauline Brunius, who was married to director John W. Brunius.

 

It's a bit of froth but its amusing and well made and, of course the two boys were major exports to Hollywood a few years down the line. Pauline Brunius is also worth watching which is good as there’s more to come!

 

Stephen Horne accompanied and added zest to the comedy cake mix.

 

Another Marshall Neilan film: The Girl at Home (1917)

 

This was a very professional lesson-in-life film with Jack Pickford’s Jimmie Dexter leaving his Mom (Olga Grey) and sweetheart, Jean (Vivian Martin – a girl with curls just like Jack’s big/little sis) to go to college and better himself. He doesn’t realise that – following a family financial set back, it’s Jean who is funding his studies.

 

The little twit gets sidetracked by a glamorous older woman cabaret artist, Diana (the very glam Olga Grey – actually 21 at the time, a year younger than Jack) and there’s a to-do when she forges a cheque to buy an expensive stole. It was a cautionary tale with a surprisingly bitter side to it…

 

Neil Brand kept the varsity rag on track.

 

Czech Avant-Garde is all about brand building!

 

The second part of this programme was a real treat with a high standard of film making even when most of the films were adverts employing avant-garde techniques rather than purely art. A tale as old as time… There were films encouraging citizens to invest their money in banks and not hide it under their beds as well as one extolling the value of Czech tractors. Best of all was a film showing how typewriters are made and using stop motion animation to illustrate the complexities of the common or garden Remington which Zbrojovka Brno made in Czechoslovakia under license from Remington-Rand.

 

Prague, City of 100 Spires (1928) showed up the city to fine effect although I only counted 46 spires… but that’s being churlish. Prague in the glow of lights (1928) also made the city look gorgeous and the beer is so fine.

 

Accompaniment was provided by the jazzed, inventive hands of Masterful Meg Morley on piano and the free-hitting Prince of Percussion, Frank Bockius. They were so in tune and instinctively giving each other space as they improvised as you’d expect from two such accomplished jazz players. They took two solo spots which enabled Meg to play the strings with a book as she progressed her melodic lines using the keys and then Frank took scoring syncopation to new heights by striking out what was effectively an extended drum solo mixed with an unseen array of percussive objects.

 

As Jack Kerouac might have said, Frank was “... kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs…” They were something else and the applause was long!

A Typewriter.

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?