The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 20-26
A Page of Madness (1926)
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa
A Page of Madness has historically been overshadowed by the avant-garde sensations of Un Chien Andalou, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Sergei Eisenstein—no doubt in part because it was lost until 1971—but it belongs in that rarified company. Kinugasa’s work is a cinematic counterpart to Japan’s Shinkankakuha literary group that sought to liberate the novel from naturalism; few films have so consciously crafted a purely cinematic language, eschewing title cards and denoting hallucination and memory purely through distorted point of view shots and editing patterns. This style, along with the sanitarium setting where a man takes a job as a janitor, perhaps to rescue his wife, amplify the film’s ideas of perspective and the subjectivity of what constitutes “madness.” Accounts regarding the role of the benshi, or narrator, as well as the differences of the surviving and original cuts vary, making A Page of Madness even more of an exercise in interpretation, an enigmatic experiment slowly pushing is way into the silent canon. Forrest Cardamenis (April 26, 8pm, 10pm at the Spectacle with live score performed by Aaron Moore)