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A Page of Madness

Original title: Kurutta ippêji
  • 19261926
  • 1h 10m
IMDb RATING
7.4/10
3.5K
YOUR RATING
  • Cast & crew
  • User reviews
  • Trivia
  • IMDbPro
Kurutta ippêji (1926)
  • Drama
  • Horror
  • Thriller
A man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife.A man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife.A man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife.
IMDb RATING
7.4/10
3.5K
YOUR RATING
  • Director
    • Teinosuke Kinugasa
  • Writers
    • Yasunari Kawabata(short story)
    • Teinosuke Kinugasa(adaptation)
    • Minoru Inuzuka(adaptation)
  • Stars
    • Masuo Inoue
    • Ayako Iijima
    • Yoshie Nakagawa
Top credits
  • Director
    • Teinosuke Kinugasa
  • Writers
    • Yasunari Kawabata(short story)
    • Teinosuke Kinugasa(adaptation)
    • Minoru Inuzuka(adaptation)
  • Stars
    • Masuo Inoue
    • Ayako Iijima
    • Yoshie Nakagawa
  • See production, box office & company info
    • 37User reviews
    • 31Critic reviews
  • See production, box office & company info
  • See more at IMDbPro
  • Photos32

    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Eiko Minami in Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Kurutta ippêji (1926)
    Ayako Iijima in Kurutta ippêji (1926)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Masuo Inoue
    • Servantas Servant
    Ayako Iijima
    • Servant's Daughteras Servant's Daughter
    Yoshie Nakagawa
    • Servant's Wifeas Servant's Wife
    Hiroshi Nemoto
    • Young Manas Young Man
    Misao Seki
    • Doctoras Doctor
    Minoru Takase
    • Crazy Man Aas Crazy Man A
    Eiko Minami
    • Danceras Dancer
    Kyosuke Takamatsu
    • Crazy Man Bas Crazy Man B
    Tetsu Tsuboi
    • Crazy Man Cas Crazy Man C
    Shintarô Takiguchi
    • Boyas Boy
    • Director
      • Teinosuke Kinugasa
    • Writers
      • Yasunari Kawabata(short story) (adaptation)
      • Teinosuke Kinugasa(adaptation)
      • Minoru Inuzuka(adaptation)
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
    • All cast & crew

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    Storyline

    Edit
    A husband picks up a job as a janitor at an insane asylum scheming all the time to be close to and free his wife from the institution where she recently attempted suicide. A score was added when in 1970 the reels were unearthed after they were considered lost for decades. The director approved and subsequently repudiated this version. —aghaemi
    • mental illness
    • madness
    • insane asylum
    • father daughter relationship
    • husband wife relationship
    • 32 more
    • Plot summary
    • Add synopsis
    • Genres
      • Drama
      • Horror
      • Thriller
    • Parents guide
      • Add content advisory

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      This film was deemed lost for more than forty years, upon being rediscovered by its director Teinosuke Kinugasa in a shed in 1971.
    • Alternate versions
      Reissued in Japan in 1973 with musical score replacing original benshi.
    • Connections
      Featured in The Story of Film: An Odyssey: The Golden Age of World Cinema (2011)

    User reviews37

    Review
    Top review
    A page out of order
    This is actually one of the titles of the film, a page out of order. It perfectly reflects the film itself, a narrative fractured, demented, cast in and out of a feverish mind, but ultimately incomplete to us, and the various misconceptions it has spawned in trying to evaluate as though it was the whole thing.

    I was increasingly suspicious of this while watching, that I was basically confronted with an incomplete film and so a film impenetrable not wholly by design but only because the keys have been lost to us, or are not attached to the film we are watching and we have to apprehend elsewhere. Doing a little research afterwards only confirmed my doubts. So a little context:

    -the film is not the tip of the iceberg of an advanced cinema whose main body is lamentably lost to us; it was saved exactly because it was an exception, a low-budget oddity the filmmaker himself re-discovered in his garden shed. The majority of silent Japanese cinema - whose final traces were eclipsed in the aftermath of WWII - were generic studio reworkings of popular material.

    -it is not the product of an 'isolated cinematic environment free of influence', rather a studied attempt to recreate what the French avant-garde was pioneering at the time; so yes, the superimpositions, the haze of motions and details, the rapid-fire montage, all of them tools in the attempt to offer us a glimpse of the fractured, elusive reality of the mind, available tools at the time that Kinugasa knew from other films.

    -so even though the idea of a janitor coming to work in a mental hospital may carry hues of Caligari, the film itself is from the line of what in France was called impressionism; the films of Epstein, L'Herbier, Gance.

    -most importantly, even though the closest parable I can think of is Menilmontant, another French film from the same year that in place of story tried to paint with only images a state of mind from inside the mirror, that film was directly structured around images. It was intended to be seen as we have it. Watching Page it becomes increasingly obvious that a story deeply pertains to what we see; as was customary in Japan at the time, that story was meant to be narrated to the audience by a benshi, a narrator supplied by each theater. We may cobble together a view of that story from other sources, but the intended effect is lost to us.

    -there is still the problem that in the version we have approximately one third of the film is missing. Most of it in the end from what I can tell, where the girl is supposed to marry her fiancé (which echoes and wonderfully annotates the scene where the janitor imagines himself reunited with his wife.

    Oh, what we have of the film is more than fine, it's actually one of the most captivating visions of the mind in disarray from the time. But it was just not meant to be seen as merely a tone poem. The dreamy flow is clearly flowing somewhere. What we have instead is only what was salvaged from it but at the same time near complete enough, making barely enough sense to stand on its own, that we may be inclined to accept as the full vision.

    We can still accept this itself as a fragment of madness and interpret from where our imagination takes us. That is fine, I encourage this.

    Rumors have been circulating about a new restored version, hopefully one that - next to a better print - somehow includes the narration, preferably by a benshi, or intertitles at the very least. Until then, no rating from me.
    helpful•49
    3
    • chaos-rampant
    • Oct 15, 2011

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • January 1975 (United States)
    • Country of origin
      • Japan
    • Languages
      • None
      • Japanese
    • Also known as
      • The Forgotten Pages
    • Production companies
      • Kinugasa Productions
      • National Film Art
      • Shin Kankaku-ha Eiga Renmei Productions
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Technical specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 10 minutes
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Sound mix
      • Silent
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.33 : 1

    Related news

    10 Great Japanese Horror Films On Criterion Channel
    10 Great Japanese Horror Films On Criterion Channel
    Apr 11ScreenRant.com
    All about “Across Asia Film Festival 2018. Ghosts of Asia” – 2 to 10 December – Cagliari, Italy
    Nov 30AsianMoviePulse

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