Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #13: A Page of Madness (1926)

On the THIRTEENTH night of Halloween ... a special treat: I re-watched one of my favorite horror films, A Page of Madness (1926), directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa and written (in whole or in part) by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. 

This is one of the most chilling and memorably creepy films I've ever seen, not only in itself, with its cursed surrealistic imagery of ghostly and insane dreams in a remote island asylum-- which a family has become perversely entangled with in some obscure manner-- but also in the mysterious circumstances of its creation. 

First, the film was made by a cryptic pre-war Japanese avant-garde group called Shinkankakuha, or "The School of New Perceptions" (both Kinugasa and Kawabata were members), with the almost cult-like stated aim of seeking to inhabit "a subjectivity that peels away the naturalized exterior aspects and leaps into the thing itself." 

Second, it was a lost film for 45 years, until a print was discovered in a storehouse in 1971, and as such it is one of the few surviving silent-era Japanese films. Consequently, there is scant information about its production-- it seems to have been filmed in an actual asylum, perhaps with real inmates as background actors. 

Third, it never had title cards but instead the narrative was filled in at showings by live performers who either read from a script or came up with dialog improvisationally. For this reason, much of the literal narrative remains disturbingly ambiguous: we know that the main character is a janitor who works at an asylum where his wife is kept as an inmate, but are his children who visit him real or are they ghostly hallucinations, their deaths having precipitated his wife's madness? Or is he himself an inmate who is merely imaging one of the other inmates to be his wife? Or are the rare appearances by psychiatric staff the actual illusions, and the truth is that all of the characters are in hell, depicted here as an asylum run by its inmates and filled with acquaintances and relatives from one's former life? 

All of these mysteries surrounding the work's production and narrative, together with the film's phantasmagoric imagery, make it feel like a forbidden, otherworldly artifact. We may never fully understand its secrets or the ghosts that haunt it.