Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!
This blog takes me to some weird places. A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ichipēji in the original Japanese) is one that would interest me in general, but a little reading would make me think twice about watching. This is a rare early Japanese silent. Apparently, for audiences in Japan, this would have been screened with someone who acted as a narrator, essentially telling the story that was playing out on screen. As such, the film has no intertitles. Just as important, the film was thought missing for more than four decades, and when it was rediscovered, a third of it was missing. So what we have is two-thirds of a show with no actual explanation of what is happening.
But, it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, and I’ve certainly watched longer films that were less coherent. So in I dove, head-first. I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the plot summary on Wikipedia. Again, there are no intertitles and no dialogue. It’s also very clearly an experimental film, so even if there were some intertitles, it’s not going to be the most coherent film around.
The elevator pitch is that a man (Masao Inoue) works as a custodian in a mental institution. The reason he does is that his wife (Yoshie Nakagawa) is in the facility, and he took the job so that he can watch over her. Eventually, their daughter shows up to announce her wedding and discovers that her father is working at the asylum. She also discovers her father is working there and becomes very upset by this in large part because she blames him for her mother’s insanity.
There’s more, of course, but that’s the bare-bones basics of at least the first part of the film. The problem on my end is that someone who is most interested in narrative doesn’t have a great deal to look at—the narrative is one that has to be either inferred or garnered from another source, because it’s not really in the film itself without getting some assistance from that other source. Because the film is an experimental one, the narrative that we see on film is far from straightforward.
There are also cultural elements here that are going to be lost on a lot of audience members including me. Our custodian has a vision where his daughter ends up marrying one of the inmates. Later, that inmate bows to him. Evidently, this is supposed to represent the fact that he did actually marry his daughter in some way, because this is supposed to be a son-in-law bowing to his new father-in-law. How would I know this is different than a different kind of bow? Well, I wouldn’t without the magic that is Wikipedia.
What this means is that I have to look at A Page of Madness is something that needs to be judged less on the merits of the story and more on the merits of everything else. It is certainly a striking film in terms of the visuals, but it’s not one that I think I would want to (or need to) watch a second time. Things happen and are unexplained, and I don’t have the cultural background to actually follow the narrative, and so it becomes just images.
Admitted, some of those are cool. At the end, our custodian gives all of the inmates of the asylum noh masks so that they can have happy faces. It’s odd and disturbing, and is actually pretty noteworthy in terms of the visual element.
But I have to say for as much as I’ve been told that this is an important and pivotal film—and it probably is—there’s not a lot here to really enjoy.
Why to watch A Page of Madness: If you are into film history, it feels important.
Why not to watch: The story is hard to follow without a road map, and the film doesn’t supply you with the road map.
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