The Avant-Garde Charm Of ‘A Page Of Madness’
When we think of Japanese Horror (J Horror) we think of movies like Ju-on (‘The Grudge’) Ringu (‘The Ring’) and classics like Kwaidan but those we’re dealing with the supernatural, things that some will feel they have a zero and donuts chance of encountering or telling themselves “It’s just a movie.” But an experimental film in 1926 took everything a step further by touching on the subconscious fear of the audience, reality itself. The film, A Page of Madness was directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa and released in Japan in 1926 and was feared lost after WWII till Kinugasa rediscovered the film in 1971 in a storehouse that he hid it in. The silent film has received a lot of mix reviews, a lot of the negative ones are based on the fact that they literally don’t know what’s going on. Unlike most western silent films movie buffs are used to, Japanese silent films did not have intertitles, we now call
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