One of the most startling and striking silent films from Japan, PAGE OF MADNESS was rediscovered by director Teinosuke Kinugasa in his storeroom in the early 1970s and made available for re-release. It follows an elderly man who voluntarily works at odd jobs in a lunatic asylum where his wife is confined, having drowned her baby son in a fit of madness many years earlier. He hopes one day to set her free. “The film is a remarkable work of concentrated emotional power, seeking to understand the nature of insanity while offering a straight narrative (the wife’s story) in flashback,” observed The Faber Companion to Foreign Film. Relying on its images, the film uses no inter-titles, displaying breathtaking technical virtuosity: the director employs every available camera device, in the style of German Expressionism: it has been called the “Japanese Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. “A masterpiece of imagination and control, it has not dated in 70 -odd years,” Faber exclaims. Time Out New York called it “one of the most radical and challenging Japanese movies ever seen”.
Phillip Johnston’s original score for “Page of Madness” was premiered on July 9th and 10th, 1998, at The Walter Reade Theater, in Lincoln Center, NYC. It was commissioned by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and performed by The Transparent Quartet. It has subsequently been performed at Duke University in Durham, NC, Time & Space Ltd. in New York, and at M.I.T.’s Killian Hall in Boston, Massachusetts and in Australia at the 2007 Sydney Film Festival and at The Red House (People’s Republic) in 2024.
Watch two video samples below:
Press | Live performance
“…Alternately frantic and lyrical – featuring a percussive, if drumless, vibraphone-and-piano combination, as well as alto saxophone and bass – Johnston’s ensemble takes its cue from Kinugasa’s editing, albeit sometimes in reverse by letting the visual rhythms speak for themselves. Most restrained when it could be craziest, the Transparent Quartet gives Page of Madness a freshness that more than compensates for its somewhat worn (and only available) 16mm print.”
––J. Hoberman, Village Voice
“In a multimedia performance on Friday that included Johnston’s newest and longest film score, the band was flexible enough to sustain the balance between tuneful bounce and mordant structural tangents that its predecessors achieved . . . Johnston mirrored with melodies that responded to the director’s use of light and shadow as well as the frequent ceremonial pacing. Moving in and out of improvisational passages like a second lens, with Johnston’s soprano capturing the anguished wail of a double reed as the characters grew more desperate, the music was by necessity knotty and ominous . . . Johnston had unquestionably found a response to Kinugasa’s vision that, like all successful soundtracks, evolved in service to the visual images.
––Bob Blumenthal, Boston Globe
“The rhythmic synchronism between film and score resembled a shadow dance . . . Once you’ve seen the film and heard the score together, it’s hard to imagine the film alone. It’s also hard to imagine it with any other score.”
––Owen Cordle, News and Observer (Durham, NC)
“This provides a memorable and rare opportunity to hear one of the most intriguing talents in contemporary jazz . . . ”
––Stan Dick, The Spectator (Durham, NC)