by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a fascinating movie
I’d recorded recently from TCM, part of their “Silent Sunday Showcase,” a
Japanese film called Kurutta Ippêji, translated as “A Page of Madness,” made in 1926 as an independent
production on an ultra-low budget by director Teinosuke Kinugawa (whose career
lasted until 1966; his most famous film is probably Gate of Hell, a samurai drama from 1955 that’s notable as the
first Japanese movie ever made in color). The imdb.com page on it gives a
70-minute running time but the TCM print ran just under an hour, and the first
thing we saw — after an English-language title announcing that the George
Eastman House had done the restoration (from a print Kinugawa had found in a
shed on his property in 1971) — was credits exclusively in Japanese characters,
with no attempt at translation. I groaned at the prospect of having to watch a
movie with intertitles in untranslated Japanese and trying as best I could to
figure out what was going on, but it turned out there was no need to translate
intertitles because Kinugawa hadn’t used any. It was a long-standing dream of
many silent directors to make a movie so self-explanatory visually it wouldn’t need titles, and at least two — Charlie Chaplin and F.
W. Murnau — came close. Kurutta
Ippêji, which TCM double-billed
with the 1919 German classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari because it had similar settings — an insane asylum
and a carnival — and because both films were stylized treatments of human
madness, turned out to be an abstract movie.
The plot is officially summarized
as “A man takes a job at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife,”
and certainly that’s the essence of what is happening, but so much more in this film is happening
besides that it’s not altogether that easy to follow. The film opens with a
sequence of a young woman in a black dress doing a manic dance, and Kinugawa
pulls back his camera to reveal that she’s in an asylum cell. She’s played by
Yoshie Nakagawa and is billed on imdb.com as “Servent’s Wife” — is that a
misspelling of “Servant” or is that actually supposed to be her name? — and
she’s been placed in the asylum for supposedly committing a terrible crime.
Through a brief flashback it’s hinted that the crime is the murder of her own
daughter (Ayako Iijima). Her husband (Masuo Inoue), the closest the film has to
a central character, is bound and determined to break her out of the
institution, though it’s not clear whether he believes in her innocence or he
just doesn’t want his wife in an institution no matter what she’s done. The film is full of other characters,
including a nurse dressed in traditional Japanese garb (most of the people are
dressed more or less in Western style) who bears a striking resemblance to the
young Yoko Ono, and a doctor at the asylum who wears glasses and looks like
Richard Loo in all those World War II-era movies in which the Chinese-American
Loo had to play dastardly Japanese villains. One remarkable aspect about Kurutta
Ippêji is how thoroughly it blurs
the lines between sanity and madness; made well before the writings of Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing
raised the question of how we socially define “sanity” and arbitrarily declare
that some people have it and some people don’t, Kinugasa and his collaborator,
Yasunari Kawabata (who wrote the short story on which Kurutta Ippêji is based and co-wrote the script with Kinugawa,
Minoru Inuzuka and Bankô Sawada), thoroughly blur the line between the sane and
the insane and in the end, of course, the husband ends up committed to the
institution, having gone insane himself (or at least behaving in a manner that
gets him declared insane by that
sinister-looking doctor) — much like the hero of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1964) infiltrates a mental institution to
investigate a murder and ends up committed himself.
The film has sometimes been
considered a Japanese Caligari, which it is and it isn’t; it’s shot in a highly stylized pictorial
manner owing a lot to both German Expressionism and traditional Japanese art,
but the sets are realistic-looking (unlike those in Caligari) and the actors wear normal clothes instead of
flamboyantly unreal costumes. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Kinugawa
originally intended to set the film in a carnival but decided that would have
been too close to Caligari — though a carnival scene does take place and it’s
apparently supposed to represent a flashback to the happier days of the
husband, wife and daughter before she killed the girl (maybe) and got locked up
in the madhouse. For that matter, Caligari opened and closed in an asylum, and the main part of the film was
presented as the delusional flashback of one of the central characters. Kurutta
Ippêji is about as far from
mainstream filmmaking as one could imagine, then and now — though it’s a clear
ancestor of the “underground” movie style of the 1950’s and 1960’s (I joked
that the makers of those films thought they were being so innovative — and Charles said, “Yeah, and so do
the ones making them now!”) — my
hope that we were going to see a “typical” Japanese film of the late silent era
was quickly dashed — and yet it’s utterly haunting even though it’s not always
easy to tell what’s supposed to be going on (my synopsis is based on my own
reading of the film and is somewhat contradicted by the imdb.com page, which
lists different actresses playing the dancer and the wife) and some of its
greatest moments — notably a madman prophet who lectures a group of other
asylum inmates and gets applauded by them until the orderlies come and drag him
away — have very little to do with the main plot. Apparently Kinugawa shot this
on an ultra-low budget, with little money available for lighting (he painted
the parts of the sets that wouldn’t be seen on camera silver so they’d reflect
light and therefore boost the level of illumination he could get) and with the
actors doubling as the crew, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster he
came up with a film that totally confused the distributors. Apparently in Japan
in 1926 there were two sets of movie theatres — ones that exclusively showed
Japanese product and ones that showed foreign films — and the theatres that
showed Japanese movies rejected it, but the ones that ordinarily showed just
foreign movies embraced it and it became a surprise hit.
