A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan [Illustrated] 1929280513, 9781929280513

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A Page of Madness

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies Number 64 Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan

A Page of Madness Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan

Aaron Gerow

Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, 2008

Copyright © 2008 by The Regents of the University of Michigan All rights reserved.

Published by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan 1007 E. Huron St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1690

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gerow, Aaron, 1964 A page of madness : cinema and modernity in 1920s Japan / Aaron Gerow. p. cm. — (Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies ; no. 64) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-929280-51-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-929280-52-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Kurutta ichipeiji (Motion picture)  2. Motion pictures—Japan—History— 20th century.  I. Title.  II. Series. PN1997.K895G47 2008 791.43'72—dc22

2008050027

This book was set in Palatino Macron.

This publication meets the ANSI/NISO Standards for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives (Z39.48–1992). Printed in the United States of America

to Seiko and Ian

Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Chapter 1.

What Is This Film?

1

Chapter 2.

Taishô and Its Cinema

7

Chapter 3.

The Avant-Garde and the Shinkankaku School

12

Chapter 4.

From Onnagata to Film Artist

17

Chapter 5.

A Less Than Independent Production

20

Chapter 6.

The Screenplay

26

Chapter 7.

The Filming

34

Chapter 8.

Editing and the Print

37

Chapter 9.

The Exhibition of Artistry

44

Chapter 10. Understanding and the Problem of Reception

56

Chapter 11. Divided Styles

65

Chapter 12. Narrating Divisions

72

Chapter 13. The Logic of Separation and the Masking of Cinema

84

Appendix A: Translations of Contemporary Reviews

100

Appendix B: A Sample of the Shooting Notes of Missing Scenes

111

Film Credits for Kurutta ichipeiji

115

Selected Bibliography

117

Index

123

vii

Illustrations

1. Sawada Bankô’s script.

29

2. Shooting notes for 25 May.

30

3. Shooting notes for 13 May.

30

4. Outline of the scene in which the fiancé’s friend tells him about the daughter’s mother.

32

5. The daughter and her fiancé.

41

6. Cubist advertisement for A Page of Madness.

48

7. Advertisement for A Page of Madness.

49

8. Advertisement for the Musashinokan.

50

9. Advertisement for the Tokyokan.

51

10. An upside-down car wheel from the opening sequence.

68

11. Expressing the sound of music in silent cinema.

69

12. Shot 1.

73

13. Shot 2.

74

14. Shot 3.

74

15. Shot 4.

75

16. Shot 5.

75

17. A look out a window in the lottery scene.

78

18. The ward hallway and the errant patient.

87

19. The border separating the sane and insane.

89

20. The bearded inmate bowing to the custodian.

92

21. Unruly spectators and the insanity of looking.

94

22. Naturalism introducing the last fantasy.

96

viii

Acknowledgments

I sometimes wondered whether this book was not like the film it discusses: a page out of order or one that had disappeared for a while only to reemerge some years later. I was originally commissioned to write a short tome on Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Page of Madness by a small publishing house. That I did, but unfortunately problems at the publisher resulted in the manuscript lying dormant and unpublished for several years. When it became clear the company was incapable of printing the book, I decided to rewrite it and submit it to another publisher. Perhaps that was fortunate: in the meantime I was able to find documents I had been unable to unearth before, and my continuing research on prewar Japanese film had given me new perspectives on A Page of Madness. Maybe this book, like Kinugasa’s film, had gained a new lease on life after its period in limbo. While the ultimate responsibility for everything written in this publi­ cation is my own, I would like to thank several individuals who helped bring this work to completion. First, André Loiselle helped me get started on the book project. I delivered some of the basic theses of this monograph in March 1997 in a talk in Japanese to Kino Balasz, an experimental film study group in Tokyo, and I am indebted to Nishimura Tomohiro, ­Sasaki Ken, Shôno Takeshi, Hioki Shigeru, Sueoka Ichirô, and Itô Haruhiro for ­questions and comments that helped me formulate my ideas. Yomota ­Inuhiko encouraged me to publish some of my research on the reception of the film in Japanese back in 1998. In subsequent years I have had opportunities to give talks on A Page of Madness at the Kawasaki City Museum, the University of California, Berkeley, the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Dickinson College and Harvard University. I would like to thank all in attendance for their probing questions. Abé Markus Nornes, Jeffery Isaacs, Janine Hansen and Doug Ing all helped me with hard-to-find materials, and Irie Yoshirô and the National Film Center were extremely helpful with Kinugasa’s papers. I would like to express my gratitude to ­Iwasaki ­Hiroshi and Tanaka Junko for giving me permission to translate their relatives’ works, and to Tajima Ryûichi and Satô Yô for helping me establish contact. The Kawakita Memorial Film Institute also assisted with film stills. Thanks must also go to Dudley Andrew, Barry Keith Grant, ix

Acknowledgments

­Yoshikawa Masa, Chris Hill, and Ian Conrich for their valuable advice, and to Bruce Willoughby at the Center for Japanese Studies for his support. Ultimate appreciation goes to Makino Mamoru, who as usual selflessly made available his sômen and his collection of rare prewar materials to this precocious scholar, treating me to a feast of information without which this book would have been impossible. Given the number of people who have asked me over the years, “When is your book on A Page of Madness coming out?” I must finally thank everyone for their patience. Here as elsewhere in this book, Japanese names are rendered with the family name first.

x

Chapter 1

What Is This Film?

Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji in Japanese)1 has appeared to most non-Japanese to be a remarkable masterwork of cinema, an experimental, modernist, avant-garde film produced in the mid-1920s in Japan that, in the words of Vlada Petric, “matches the best avant-garde films of the era.”2 Such an appraisal already existed, in fact, when the film was originally released in 1926 in Japan. One critic called it “a work that has advanced a step ahead of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Perhaps, as far as we know, this is a new trend in cinema surfacing in the world for the first time.”3 Another, claiming that Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923) or F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924) did not depart from the form of existing films, found courage in A Page of Madness. Here film is not simply moved by a story. It is cinema for the sake of cinema. It has musical rhythm, not just a novelistic narrative, one that need only evoke a mood. This is an object of devotion conceived out of the theories of pure and absolute film, a true and precious thing pushing toward artistic instinct and artistic supremacy, something unthinkable to the film producers of today, who are consumed by nothing but money and the business mentality.4

At a roundtable discussion, Kinugasa himself said that neither he nor his  screenwriter, the novelist Kawabata Yasunari, “wanted to pursue a 1. Most English-language discussions have used the romanization ippeiji, even though contemporary advertisements (see fig. 7) and programs provide the transliteration ichipeiji as the correct reading for the last two ideographs of the title. The reading Kurutta ichipeiji is also provided for the title of the script published in Kawabata Yasunari’s complete works: Kawabata Yasunari zenshû (Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari) (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1982). 2. Vlada Petric, “A Page of Madness: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Silent Cinema,” Film Criticism 8.1 (fall 1983): 87. 3. Tonoshima Sôjin, “Kurutta ichipeiji sonota” (A Page of Madness, etcetera), Chûkyô kinema (­Nagoya Cinema) 2.8 (August 1926): 60. Unless noted, all translations from the Japanese are my own. 4. Shin, “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema 2.8 (1926): 54–55.

1

Chapter 1

story.”5 To one newspaper reviewer, this was to be the beginning of a new age in film: “The director has parted from the old notion in cinema of trying to film ‘things’ and has become conscious of the attempt to take in ‘light.’ The play of light, the melody of light, the speed of light—this is the way films will be made.”6 Yet at the same time this discussion was taking place there was another discourse about A Page of Madness that seemed to describe a completely different cinematic experience. For this film, which purportedly places little emphasis on story, a newspaper offered the following partial summary a week and a half before its release, one of many published as a means of advertising the film. This is the grim interior of a mental hospital, resounding with dancing, shrieking, howling, and yelling. Here a pitiful and tragic tale is born, the drama of a sailor who had mistreated his wife, forgot his daughter, and eventually drove his wife insane. After a few years, the sailor, tired of life, returned to his hometown and learned that his wife had been saved at a mental hospital. He became a custodian there to gain access. His daughter has grown up beautifully and is about to marry a young man, but she worries about her insane mother. The father’s pain, his uneasy fear, is that his insane wife will destroy their daughter’s happiness. In this way, events proceed darkly in relation to the crazy wife.7

There is no indication here that this is an avant-garde, experimental film. It is described just like any other narrative motion picture, one featuring a melodramatic plot not at all different from the stories of many contemporary Japanese gendaigeki based on shinpa theater.8 One may dismiss this text as a mistaken effort to commercialize a noncommercial film, but much of it 5. See the roundtable discussion “Kurutta ichipeiji gappyôkai sokkiroku” (Transcript of the Group Evaluation of A Page of Madness), Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.2 (August 1926): 59–63. Most of the participants accepted the categorization of A Page of Madness as a “storyless” film. 6. Tanaka Jun’ichirô, “Hyôgen shugi no eiga” (An Expressionist Film), Hôchi shinbun, 23 June 1926, 4. A full English translation is included in appendix A. 7. “Shin eiga” (New Films), Yomiuri shinbun, 13 September 1926, 9. Most newspapers and filmrelated magazines published plot summaries of new films that were provided by the distributor. Many, such as the long summary of A Page of Madness the Yomiuri shinbun printed on 28 June, even included a description of the ending. 8. Gendaigeki are films set in the modern (post-1868) period and are differentiated from jidaigeki or period films. Shinpa is the “new school” of Japanese theater that introduced modern stories into the theatrical repertoire in the late 1800s. These plays were often conventionally melodramatic, focusing on the sufferings of women who, due to fate or social circumstance, could not fulfill their romantic desires. Shinpa theater had a profound influence on early gendaigeki films.

2

What Is This Film?

is identical, word for word, to the summary in the program of the Tokyokan theater that audiences would have read when they attended a showing.9 It is also differs little storywise from the supposed script of the film that ­Kawabata published in July of that year.10 Far from considering A Page of Madness radically experimental, not a few commentators offered opinions about its narrative normalcy from different perspectives. The screenwriter Kisaragi Bin, aware of contemporary European productions, dismissed the notion that the film was revolutionary, writing, “This degree of technique is neither very new nor difficult. This number of stylish elements is by no means rare in a single film these days.”11 Another critic, while praising the film in general, called the story “traditional and as dull as a cow.”12 Many commentators derided the melodramatic story of the daughter and her fiancé, and at least one complained of the thoroughly shinpa quality of the acting.13 In retrospect, the film historian Satô Tadao, in arguing the film’s differences from Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, 1920), has defended its shinpa narrative. This film brings out the painfulness of the familial love between husband and wife and parents and children. . . . Here are the splendid feelings and emotions of Japan. Such Japanese feelings were the specialty of Kinugasa Teinosuke, a veteran of shinpa, . . . and even this “Western” avant-garde film of his younger days was naturally permeated with it.14

Satô, like some of his predecessors, rejects the notion that Kinugasa’s film was radically a-narrative. What, then, is A Page of Madness? Is it an avant-garde work that undermines the very processes of narrative in a quest for a pure and absolute 9. “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness), Tokyokan shûhô (Tokyokan Weekly), 24 September 1926. 10. Kawabata Yasunari, “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness), Eiga jidai 1.1 (July 1926): 122–31. While one can say that the scenario is colder and less melodramatic than the published plot summaries, it does clarify many of the story points. An English translation was published in D. A. Rajakaruna, Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Crazy Page and Crossroads (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Kandy Offset, 1998). 11. Kisaragi Shinju, “Iwayuru Shinkankakuha eiga” (The So-called Shinkankaku School Film), Chûgai shôgyô shinpô, 28 June 1926, 7. “Shinju” was Kisaragi’s pen name as a critic. 12. Okuya Yoshiyuki, “Kurutta ichipeiji kan” (Views on A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema 2.9 (September 1926): 27. A full English translation is included in appendix A. 13. See Satô Yukio’s comments about Inoue Masao in “Kurutta ichipeiji gappyôkai sokkiroku,” 62. 14. Satô Tadao, Nihon eiga no kyoshôtachi (Masters of Japanese Cinema) (Tokyo: Gakuyô Shobô, 1979), 37.

3

Chapter 1

c­ inema or is it a conventional narrative expression of traditional melo­ dramatic emotionality? The question may strike those outside of Japan as odd given how difficult the film is to understand on a first or even second viewing. If one defines avant-garde cinema as the conscious attempt to lead the field in combating, undermining, or finding new alternatives to dominant, usually commercial codes of film, the most important of which is ­narrative, then surely A Page of Madness is nothing but avant-garde? The degree to which even professional film critics and historians have erred in relating basic plot points must attest to how hard it is to access the version of the story available through the screenplay. Yet when scholars have used this very real experience to argue, for instance, as James Peterson has done, that “this experimental style is Kinugasa’s war or utter rebellion against film language,”15 they risk mistaking their reading, or that of an ideal reader, for the reading of historical viewers, obfuscating the different ways the film was read and even the general struggles over the meaning of such a cinema if not its modernity at the time.16 They also risk reifying a film text that, while it certainly looks experimental, is probably not the same work that was shown to audiences in 1926 since significant portions appear to be missing from the version we see today. As Jonathan E. Abel warns us, A Page of Madness may have been the “site for imagining a radically different kind of film, not a radically different kind of film itself.”17 It is because our reading of the film is so troubled that we must take care in using our experience to pass judgment on the text’s status. First, as we shall see, there are many narratives hovering about A Page of Madness that persist less because they are accurate—and some are not—than because

15. James Peterson, “A War of Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa’s Page of Madness and the Japanese Avant-Garde of the 1920s,” Cinema Journal 29.1 (fall 1989): 51. 16. In The Flash of Capital, Eric Cazdyn offers a compelling argument for allegorical readings. In his view, “alternative” interpretations connecting seemingly disparate elements can “exercise” the mind and “cultivate the skills to narrate (and intervene with) more satisfyingly the present world system.” His claim, for instance, that “By cracking open (in terms of film art and the Japanese film industry) new possibilities in the face of impossibility, Page of Madness rehearses in an aesthetic register a solution to the historical problem of colonialism” can provide a possibly powerful template for interpreting the film, but it must be evaluated through thoroughly historicizing the text and its history. Cazdyn generally uses a standard account of the film’s style, one that unfortunately pays insufficient attention to inconsistencies in the style, conflicts over its interpretation, and the multifaceted history of this text. I hope to show how closely analyzing the film and its complex history provides a richer and more significant history of the very problems of modernity Cazdyn rightly raises. See Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 204–15. 17. Jonathan E. Abel, “Different from Difference: Revisiting Kurutta ichipeiji,” Asian Cinema 12.2 (fall–winter 2001): 72–96.

4

What Is This Film?

they fulfill various desires. The story of a masterpiece emerging out of nowhere, in a marginal nation far from the center of modernism, is such a narrative, one that has been appropriated by those desiring a stronger national cinema (finding, for instance, that Japanese film became the independent equal of European film in the 1920s, long before Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon [1950]) or a history of origins (some see A Page of Madness as the beginning of a Japanese experimental film tradition that is otherwise thought to have begun in the 1950s) or even a text allegorizing the complications of Japanese modernity in the capitalist world system. We must be careful of how our desires shape our vision of this film, for they can commit a violence against the text, one that suppresses its alterity and the history of how and why it was constructed as an avant-garde work. A Page of Madness can thus stand as a lesson in the problems of reading a film from a different time and culture. Reception studies in general has warned us about equating our readings with those of all viewers.18 Studies of spectator readings of films remind us that a film text is not simply the images projected on a screen but also the meanings historical audiences took from them, frequently by using texts (criticism, advertisements, or other films) separate from and not available within the film itself. In this light, it would be grossly premature to call A Page of Madness avant-garde without even looking at these other texts and analyzing how contemporary viewers used them. For instance, benshi (lecturers) were employed by the theaters to explain the film.19 They used scripts provided by the distributor to explicate or narrate the film and make sure that the narrative details, if not the melodramatic tone, were transmitted to the audience. With no evidence that any of the film’s benshi radically experimented in their narrations, it seems fairly certain that in this way contemporary theater viewers would have encountered a decidedly narrative experience, one that in certain respects varied little from conventional movie fare. We must take benshi narration, plot summaries, and critical discourse into account when analyzing A Page of Madness precisely because it is a work whose very relationship with such texts became the subject of debate, the occasion for arguing over how film should create meaning and what role spectatorship had to play in modern Japan. That should not preclude us from closely analyzing the text itself because it always stood at the center of 18. For a useful overview of the issue of reception studies in film scholarship, see Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 19. Kinugasa’s comment to Georges Sadoul that the film escaped benshi narration by playing at foreign film theaters is either Kinugasa’s or the translator’s mistake (Kinugasa ­Teinosuke, “Le cinéma japonais vers 1920” (Japanese Cinema around 1920), Cahiers du cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) 166–67 [mai-juin 1965]: 46). All foreign film theaters had benshi, and benshi did narrate A Page of Madness.

5

Chapter 1

considerations of how cinematic works should operate, albeit without, I will argue, offering a univocal stance on the kind of cinema it was proposing. A Page of Madness underlines the maddening qualities of textuality itself—our inability to pin down a single text or reading, or fix the borders of a solitary work—in part by narratively foregrounding the violation of borders, the influence of perception (reading) on meaning, and the multiplicity of textual modes. In stressing the multivalence of A Page of Madness—its unconventionality and its conventionality—my aim is not to engage in a hermeneutic debunking of the myths or to read the text against the grain but to argue that this dual nature is both the mark of the film’s historicity and one of the reasons why it fascinates us. Kinugasa’s work reveals these two faces because it was created and received at a time defined by divisions over the definition of cinematic meaning, the form the movies should take, and their place in modern existence. A Page of Madness was itself an intervention in these ­debates, one that explored various cinematic potentials, but, as we shall see, in an often contradictory way. As such, it can speak not only of the contemporary conflicts over Japanese modernity but also of the contradictory position in which Japanese film artists were placed in a cinematic world geography dominated by Hollywood film and European modernism. In this book, I will begin by delineating the often conflicting, if not contradictory, array of contextual factors behind the film, showing how they pushed and pulled it in different directions as it was planned, written, shot, edited, and exhibited. After detailing, in generally chronological order, how the film was made and shown, I will describe the sometimes radically different ways it was read at the time and conclude by examining how the film we can see now foregrounds, perhaps self-consciously, the maddening problems of interpretation, especially in relation to the issue of defining cinema in 1920s Japan.

6

Chapter 2

Taishô and Its Cinema

The contradictions within A Page of Madness seem analogous to the historical state of Japanese society at the time. The film was made in 1926, the last year of the Taishô period (1912–26), an era often symbolized by the figure of the emperor Yoshihito, the long-ailing father of Hirohito. To just briefly introduce the cultural climate,1 we can say that in practically a reflection of Yoshihito’s instability the society that surrounded him was racked with cultural tumult and a conflict of extremes. While it has been called the age of “Taishô democracy” for its fitful efforts at parliamentary democracy, the 1920s was also a time when growing state and military authority, effected by the authoritarian Peace Preservation Law of 1925, battled a flood of new ideas, from left-wing radicalism to labor unionism. This was a Japan that, following its victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and its successful participation with the Allies in World War I, was now a world leader far more involved in the outside world than in the past yet one still subject to the pressure to “leave Asia and join the West” (datsu-A nyû-Ô), not only in terms of capitalist economic and geopolitical power but also in the cultural values of art, body, and morality. Experiencing an economic boom following World War I, the country was witnessing the development of a modern consumer culture based on an emergent urban middle class, one influenced by America and Europe as both food and clothing became increasingly westernized. The break with the past and the entry into the new were most power­ fully and terribly marked by the Great Kantô Earthquake of September 1923, which leveled much of Tokyo and Yokohama. Postquake culture was defined on the one hand by a bold optimism in a modernist future, one 1. For more on Taishô history and culture, see Bernard Silverman and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in Crisis: Essays in Taishô Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Minami Hiroshi, ed., Taishô bunka (Taishô Culture) (Tokyo: Keiso Shobô, 1965); Takemura Tamio, Taishô bunka (Taishô Culture) (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1980); Sharon Minichielo, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998); and Elise Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000).

7

Chapter 2

that took advantage of the fact that the earthquake wiped the slate clean, ­prompting, for instance, Murayama Tomoyoshi, the futurist artist and codesigner of the Aoikan, Akasaka’s modernist movie house built in 1924, to help paint dadaist designs on barracks constructed for quake victims. Yet it was also shaped,by an underlying emotional shock that helped breed deep suspicions about the permanence of the new, giving birth to the nihilist heroes of film and literature that captured the imagination of 1920s audiences. The 1920s came to be defined in part by the expression ero guro nansensu, a devilmay-care culture of eroticism, the grotesque, and nonsense. Miriam Silverberg has emphasized how a central cultural trope in interwar Japan was montage, as this culture often delighted in mixture and juxtaposition.2 I have made similar arguments about film culture of the era. Motion pictures were often at the center of this cultural turmoil, as for some they represented new ways of thinking and expressing and for others the dangers of the modern crowd and its unruly desires. As I have argued elsewhere, these positions in part constituted competing visions of modernity, with a Fordist world of production and consumption organized through clear divisions of cultural signification contending with a “culture of combination” involving more carnivalesque heterotopias of mixture, juxtaposition, and flow.3 In a shift toward the former, the medium had already undergone a drastic transformation in the late 1910s and early 1920s in what was called the Pure Film Movement. This was an effort by reformist intellectuals, under the influence of both American and European motion pictures, which dominated domestic screens in the 1910s, and shingeki, the new realist form of theater, to rid Japanese cinema of such traditional theatrical trappings as onnagata (men playing women’s roles) and produce more “cinematic” films.4 As intellectuals such as the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirô and the shingeki playwright Osanai Kaoru entered the industry, and as reformist companies such as Shôchiku and Taikatsu appeared around 1920 to make their bid to modernize the movies, the style of filming centered on the long shot and long takes—termed “canned theater”—gave way to one closer to that 2. For more on this culture, see Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 3. See my book, provisionally titled Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, ­Nation and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming) or “One Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Culture and Industry in 1910s J­apan,” Screening the Past 11 (2000), http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/ fr1100/agfr11e.htm. 4. For more on Taishô era film culture, see Joanne Bernardi, Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001); and Thomas LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2005).

8

Taishô and Its Cinema

of the emerging classical Hollywood style, with close-ups, parallel editing, flashbacks, and other elements of continuity editing. The dominant form in the industry was significantly altered: the moviegoing experience was no longer dominated by the space of the cinema hall, with popular benshi molding films through their own rhetorical play, but by increasing absorption in a fictional world dominated by stars, now including women (onnagata disappeared by 1922–23), that was even more popular than the benshi (who were now charged with serving the text) and shaped by directors whose names also appeared prominently on posters. The production of cinematic meaning was increasingly centralized as a unified, universal text created in a more rationalized sphere of production was considered to take precedence over how benshi or audiences played with the movie. After the quake, in the cultural geography as a whole, the waisetsu (obscene) space of the movie district of Tokyo’s Asakusa, defined by its chaotic hybridity, physicality, and participatory formats, gave way to the cleaner, more visual, more consumeroriented experience of the Ginza.5 Audiences began seeing Japanese films in droves, giving the domestic industry the boost it needed to finally, by the time A Page of Madness was made, overtake foreign imports, which had accounted for 75 percent of the films screened in 1920.6 Accompanying the rise of Japanese film, new companies such as Teikine and Tôa entered the business, theater construction boomed, and major stars such as Bandô Tsumasaburô started breaking away from the studios to form independent production companies around 1925. Viewing all this, film critics, who until then had almost unabashedly favored the foreign fare, finally started offering words of praise for Japanese works they could call the equal of foreign films. Murata Minoru’s The Street Juggler (Machi no tejinashi, 1925) and The Sun (Nichirin, 1926) are prominent examples. Such works did not earn the accolades of critics because they had ­finally offered a distinctively Japanese alternative to the dominant foreign fare, however. A critic cited The Sun, for instance, for its “influence from the L’Herbier school,” a reference to the films of the French director Marcel L’Herbier.7 Not only the critical elite but also many of the major 1920s 5. For more on the shifting dramaturgy of Tokyo’s modern spaces of play, see Yoshimi Shun’ya, Toshi no doramaturugî (The Dramaturgy of the City) (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1987). 6. See Chiba Nobuo, “Sei no kagayaki kara Orochi made” (From The Glow of Life to Orochi), Sekai no eiga sakka 31: Nihon eigashi (World Filmmakers 31: Japanese Film History) (Tokyo: ­Kinema Junpô, 1976), 36; and Marianne Lewinsky-Sträuli, “Une avant-garde au Japon: Une page folle” (An Avant-Garde in Japan: A Page of Madness), Archives 15 (1988): 2. 7. Dan Shizuo, writing in Kinema junpô (The Movie Times), 21 January 1927, quoted in Yamamoto Kikuo, Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyô (The Influence of Foreign Film on Japanese Cinema) (Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shippanbu, 1983), 174.

9

Chapter 2

­ irectors admitted to the powerful influence of American and European d cinema, indicating the degree to which contemporary film culture was open to and aware of international trends. The earliest efforts at reform in the 1910s cited Bluebird films, the product of a Universal subsidiary with a melodramatic but rather European tone, as a conscious model. The release of the German Expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on 13 May 1922 made waves not only in the film world, where Mizoguchi Kenji attempted to create an entirely Expressionist film in Blood and Soul (Chi to rei, 1923), but also in literature, theater, and the plastic arts. This led to the successful release of many other German films, including the Kammerspiel masterpiece The Last Laugh (released in Japan on 1 April 1926). It was French film, however, that dominated discussions in film circles in the year before the production of A Page of Madness and served as a model of modern cinema to many intellectuals at the time. The list of the best ten films released in 1925 voted by the readers of the leading film magazine, ­Kinema junpô, was topped by Jacques Catelain and Marcel L’Herbier’s La ­Galerie des monstres and Alexandre Volkoff’s Kean (both 1924), two French films imbued with the film culture of ciné clubs and film purism that in cinema history is loosely called French Impressionism. Writings on Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923, released in Japan on 29 January 1926) and L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1924, released in Japan on 25 March 1926) and The Late Mathais Pascal (1925, released in Japan on 16 April 1926) took up, along with debates on The Last Laugh, the most space in film magazines in the first months of 1926. Such films were accompanied, and in some cases even preceded, by translations of the theories of such leading French film intellectuals as Louis Delluc (as early as April 1924), L’Herbier (June 1925), and Léon Moussinac (March 1926). Films that were not introduced in Japan, such as Delluc’s Fièvre (1921), were presented through translated screenplays that themselves eventually influenced the way scenarios were written in Japan. The fundamental position of Delluc and his followers was that cinema is a purely visual medium unique among the arts whose power lies in a sort of mystical photogénie founded in a rhythmic, poetic, and almost musical editing of images that offers a new means of perceiving reality. This position had a lasting influence on many Japanese film critics, especially after the rise of the Pure Film Movement, which, while it never promoted avant-garde film purism the way the later French theorists did, prepared the ground for the discussions of cinematic essence that would proliferate in Japan in the 1920s. Thus, French Impressionism and to a lesser extent German Expressionism were the most important influences at the time A Page of Madness was produced. Soviet cinema, one should note, was not an influence because it 10

Taishô and Its Cinema

had not yet been introduced to Japan.8 European conceptions of avant-garde film influenced the Japanese film scene in conflicting ways. On the one hand, as we shall see, they complicated the visions of modern cinema based on Hollywood’s Fordist model while, on the other hand, they percolated down to the “vernacular” level where they had a lasting effect on the popular cinema of such jidaigeki masters as Itô Daisuke and Inagaki Hiroshi. Gennifer Weisenfeld has emphasized how Japanese avant-garde art movements such as Mavo could feature a mixture of social activism and artistic suprematism, while also being deeply involved in mass culture and commercialism.9 Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness could also, in its own way, span these different possibilities, having been born in a context, the Taishô era, subject not only to conflicting foreign influences but also to varying ways of adapting and defining cinema; by itself, it would evince these conflicting influences if not also their competing conceptions of modernity.

8. The first Soviet film, Polikushka (dir. Aleksandr Sanin, 1922), was not shown in Japan until 1927. The critic Kurahara Korehito began introducing Soviet cinema in Kinema junpô in March and April of 1927, but the first translation of montage theory, an article by ­Semyon Timoshenko, was not published until March 1928 in Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic). See Y­amamoto, Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyô, 186–98. Some Japanese film figures had learned of Soviet film earlier from foreign film magazines, but in general it is quite unlikely that A Page of Madness was influenced by Soviet montage. 9. See Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Following Peter Bürger, Weisenfeld distinguishes between modernism, defined as a movement severed from social relevance and focused on the autonomy of art, and the avant-garde, which attempts to alter the social role of art by transforming its institutional forms, and argues that Mavo, which was led by ­Murayama Tomoyoshi, exhibited elements of both. I will not follow these definitions in this book since most of the writers I cite do not either, but one can see aspects of both tendencies in A Page of Madness, even if it ultimately leaned more towards a modernist “art for art’s sake” than an avant-garde politics of socially committed art, all the while using art as part of a commercial strategy and as a means of attaining cultural capital.

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Chapter 3

The Avant-Garde and the Shinkankaku School

A strong and vibrant avant-garde in art and literature, existing from the late Meiji era (1868–1912), formed another important background to A Page of Madness. Although this history is too long and rich to summarize here, I want to stress the fact that it is rife with incongruities and thus its influence on Japanese cinema is complicated. A primary issue is that this avant-garde surfaced only a decade or two after naturalism had asserted itself in Japan. Imports tended to arrive with short time intervals. Dadaism and futurism, for instance, appeared around the same time as fauvism and cubism. Avantgarde art flourished, but the historical distinctions between movements that were significant to Europeans were sometimes unimportant to Japanese artists, who frequently took them all as techniques equally applicable in opposing artistic naturalism. The art historian Omuka ­Toshiharu has cited these and other factors to argue that the Japanese modern art movements of the 1920s cannot properly be called zen’ei (avant-garde) because many of them lacked the radical, often self-destructive opposition to the existing art systems of their European predecessors when they were adopted in Japan.1 The syncretic appropriation of often radically opposed styles can also be found in literature. Yokomitsu Riichi, the leader of the modernist ­Shinkankaku (new impressionist) school,2 which provided backing for A Page of Madness, openly declared, “I recognize futurism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism, symbolism, constructivism, and some of the realists as all belonging to the Shinkankaku school.”3 His statement about the breadth of the Shinkankaku spirit illustrates both the degree to which he and his col1. See especially the introduction to Omuka Toshiharu, Taishôki shinkô bijutsu undô no kenkyû (Studies on the New Art Movements of the Taishô Era) (Tokyo: Sukaidoa, 1995). 2. Since the word kankaku can be translated as “sense,” “feeling,” or “impression,” the name of the movement has been variously rendered in English as neo-impressionism, neoperceptionism, or even the school of new sensibilities. While I use the Japanese original in the text, the contemporary use of the term shinkankaku to name the new French cinema suggests that “new impressionism” is closest to the way the term was being used in film circles at the time. 3. Yokomitsu Riichi, “Kankaku katsudô” (Sensory Activity), Bungei jidai (Literary Age) 2.2 (February 1925): 7.

12

The Avant-Garde and the Shinkankaku School

leagues were aware of international movements and, at the same time, their tendency to appropriate them for their own purposes instead of following the original manifestos. Yokomitsu and fellow writers such as Kawabata Yasunari (whose later works, including The Izu Dancer (Izu no odoriko) and Snow Country (Yukiguni), earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968), Kataoka Teppei,4 and Kishida Kunio,5 had been associated with Bungei shunjû (Literary Years), a journal that represented a front against the proletarian movement’s politicization of literature. They parted with its editor, Kikuchi Kan, however, after it became apparent that his literature was shifting toward the popular. Through its coterie magazine Bungei jidai (Literary Age), which began publication in October 1924, the Shinkankaku school opposed both leftist and commercialized literature, advocating instead an artistic literature in and for itself that, to its critics, bordered on a form of decadent aestheticism. Their avant-garde stance was less in the field of politics—their position there differed little from that of the established literary elite—than on the level of literary form, and they launched attacks against dominant styles of fictional writing. The primary target was the naturalism defined by the shishôsetsu (I-novel) style that reigned over most of the Taishô literary world. The shishôsetsu posited immediate individual experience as the authentic means of knowing the world and thus subjective confession as a primary form of realistic prose. Many novels were thus episodic accounts of daily life taken from the perspective of a single individual, in most cases the author. Edward Fowler argues: Given the bundan’s faith in the ability of the writer to apprehend and portray brute reality and to present himself without mediation, the distinctions between private person and narrating persona, between autobiography and fiction, lost their significance.6

Not only were the author and hero often conflated in a biographical hermeneutics that equated personal fiction with documentary, the act of writing itself was treated as a transparent, unmediated window onto the soul of 4. One of the oldest of the group, Kataoka was also one of the writers most interested in cinema. Some of the novels he produced after turning to the left politically, such as A Living Doll (Ikeru ningyô), became the source of some of the best late 1920s leftist “tendency” films (keikô eiga). 5. Kishida, a leading playwright and theorist in the shingeki theater movement, had studied theater in France. His daughter is the actress Kishida Kyôko, famed abroad for her role in Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964). 6. Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xxvi.

13

Chapter 3

the writer. Shinkankaku writers contested this amalgamation of character/ author, of living/narration, by flaunting the fictional against authenticated personal experience and foregrounding style, and thus the opacity of writing, over the pretense of immediate access to reality. Much of Shinkankaku writing is concerned with a play of narrative voice, with Yokomitsu’s “A Fly” (Hae), for instance, abruptly shifting point of view from character to character until it ends with a narrator impossible in the shishôsetsu: a fly. Writing attempts to alter perception in order to decenter the human subject and undermine the textual pretension toward a stable voice tied to the author. Subjective depictions were prominent in Shinkankaku writing but less in order to authenticate the perceiving subject than to explore how immediate subjective impressions could complicate subjective unity. The authors were thus interested in “the various aspects of human phenomena in a new age in which the multiple sides of humanity, such as psychology, perception, and sensation, acted on their own and resulted in uncanny inversions and perversions.”7 Their concern for cinema, which culminated in their association with A Page of Madness, was motivated by conceptions of that medium’s deep involvement in modern transformations in human perception and sensation. William O. Gardner has found in Kataoka Teppei’s writings on film an appreciation of the cinema’s ability to foreclose “the need for rational or intellectual intervention . . . in favor of a seemingly prerational circuit between the film and the viewer’s sensory apparatus.”8 Motion pictures also had a profound influence on the Shinkankaku school’s literary course. Toeda ­Hirokazu has explored in a number of articles the influence of film on Shinkankaku writers such as Yokomitsu and Kawabata, arguing in particular that A Page of Madness helped formulate Yokomitsu’s own conception of the Shinkankaku stance as formalist and that images from the film continued to haunt novels such as Yokomitsu’s “Ideas of a Flower Garden” (“Hanazono no shisô”) and Kawabata’s Wedding and a Funeral (Konrei to sôrei).9 The fact that the term shinkankaku was also used to name the French Impressionist cinema (as well as, at times, 1920s German film), underlines how in the discursive field of 1920s Japan that set of films, the Shinkankaku 7.  Odagiri Hideo, Gendai bungakushi (The History of Modern Literature), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Shûeisha, 1975), 356. 8. William O. Gardner, “New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films and Japanese Modernism,” Cinema Journal 43.2 (spring 2004): 66. 9. See, for instance, Toeda Hirokazu’s “Shinkankakuha no hikari to kage” (The Light and Shadows of the Shinkankaku School), Bungaku (Literature) 3.6 (November–December 2002): 123–32; or “‘Shinkankakuha Eiga Renmei’ to Yokomitsu Riichi: 1920-nendai ­Nihon ni okeru geijutsu kôryû no ichisokumen” (The New Impressionist Film League and Yokomitsu Riichi: One Aspect of Artistic Exchange in 1920s Japan) Kokubungaku kenkyû (Studies in Japanese Literature) 127 (March 1999): 33–44.

14

The Avant-Garde and the Shinkankaku School

writers, and A Page of Madness were all articulated as part of the same cultural phenomenon. It is important to note, as Okuno Takeo does, that the Shinkankaku writers “were less moved or influenced by a new generation of Western literary works, theory, and movements, than by the same social or generational necessity that moved the new Western writers—the state of the modern.”10 While it was produced under the presence of Western art, theirs was not a shallow copy of the West, as some critics charged, but a response to the inherent alienation of an urban, capitalist society that was even further exposed by the destruction of the earthquake and the rebuilding afterward. As Yoshimoto Takaaki argued, the “dissolution of the ‘ I ’ ” enacted by ­Shinkankaku writing expressed a “loss of a sense of presence, of any secure existence within the social structure.”11 Japanese cultural producers had much in common with the European avant-garde,12 which also faced a world in ruins after World War I and still rapidly transforming under the effects of capitalism, but that does not mean that the forms in which they socially, politically, or culturally articulated their responses were the same. The Shinkankaku school was by no means a unified movement with a precise manifesto or identifiable style; its name was not even chosen by the group but affixed ex post facto by the literary critic Chiba Kameo.13 Individual authors such as Yokomitsu were rarely consistent in their pursuit of “new impressions,” often producing works in the shishôsetsu style at the same time they were writing ­novels combating it. Mariko Shigeta Schimmel has deftly shown how prewar modernist literary movements like the Shinkankaku school, its more commercially fashionable cousin modanizumu bungaku (the trendy “modernism literature” of Ryûtanji Yû and others in the late 1920s and early 1930s), and even proletarian literature were often strange bedfellows, sharing as many similarities as they did differences.14 10. Okuno Takeo, Nihon bungakushi: Kindai kara gendai e (The History of Japanese Literature: From the Modern to the Contemporary) (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1970), 107. 11. Yoshimoto Takaaki, Gengo ni totte bi to wa nanika (What Is Beauty for Language?), vol. 6 of Yoshimoto Takaaki chosakushû (Works of Yoshimoto Takaaki) (Tokyo: Keisô Shobô, 1972), quoted in Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 79. 12. In emphasizing how international trends are important in understanding Taishô culture, the cultural historian Takemura Tamio notes, “This was the age when our literature first adopted an international character. . . . [I]n order to grasp the total image of Japan in the twenties, one must emphasize the areas of contact with global culture and an international perspective” (Taishô bunka [Taishô Culture] [Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1980], 199). 13. As Okuno observes, “One can say that it was through Chiba’s definition that they became conscious of their literature as a literary movement” (Okuno, Nihon bungakushi, 109). 14. Mariko Shigeta Schimmel, “Estranged Twins of Revolution: An Examination of Japanese Modernist and Proletarian Literature,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2006.

15

Chapter 3

Yokomitsu later described his work in the 1920s as a “war of utter rebellion against the Japanese language,”15 but it would be wrong to equate his efforts with the consistently social or political radical stance of futurism (especially that of Russia) or dadaism. The Shinkankaku school was, in the end, a literary not a social revolution and an often limited one at that. While there were those in the Japanese avant-garde who did pronounce a political position, they did not provide the same kind of background to A Page of Madness as that enjoyed by European film experimentation. A Page of Madness must be considered in light of these discursive similarities to and differences from the European example. If it was avant-garde, it was so in the same way that Shinkankaku literature could lump expressionism and realism together or that modanizumu bungaku could combine literary experiment with popular fashion.

15. Quoted in Alan Campbell, “Yokomitsu Riichi,” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983), 16.

16

Chapter 4

From Onnagata to Film Artist

One of the influences on A Page of Madness that had no parallel in European modernism was, of course, Kinugasa Teinosuke himself, a man who started out in the movies as an onnagata, the symbol of a backward cinema to Taishô film intellectuals. The director praised as the auteur behind A Page of Madness was only months before rated in Engeki eiga (Theater and Film) with marks of only 4 out of 10 for “brains,” 0 for “education,” 1 for “technique,” 0 for “natural talent,” and 2 for “future,” leaving him far behind such contemporaries as Murata Minoru, Shimazu Yasujirô, and Ushihara Kiyohiko.1 He was not exactly the figure one would have expected to create an experimental masterpiece. The fact that his statements concerning his own life are also inconsistent and sometimes unreliable adds to the difficulty of judging his status. Born on New Year’s Day in 1896, the theater-loving Kinugasa, who by no means received an intellectual education as the fourth son of a tradesman, ran away from home as a boy to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. After touring the countryside as an onnagata in third-rate shinpa, he worked for a time in the troupe of Inoue Masao (the star of A Page of Madness) before appearing in shinpa film productions made at Nikkatsu’s Mukôjima Studio starting in 1917. While he gained some fame among female fans for his good looks (portraying a woman) in productions film critics often despised, Kinugasa did appear in reformist efforts such as Tanaka Eizô’s The Living Corpse (Ikeru shikabane, 1918). When he earned his first chance to direct in 1920, with the film Death of a Younger Sister (Imôto no shi), it was on the basis of his own screenplay, which was “deeply influenced by Bluebird films.”2 Yet given that he and the other Nikkatsu onnagata quit en masse in 1922 when the company began using actresses and retreated to Kokkatsu, the last bastion of old-style filmmaking in the industry, it is unclear how committed he was to film reform at the time. 1. See “Satsuei kantoku saitenhyô” (Grades for Film Directors) Engeki eiga (Theater and Film) 1.2 (February 1926): 47. 2. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga eiga no seishun (My Youth in Film) (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1977), 29.

17

Chapter 4

After Kokkatsu folded, Kinugasa, in an early manifestation of his independent streak, produced by himself a rensageki, or “chain drama,” a form of theater popular in Japan in the teens that combined filmed scenes with sections acted onstage in a single story. His success with this production brought him an offer in 1923 from Makino Shôzô, the maverick “father” of Japanese cinema, to join his independent company, Makino Productions, as a director. Makino, who left the conservative Nikkatsu in 1921, where he had produced many movies featuring ninja and legendary swordsmen as the head of the Nikkatsu Kyoto studio, films that reformers often lambasted, had begun introducing into the jidaigeki some of the reformist film techniques already visible in gendaigeki, providing audiences with speed, action, violence, and realistic human turmoil. Kinugasa went to Kyoto and followed Makino for four years, working in gendaigeki as much as jidaigeki, and it was toward the end of his tenure that he directed several films for Makino coproduced with the United Association of Film Artists (Rengô Eiga Geijutsuka Kyôkai), an independent production alliance modeled on United Artists founded by the maverick producer Negishi Kan’ichi and the popular novelist Naoki ­Sanjûgo and supported by such illuminati as the novelists Kikuchi Kan and Kume Masao. Kinugasa’s films with the United Association of Film Artists included Tsukigata Hanpeita (1925), starring the Shinkokugeki theater star Sawada Shôjirô;3 The Sun (Nichirin, 1925), featuring the progressive Kabuki actor Ichikawa Ennosuke and based on a story by Yokomitsu Riichi (different from the source of Murata’s film mentioned above);4 and Ten’ichibô and Iganosuke (Ten’ichibô to Iganosuke, 1926). While the first was successful, the last encountered trouble after the formation of the Japan Motion Picture Producers Association (JMPPA) by the major studios, Nikkatsu, Shôchiku, Teikine, and Tôa, in November 1925. Intimidated by the rise of independent production companies such as ­Makino’s and Bandô Tsumasaburô’s and feeling the need for greater cooperation to eliminate the cutthroat competition that plagued their business, the “Four Company Alliance” dealt a blow to Makino’s releasing network by threatening any theater that showed non-JMPPA films with a complete cutoff of supply. With a drastic drop in the number of theaters willing to show independent films, the release of productions such as Ten’ichibô and Iganosuke was delayed or even canceled. It was only Makino’s efforts to rally 3. Shinkokugeki was the name of Sawada’s troupe, but it came to symbolize a new form of period drama theater that instilled the realism of shingeki and the action of the movies into old samurai tales. 4. The Sun originally passed the country’s censors, but there were many right-wing complaints about its depiction of the ancestors of the imperial family. This led to its withdrawal after only a short run.

18

From Onnagata to Film Artist

a unified opposition and the Big Four’s own weaknesses (Shôchiku undermined the pact by signing with Bandô to distribute the films of that top box-office draw) that allowed independents to survive as the JMPPA cartel eventually fell apart in March 1926. By early 1926, then, Kinugasa had experienced most of the dominant currents in the Taishô film world, beginning with the shinpa and rensageki productions reformists reviled and then the more modern films that his mentor Makino also promoted in his own, very commercial way. His work with Makino and later Naoki introduced him to the potential of independent filmmaking, and his exposure to Naoki and Yokomitsu placed him in close contact with a community of literary intellectuals devoted to pursuing a “film art” distinct from the output of the profit-driven majors. Kyoto may be known today as the “old capital,” a repository of traditional Japanese culture, but in the 1920s it was the “Hollywood of Japan,” a center not only of commercial film production but also of innovative filmmaking by figures such as Makino Shôzô, his scriptwriter Susukita Rokuhei, and the young director Itô Daisuke. Kinugasa’s background was thus varied, and in some ways it represented what would eventually become the polyvalence of A Page of Madness itself.

19

Chapter 5

A Less Than Independent Production

The fact that this overlooked director produced the equivalent of what Gance, Murnau, or even Sergei Eisenstein did makes romanticizing the narrative of the production of A Page of Madness so tempting that it has seduced even the best film scholars. Donald Richie, for instance, has written that Kinugasa and his staff “were free to make what they wanted” because the film was “made with very little,” a kind of “amateur film” that lacked an “expensive studio.” What was produced “was not a question of influence” by Expressionism and Impressionism, says Richie, because both were “completely and utterly unknown in Japan until Kinugasa began shooting.” “It was a much rarer thing—a parallel discovery of the resources of the cinema” by a person with “no cinematic training, with no overpowering influences . . . a completely personal poetic statement in cinema.”1 While certainly compelling, this narrative is not quite true. It exists, perhaps, because of avant-garde cinema’s need for such stories to justify a film’s status as a personal work of cinematic art. Such exaggerations underline the fact that A Page of Madness is not always what it may seem at first. Kinugasa must have been aware of the European avant-garde at the time, even though he gave conflicting testimony about this. Although he asserted in an interview after the film was rediscovered that he had seen none of the Impressionist or Expressionist films before making A Page of Madness,2 he seemed to have no problem admitting to the effect of both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and La Roue in an interview conducted before that event.3 It is clear that his collaborators, most of his director colleagues, the critical establishment, and even his community in Kyoto were aware of the European movements.4 Kinugasa, far from having “no cinematic training,” was deeply involved in 1. Donald Richie, “Japan’s First Experimental Cinema: Two Films by Teinosuke Kinugasa,” Art and Cinema 1.2 (fall 1986): 3–4. 2. Hubert Niogret, “Entretien avec Teinosuke Kinugasa” (Interview with Kinugasa Teinosuke), Positif (Positive) 150 (May 1973): 73. 3. Kinugasa Teinosuke, “Le cinéma japonais vers 1920” (Japanese Cinema around 1920), ­Cahiers du cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) 166–67 (mai-juin 1965): 46. 4. The film historian Makino Mamoru has stressed Kinugasa’s close relationship with the group of Kyoto University philosophy students that produced Eiga zuihitsu (Film Essays), a coterie magazine known at the time for its theoretical support of avant-garde tech-

20

A Less Than Independent Production

the various cinematic and artistic trends of the time. This is important to stress because the director, although he described in his autobiography “the strong urge to make just once the kind of film I wanted to create free from anyone’s control,”5 did not do this divorced from the involvement of several influential artistic figures. The first was the Shinkankaku school. Kinugasa had enjoyed previous contact with Yokomitsu Riichi during the filming of The Sun, and their collaboration may have involved personal affinities,6 but the literary modernists were also keenly interested in cinema at a time when many writers were involving themselves in the medium. Before Kinugasa even approached the group, Kataoka wondered in Eiga engeki whether “the direction film art should pursue in the future could not coincide in spirit with the ­Shinkankaku school.”7 They were as much interested in using cinema as Kinugasa was in using them, and it was their involvement that reshaped the form of the film. When Kinugasa decided to go independent, his first plan was to film a story about an old man and a circus. Instead of working in a studio, he would simply hire a traveling circus to set up a tent in a field near his home in Kyoto, buy a few lights, and shoot on the spot. He had recently ordered a new Parvo K camera from Shanghai equipped with a 400 foot magazine and four lenses—three Tessa (35mm, 50mm, and 75mm) and one Cook (a 25mm wide angle). He would develop the film himself in a makeshift lab he had built underneath his house, and all the costs would be covered by the savings he had accumulated since his days as a Nikkatsu star.8 The plan resembles, at least in spirit, the strategy for independent cinema Naoki Sanjûgo outlined in a series of articles, first in Engeki eiga and then Eiga jidai (Film Age), in 1926. Noting how some of the Teikine product was actually being made for thirty-five hundred yen a title,9 Naoki offered a detailed plan on

niques. See Makino Mamoru, “Eiga ni okeru Kyôto gakuha no seiritsu” (The Founding of the Kyoto School in Film), Âto risâchi (Art Research) 1 (2001): 29–51. Kinugasa’s relation to Kyoto philosophy is also evident in the fact that the philosopher Tanikawa Tetsuzô visited the set of A Page of Madness. See Kawabata Yasunari, “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei nikki” (Diary of the Filming of A Page of Madness), in Kawabata Yasunari zenshû (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol. 33 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1982), 21. 5. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga eiga no seishun (My Youth in Film) (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1977), 59. 6. Kinugasa emphasized that the two were roughly equivalent in age and from the same prefecture. See his “Ano koro no koto” (In Those Days), in Yokomitsu Riichi no bungaku to shôgai (Yokomitsu Riichi’s Life and Literature), ed. Yura Tetsuji (Tokyo: Ôfûsha, 1977), 182. 7. Kataoka Teppei, “Furasshu bakku” (Flashback), Engeki eiga (Theater and Film) 1.4 (April 1926): 10. 8. Kinugasa, Waga eiga no seishun, 60–61. 9. Naoki Sanjûgo, “Eigakai dorobanashi (roku)” (Dirty Tales of the Film World: Number Six), Engeki eiga 1.7 (July 1926): 110.

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Chapter 5

how to make profitable films as an individual producer for five thousand yen a shot.10 This was production bordering on the amateur, and Kinugasa initially seemed set on following the blueprint of his former collaborator. He was also not the first young director to try to create his own production company for Itô Daisuke had done it earlier in 1926. His plans changed, however, when he visited Tokyo to discuss the project with Yokomitsu. Yokomitsu first arranged for Kawabata Yasunari to meet with Kinugasa at Yokomitsu’s home on 3 April 1926. There, according to Kawabata’s diary, the director “asked for our participation in a project to produce a good, artistic film without regard for profit.”11 Soon Yokomitsu, Kawabata, Kataoka, Kishida, and Iketani Shinzaburô met to consider ­Kinugasa’s proposition. According to Kinugasa, the circus idea went out the window fairly quickly, but with no agreement on a replacement story the member with the most idle time on his hands, Kishida, was asked to write a screenplay. What he produced, “Zenmai no tawamure” (“The Play of the Springs,” later published in the August 1926 issue of Engeki eiga), was perhaps a farce too much in the French style to satisfy the group. Kinugasa proposed a story about an insane asylum. The director had recently toured the well-known Matsuzawa mental hospital in Tokyo’s Setagaya, which was one reason, Kinugasa later said, why “people in that field said that I had fairly correctly depicted the facts about mentally insane patients” in A Page of Madness. He described his experience to Yokomitsu and Kawabata, wondering “whether there wasn’t some kind of drama behind the figure of the insane.”12 The three decided to go with that, and Kawabata, now the only one who was free, was left with the task of writing. The second shoulder Kinugasa would lean on was that of Inoue Masao. Inoue was one of Japan’s most famous actors, a figure central in the development of both shinpa theater and the shingeki movement who had become interested in the possibilities of cinema quite early on. He acted in films beginning in 1910, before it was respectable to do so, and ran a motion picture study center out of his home in the late 1910s. After a brief stint at Kokkatsu around the same time Kinugasa was there, Inoue continued to pursue a dual career on stage and screen under contract with Shôchiku, appearing, for instance, in one of the big-budget historical epics of 1926, The Great Kusunoki (Dai Nan-kô). He responded when Kinugasa asked him to participate in the 10. Naoki Sanjûgo, “Shinpen eigakai dorobanashi (ni)” (New Dirty Tales of the Film World: Number Two), Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.4 (October 1926): 19–21. 11. Kawabata Yasunari, “Dokuei jimei” (Self Projection, Self Existence) in Kawabata Yasunari zenshû (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol. 33 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1981–82), 402. 12. Kinugasa, Waga eiga no seishun, 64.

22

A Less Than Independent Production

film by canceling a May stage performance and agreeing to appear without compensation. With the preliminaries settled, Kinugasa and the principals met on 10 April at the Tokyo Station Hotel to solidify their arrangement and, in what marked the beginning of a somewhat successful media campaign, call a press conference. The next day’s papers revealed a plan more ambitious than the production of a single amateur film. The Hôchi shinbun reported the group’s intention “to produce about two research films a year without regard for exhibition value and create a significant revolution in the present film world.”13 The Asahi shinbun wrote about the prospective appearance of “stupendous films neither Expressionist nor futurist,” and plans were even announced for a film with Ichikawa Ennosuke and another to be directed by Kataoka Teppei.14 The presence of Inoue and the Shinkankaku writers drew the press’s attention as the coverage put their names in the headlines while devoting very little coverage to Kinugasa himself. Acting on its own, the Hôchi dubbed the group the Shinkankakuha Eiga Renmei (New Impressionist Film League), a name that Kinugasa and the others, though they apparently never wanted it, ended up using as their collective appellation in a curious but telling repeat of the Shinkankaku school’s experience. From the beginning, the project was articulated within a series of discourses that would be important in defining the finished film. While he was pursuing his own conception of the project, Kinugasa evidently envisioned the film as a collaborative endeavor that required the consent and cooperation of fellow artists. The fact that he approached figures in arts more respectable than cinema indicates his belief that his effort to produce “a good, artistic film,” while aligned with contemporary discourses on the purity of cinematic expression, still believed that the motion pictures had to draw on the strength of its older, less capitalist artistic predecessors in order to assume the status of an equal work of art. In a Japanese film world that was still considered inferior to that of the West, the influx of genuine artists from other fields was seen as creating the kind of “reform”—in motion pictures not politics—that the Pure Film Movement had begun years before and the press and official institutions such as schools and government regulators generally supported. The use of the term kenkyû (research) in early announcements closely aligned the group with the Pure Film Movement and its stress on study or research as the means of discerning the essence of cinema and distinguishing it from the crass forms of film generated by ­commercial 13. “Eigakai kakushin no tame” (For Reforming the Film World), Hôchi shinbun, 11 April 1926, evening ed., 11. 14. “Inoue o uwaoki ni” (Bringing In Inoue), Tokyo asahi shinbun, 11 April 1926, 5.

23

Chapter 5

­ roduction practices.15 The image of Kinugasa and his compatriots as rep searchers ignoring profit located their project in bourgeois definitions of art as a practice divorced from the realm of economy, as well as giving them the cultural capital that would help them present their creative process in the media through familiar narratives of artistic sacrifice. At the same time, the group was subject to a popular fascination fed by the press for the strange and often sensational new arts arriving from Europe (futurism and Expressionism) or springing up in Japan (the Shinkankaku school). Thus, while A Page of Madness presented itself as a challenge to the dominant commercial cinema, its production would be neither discursively unusual nor lacking in public attention. It was likely the combination of high-profile artists and prominent media coverage that gave Kinugasa’s project advantages many other independent productions did not have and made the major studios friendly to the director’s effort to make “his own” film. The project having expanded beyond what he could shoot in a local field, Kinugasa was forced to look for a real film studio. He soon got help from Shirai Shintarô, a managing director at Shôchiku, who had seen the Hôchi article. With most of its production concentrated in gendaigeki made at the Kamata Studio in Tokyo, Shôchiku had tried to no avail to use its Kyoto production center, the Shimokamo Studio, to make jidaigeki. The company had been forced to abandon the studio in May 1925 except for occasional productions such as The Great Kusunoki, which was shot there in February and March of 1926. Thus, Shirai, in charge of the Osaka-Kyoto area, had an empty studio on his hands, and he offered it to Kinugasa free of charge. Shôchiku’s assistance did not stop there; it also invested financially in the project.16 Inuzuka Minoru, a screenwriter at Shôchiku, was added to the staff, and it is likely that the use of Inoue, who was on contract to Shôchiku, could only have occurred with the studio’s approval. One can only speculate as to the studio’s reasons for helping ­Kinugasa. For a medium burdened with a bad reputation as base entertainment that was corrupting the nation’s youth, such assistance surely gave the industry a public relations tool, evidence with which to argue that film was 15. See my book, provisionally titled Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). 16. See Kinugasa’s interview in Tanaka Jun’ichirô, Nihon eiga hattatsushi (The History of the Development of Japanese Cinema), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1976), 66; and his “Watashi no rirekisho” (My Resumé), in Watashi no rirekisho: Bunkajin 10 (My Resumé: Cultural Figures 10), ed. Nihon Keizai Shinbun (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 1984), 433. According to Inuzuka Minoru’s recollection, Shôchiku’s financial involvement was more in the form of a loan. He reports that Kinugasa pleaded with him to persuade Shirai to lend the director ten thousand yen. See Inuzuka Minoru, Eiga wa kagerô no gotoku (Film Is Like a Mirage) (Tokyo: Sôshisha, 2002), 88–97.

24

A Less Than Independent Production

“a new civilization, a new art,” as Shirai did when boasting of his involvement in A Page of Madness in a trade yearbook.17 In addition, as at least one film magazine speculated at the time, the financial obligations the studio was imposing on the director could be seen as Shôchiku’s effort to acquire the Makino veteran Kinugasa in order to boost its jidaigeki production, a prediction that eventually came true.18

17.   Shirai Shintarô, “Banninmuki no jidaigeki” (Period Films for Everyone), in Nihon eiga jigyô sôran (Shôwa ninen han) (Japanese Film Industry Almanac, 1926 Edition), ed. Ichikawa Aya (Tokyo: Kokusai Eiga Tsûshinsha, 1926), 306–8. 18. [Yamamoto] Rokuyô-sei, “Nihon eigakai no chikagoro” (Recent Events in the Japanese Film World), Nihon eiga (Japanese Cinema) 22 (June 1926): N.p.

25

Chapter 6

The Screenplay

Much of what was necessary for the production of A Page of Madness was in order by the beginning of May except for one thing: the script. Kawabata ­Yasunari was supposed to write the screenplay, but by his own admission he only provided Kinugasa with an “incomplete” script in Tokyo before the director left for Kyoto. The lack of a complete blueprint before shooting began raises questions about how the production proceeded, but it also underlines the fundamental uncertainty over the status of the film text. As we shall see, the fact that there are multiple “scripts” for A Page of Madness may intersect with the multiple interpretations of the finished film we have already noticed. Kinugasa’s film, it seems, had several “versions” from the start. Given Kawabata’s own account, it is widely recognized that the scenario printed in his complete works was not solely written by him. He, after all, was only given credit for the “original story” in the film, with no one earning credit for the script. Who, then, composed the story for this film and what written basis actually existed for filming it? The most widely related account is largely based on Kinugasa’s memoirs. The novelist was supposed to proceed to Kyoto before the start of filming to complete the script, but he did not show up until 14 May, long after shooting had begun. Working with what he had, Kinugasa was often forced to film without a script, a condition, he said, he did not mind. To him, “a film script is complete when the film is done.”1 He said Inuzuka and Sawada Bankô, Kinugasa’s assistant, worked on the script in the meantime, and when Kawabata finally arrived the four of them stayed up late working on subsequent scenes. The script for the film that was printed in the July issue of Eiga jidai and eventually reproduced in Kawabata’s complete works is therefore a collaborative endeavor. According to Kinugasa, it was written by Sawada and Inuzuka after the filming was complete based on their notes and checked and rewritten by Kawabata. At the end of the version printed in Eiga jidai, Kawabata thanked Kinugasa, Inuzuka, and Sawada for their work on the script. Recent credits for the film thus list Kawabata, Kinugasa, Sawada, and Inuzuka as screenwriters. Given 1. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga eiga no seishun (My Youth in Film) (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1977), 71.

26

The Screenplay

the discussions that occurred even before filming began, important contributions to the final product were also made by Yokomitsu Riichi, Kishida Kunio, Kataoka Teppei, and Iketani Shinzaburô. The script for A Page of Madness, like the film project as a whole, was clearly a collaborative effort. Yet there are reasons to question the accepted account, as well as Kawabata’s role in the production. The first is the vehement criticism Inuzuka Minoru, in a 2002 autobiography, launched against Kinugasa’s story about the script. This is Inuzuka’s version. Kinugasa had secured the film studio he had been looking for, so he immediately entered the scriptwriting stage, gathering the personnel and beginning work under the banner of the “New Impressionist Film League.” Kinugasa’s framework for depicting the real life of the insane using a mental hospital as a model was already about half formed in his mind. The three who were asked to write the script, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Kataoka Teppei, arrived in Kyoto to devote themselves to writing. With the addition of myself and Sawada Bankô, Kinugasa’s assistant, who also wrote scripts, the five of us locked ourselves up in an inn near the studio and in only ten days wrote something resembling a script. During that time, Kinugasa came by the inn almost every day and read what we had written so far, sometimes offering his opinion and taking notes. That’s why when the script was finished he did not appear to have to read it again. I suspect that even before filming began his notes, which were the equivalent of a decoupage, were complete even up to the last scene. That perhaps explains why when shooting started there were no impediments from the first day and it proceeded apace.2

Based on this recollection, Inuzuka accuses Kinugasa of several falsehoods and misdeeds: (1) failing to give credit in the film to the real scriptwriters and later denying their roles (especially the roles of Yokomitsu and Kataoka); (2) claiming that the script was written while filming was in progress when it was in fact composed beforehand (Inuzuka says he was rarely on the set and thus could not have contributed to anything done during shooting); and (3) stating that the published Kawabata script was based on the film notes and script when in fact it was a reworking of the script ­Inuzuka had to write on the spur of the moment in Tokyo when Kinugasa had to submit the film to the censors. As a lifelong screenwriter (who also directed over fifty films), Inuzuka is particularly incensed by what he ­perceives as Kinugasa’s 2. Inuzuka Minoru, Eiga wa kagerô no gotoku (Film Is Like a Mirage) (Tokyo: Sôshisha, 2002), 88.

27

Chapter 6

self-aggrandizement at the expense of the scenarist’s craft and copyright privileges. Inuzuka’s version raises some serious doubts about how the script for A Page of Madness was produced, but, written over seventy years after the film’s production by a man about a hundred years old, it does not necessarily provide us with the complete truth. His story, while it contradicts ­Kinugasa’s account in his memoirs point for point, does not, for instance, explain why Kawabata’s diary of the film’s shooting, published at the end of May 1926, apologetically states that he only gave Kinugasa an incomplete script because he was sick and writing in bed. Kawabata mentions late night discussions with Kinugasa, Sawada, and Inuzuka over the scenario after his arrival on 14 May, but there is no reference to working with Kataoka and Yokomitsu. In evaluating the two accounts, one is more likely to accept the one printed soon after the fact. But even if we cannot accept much of ­Inuzuka’s narrative, he offers two claims that further documents prove to be essentially correct: that there was a viable script when shooting began and that decoupage notes played a central role on the set. An investigation of Kinugasa’s personal papers, housed at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the National Film Center, reveals a handwritten screenplay for the film that is thirty-four pages long on B4 sized paper, composed of scenes numbered 1 to 114, covering the story of the film from the beginning until just after the lottery scene, about three-fifths of the existing print of the film (fig. 1). Since it is full of scribbles and notations about the precise shots taken on the set and the planned decoupage, it seems certain that this document was used on the set to make A Page of Madness. Unlike the script published in Kawabata’s complete works, this text, even before the notations were added, contains many directions concerning camera technique. Kinugasa’s personal papers also contain some ninety-four pages of shooting notes covering the period 11–31 May (fig. 2).3 These show the filmmakers using the scene numbers from the screenplay, and thus basing their work on its blueprint, even up to the end of filming (fig. 3). It seems that the script itself was used to write the shooting notes until 11 May, so it was likely the only document used during at least the first week of filming. The question is who wrote this script. According to Nakatani Masanao, who has investigated the handwriting on the screenplay, it was penned not by Kawabata but by Sawada Bankô. Nakatani speculates that it was written based on an outline composed by Kawabata, but given the novelist’s own 3. The notes do not seem to be complete; pages are missing amongst the notes for some days, and there are days for which all the notes seem to be lacking. There are thus shots in the extant print, such as those near the end of empty Kyoto streets, that are not recorded anywhere in the notes.

28

The Screenplay

Figure 1.   Sawada Bankô’s script for A Page of Madness. This is scene 89, the riot in the mental ward, showing the notes and revisions added on the page in red ink. Numbers and katakana indicate different shots. It was likely this messy page that prompted the crew to begin taking separate shooting notes on the set.

statements it seems that was nothing substantial. Beyond calling his scenario shirikiretonbô (incomplete), he said it was “extremely simple, with a story featuring little plot to speak of.”4 Sawada’s scenario, on the other hand, has a clear plot. It shares much of the same story as the script Kawabata eventually published in Eiga jidai, and there are a few similarities in the language.5 4. Kawabata Yasunari, “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei nikki” (Diary of the Filming of A Page of Madness), in Kawabata Yasunari zenshû (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol. 33 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1982), 22. 5. Compare the first scene in Sawada’s script with the first scene in Kawabata’s scenario. ­Sawada’s version reads: The roof of a mental hospital. A lightning rod. Torrential rain. Lightning. Water flowing down stairs. An automobile. Water flowing on the street. Telephone poles. Streetlights. A rickshaw in the torrential rain. A spinning wheel. A large tree. The gate of the mental hospital.



Kawabata’s reads: Night. The roof of a mental hospital. A lightning rod. Torrential rain. Lightning.

29

Figure 2.   Shooting notes for 25 May, the scene in which the fiancé’s friend tells him about the daughter’s mother. Even this single page was written by several people using different pens. The letter N indicates shots not filmed that day.

Figure 3.   Shooting notes for 13 May showing the use of scene numbers from Sawada’s script. Most of the shots of the dancer were filmed on this day. 30

The Screenplay

These similarities suggest textual influence, but if Kawabata’s script really was produced after filming was complete, as Kinugasa claims, it was more likely influenced by Sawada’s text not the other way around. That leaves us with very little hard evidence of Kawabata’s significant involvement before the filming began. Nor does it clear up the issue of what Sawada’s script was based on, for, while it seems to be in his handwriting, there is no proof that it was not a copy of a script written by another or something produced by a group that Sawada merely recorded. Sawada was a budding professional screenwriter, however, so it is likely he made a significant contribution to the script on which much of the shooting of A Page of Madness was based. In considering the degree to which Kawabata contributed to the film, we must also investigate the possibility that his discussions with Kinugasa, Sawada, and Inuzuka after he arrived in Kyoto significantly shaped the final film. Interestingly, the shooting notes show that the production was beginning to tackle scenes not contained in Sawada’s script as early as 14 May, the day Kawabata arrived. A closer examination of the shooting notes, however, casts doubt on the extent to which Kawabata was involved in the filming even at this point. First, the notes reveal that shooting, which was proceeding out of plot order, was still citing scene numbers from the Sawada script as late as the 31 May, the last day of filming. There are no scene numbers indicated beyond 114,6 demonstrating that there was no new script that took a primary place even after Kawabata arrived. The only extant written documents that appear to indicate some form of preliminary text used before entering this stage of shooting are outlines of two scenes not in Sawada’s script (fig. 4): the moment when the friend of the daughter’s fiancé tells him that her mother is mentally ill (a scene missing from the existing print)7 and the final scene showing the custodian in the hall after the last hallucination. Perhaps both were considered important enough to write up in advance, but each appears to be simply a preliminary sketch, only two to three pages in length, without the scene or shot numbers or precise cinematic notations of Sawada’s script. The handwriting does not appear to be that of Kawabata, Sawada, or Kinugasa, so it is not clear who composed these. It is true that most of the scenes not in the script were composed during the ten days Kawabata was in Kyoto, but the shooting notes reveal a mode of production that to a certain degree precluded Kawabata’s close 6. The notes for 19 May are topped with the number 115. If this is a scene number, it is not in the Sawada script. But since what was filmed that day was the funeral after the custodian kills the staff in his dream, something that occurs narratively long after scene 114 in the script (where the custodian gives his wife a rice cake), it is unlikely that this is a scene number. 7. An English translation of the shooting notes for this scene is included in appendix B.

31

Chapter 6

Figure 4.   Outline of the scene in which the fiancé’s friend tells him about the daughter’s mother.

i­ nvolvement. The notes are a curiously hybrid mix of screenplay and filming record. These are not the notes that Inuzuka recalls, written by Kinugasa before filming began. They were definitely written on the set because they often contain the handwriting of several people—including Sawada—on the same day, they are sometimes replete with crossed out passages and hastily written notations, and they record retakes and other events that could have only happened on the set.8 However, they are not simply the record of what was shot because they usually present the scene in order and even 8. The spacing of the notes on the page also indicates that they were probably not written beforehand and appended on the set. Notes about retakes mostly do not appear to be squeezed into something already written but are simply put down and the next shot noted with adequate room next to it. Even the notes for 18 May (the scene in which the custodian imagines trying to lead his wife away and killing the staff), which are probably the cleanest of all the notes, could not have been written beforehand because they include such annotations as “45: Retake of 43.” It is likely that numbers were sometimes written later since a few notations seem to have been squeezed between previously written ones even as the shot numbering remained continuous with no corrections in the numbers. Given that the notes plan a scene’s editing as much as they record the day’s shooting, it is possible that scenes were sometimes shot out of order but written on paper in proper decoupage order, necessitating the squeezing in of a new shot note between the notations of two previously filmed shots if the those notes were not properly spaced.

32

The Screenplay

include insert shots or flashbacks that were probably not filmed that day.9 It is as if they are a pseudo script, though one not written in the style of either ­Sawada’s or Kawabata’s screenplays. They are like a written decoupage that was produced on the set and followed mostly—though not always—in the subsequent editing. Kinugasa expressed in his autobiography his predilection for working without a script, and these notes appear to prove that. While Kawabata may have provided brief scene outlines beforehand or helped create the story through discussions off the set with the director, Sawada, and Inuzuka, the technical nature of the notes, which contain many film terms and present a precise decoupage, reveals something that must have been produced by film professionals not a first-time screenwriter. Most likely they were produced under Kinugasa’s supervision by various crew members working on the set.10 In conclusion, although Kawabata’s name was used prominently in the advertising for the film, there is very little evidence of his deep involvement in the production. Given the Sawada script, the shooting notes, and ­Kawabata’s own admissions about the inadequacy of what he wrote, it seems that the initial credit for the “original story” given to Kawabata on the film’s release is the most accurate description of his participation. If a script credit is to be accorded, it should go to Sawada and those who helped him produce the shooting script. The screenplay published in Eiga jidai is not a proper script for A Page of Madness. It is just one of the many texts floating around that film, another version of a movie with many versions.

9. Such shots are marked with an N. Shots actually filmed that day are numbered in order. 10. Sawada’s handwriting is visible on some days’ notes. Since Inuzuka wrote that he was rarely on the set, the most likely candidates for helping to write these notes are the assistant directors Koishi Eiichi, Ôsugi Masami, and Murata Takerô and possibly the camera crew of Sugiyama Kôhei and Tsuburaya Eiji.

33

Chapter 7

The Filming

The shooting notes give us a vibrant picture of the many figures actively engaged in cinematic creation on the set. They underline the fact that the production of A Page of Madness involved many voices and many texts, artists, and technicians who were improvising as well as working from detailed scripts and were utilizing both established industry methods and more experimental forms. They also illustrate how this film was a shifting and fluid entity that passed through several stages and changed each time. A Page of Madness began filming on 6 May as a coproduction of the Film League and the National Art Film Company (Nashonaru Âto Firumusha), Kinugasa’s production company.1 According to Kawabata, about seventy people worked on the film.2 Inoue arrived with hair cropped like an old man, bringing along the young Takiguchi Shintarô from his troupe.3 Iimura Ayako, Minami Eiko, and several others came on the recommendation of the Shinkokugeki’s Watase Junko. Most of the remaining personnel were friends or old colleagues of Kinugasa’s. Seki Misao (a Hollywood veteran), ­Takamatsu Kinnosuke (or Kyôsuke), Tsuboi Tetsu, and Sawada Bankô followed Kinugasa from Makino; Takase Minoru (famous afterward as a comedian) was a fellow actor at Nikkatsu; and Nakagawa Yoshie and 1. Kinugasa gives the fifth as the start date. See Tanaka Jun’ichirô, Nihon eiga hattatsushi (The History of the Development of Japanese Cinema), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1976), 66. Kawabata says it was the sixth. See Kawabata Yasunari, “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei nikki” (Diary of the Filming of A Page of Madness), in Kawabata Yasunari zenshû (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol. 33 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1982), 19. According to the Nihon eiga jigyô sôran, shooting began on the seventh. See “Taisho jûgo nendo getsurei kiji,” in Nihon eiga jigyô sôran (Shôwa ninen han) (Japanese Film Industry Almanac, 1926 Edition), ed. Ichikawa Aya (Tokyo: Kokusai Eiga Tsûshinsha, 1926), 312. The 30 May story in the Yomiuri shinbun concurs with Kawabata. The Sawada script, which seems to have been used to write the shooting notes until 11 May, does not always clearly indicate the filming dates. Numbers placed above the shot numbers may be dates, and if that is the case the earliest notation is dated 6 May. 2. Kawabata, “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei nikki,” 21. 3. Takiguchi became an actor at Shôchiku, Nikkatsu, and Daiei before being drafted during World War II. He was captured by the Soviets and decided to stay in the Soviet Union after the war, eventually living in Moscow and marrying Okada Yoshiko, a famous Japanese film actress who made a sensational dash across the snowy border in Sakhalin in January 1938. She entered the Soviet Union with her lover, Sugimoto Ryôkichi, a leftist theater director who was executed by the Russians as a spy in 1939.

34

The Filming

cameraman Sugiyama Kôhei (who later shot many films by Kinugasa and Mizoguchi) had worked with Kinugasa when Makino briefly merged with Tôa. ­Sugiyama’s assistant, Tsuburaya Eiichi, became famous in later years under the name Eiji for the special effects photography that brought to life such fantastic beings as Godzilla and Ultraman. This was therefore not a small-scale, personal production. A Page of Madness was no longer a low-budget indie in the Naoki mold. Ignoring Naoki’s blueprint, Kinugasa insisted on shooting inside the studio with artificial lighting. They filmed without inhibition, shooting nearly three times the amount of footage that was eventually used.4 The result, even in ­Kawabata’s mind, was extremely expensive.5 In the end, the film reportedly cost twenty thousand yen to make, considerably more than most major ­studio productions.6 Considering that the studio was free, Kinugasa already owned a camera, and the main star worked without pay, one can say that either the figure is high or Kinugasa and his fellow artists were profligate spenders. The expense reiterates the fact that A Page of Madness was neither a lowcost  alternative production outside the studio system nor an average studio work. The way it was filmed reveals a similar hybrid combination of industrial and artisanal production methods. The cast and crew included a mix of individuals from inside and outside film, and so it was perhaps to be expected that the shooting would be a mixture of professional and unprofessional (or alternative) practices. Production of the film was an often haphazard but communal affair, one united by a sense of community with no strict division of labor. Everyone, including Inoue, helped to build and paint sets or took turns pushing the camera dolly. A spirit of experimentation abounded as every conceivable trick was tried to achieve the optical effects seen on-screen.7 As the average age of the participants was about 4. Kawabata reports that 20,000 feet or 6000 meters were shot for what ended up as a 7,000-foot or 2100-meter film. See “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei yodan” (An Account of the Filming of A Page of Madness), Geki to eiga (Drama and Film) 4.8 (September 1926): N.p. This figure seems high because the shooting notes do not record that many retakes. 5. Kawabata, “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei nikki,” 21. 6. Naoki reported the figure in “Shinpen eigakai dorobanashi (sono yon)” (New Dirty Tales of the Film World: Number Four), Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.6 (December 1926): 19. He added that it cost two thousand yen more just to get the film distributed. For a comparison, note that the commercial films Kinugasa made for Shôchiku in the same studio afterward were budgeted at ten thousand yen apiece. Inuzuka reports that A Page of Madness cost ten thousand yen, but he seems to have based this figure on the amount he says Kinugasa borrowed from Shirai. See Inuzuka Minoru, Eiga wa kagerô no gotoku (Film Is Like a Mirage) (Tokyo: Sôshisha, 2002), 100. 7. The theater director Suzuki Tadashi found in A Page of Madness the spirit of genba, which he defines as “a space of struggle that handles fluid and chance encounters with the spirit of handcraftsmanship.” See his “Kurutta ichipeiji o mite” (Viewing A Page of Madness), Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 24.

35

Chapter 7

t­ wenty-five,8 the spirit and vigor of youth abounded on the set. Filming must have been grueling on some days; over seventy shots were filmed on 18 May, for example, in what must have an all-night session. Not all of these practices were unusual in the contemporary Japanese film industry, however. While Hollywood was by this time mostly a Fordist industry, with artisanal producers such as Erich von Stroheim and Charlie Chaplin being pushed to the side, the Japanese film business was still a hybrid mix of industrial practices that was shifting toward mass-production systems but was still without a well-defined division of labor. Scripts had not yet been turned into precise blueprints of production, and there did not exist, for instance, scripters who carefully noted every shot and its pertinent details to ensure continuity. It is telling that Sawada’s script was first used to write down what shots were taken; the separate shooting notes were only kept starting on 11 May when it became clear that the scene they were filming—the riot in the mental ward—was getting too complicated to note what was happening in the margins of the script or between lines on the page. Here was a case in which a common industry practice—writing notes on the script—was changed due to the special characteristics of A Page of Madness, its unusually large number of shots. The fact that the notes are rather inconsistent, with no real effort to effectively identify every shot taken, probably stems from the fact this was not yet an established procedure in the industry.9 Yet there are aspects of rationalized industry practice evident in the production of A Page of Madness, particularly in the fact the film was shot out of order and different scenes set in the same location were shot together, even when they were narratively far apart. That is why Sawada’s script was so important to the production, providing an industrial logic to the filmmaking. However, once the filmmakers came to scenes not in Sawada’s script—ones that, like the slaughter of the staff and the marriage of the daughter to an inmate, are actually the most illogical from a narrative point of view—they resorted to a less efficient mode of production: shooting largely in order. Such varied filming methods are one reason why the film itself appears to sport different styles, from the realist to the experimental.

8. Takano Etsuko, “Kurutta ichipeiji no koto” (On A Page of Madness), Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 22. 9. There are some pages on which the shots are not numbered, and the retakes are rarely numbered separately. The now largely universal practice of using clapper numbers to identify scene, shot, and take is not apparent here.

36

Chapter 8

Editing and the Print

Production was under a strict deadline because of Inoue’s scheduled stage appearance on 1 June. After filming wrapped up on 31 May,1 editing proceeded at a brisk pace and was completed in only about a week. Considering the number of shots in the film, the intricacy of the editing, and the fact Kinugasa was working directly with the negative, it is amazing that the enormous task of putting together this complicated film was completed in such a short time.2 Kinugasa relates in his autobiography how, working in the days before Moviolas yet wanting to check the rhythm of his editing, he rigged his Parvo camera so that by opening the back he could view the scenes he had spliced together through the lens. The quickness of the editing process is proof of how important the shooting notes were. With the notes constituting a form of preliminary decoupage, editing could proceed apace because it had been planned on the set prior to postproduction. For an illustration of this, consider the lottery scene and how it was rendered first in Sawada’s script, then in the notes, and finally in the film. The script: Scene 106 The lottery. The chest of drawers is in the center. The label “First Prize.” Three young women in the momoware hairstyle. Three or four are sitting, handing over prizes to four or five people. All of them return having only won trifling prizes. The custodian stands there holding a few items he bought. Round candy in a box. The custodian sticks his hand inside and draws one out. He hands it to the lottery girl. The girl’s hands open the wrapping. She opens the paper inside. 1. According to the shooting notes, the last scene shot—that of the marching band announcing the lottery—was filmed on 31 May. Curiously, though, on the thirtieth the Yomiuri shinbun reported that the film was completely finished. See “Shinkankakuha Renmei no dai-ikkai sakuhin kansei” (First Film of the New Impressionist League Completed), Yomiuri shinbun, 30 May 1926, 5. 2. It is possible that Kinugasa started editing the film during shooting, especially in the last week of May when the shooting schedule appears to have been less onerous.

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She flashes a smile, as if surprised. “First prize! First prize!” Everyone at the lottery gathers around in a commotion. Faces of the crowd full of envy. (They express considerable emotion.) The lottery girl rings the bell. More people gather round. The men at the lottery all cooperate to lower the chest. One girl turns and removes a label that reads “Extra First Prize” from a dancing dress. She hands the clothes to the custodian. The face of the custodian, laughing over and over. A lottery girl puts the extra prizes into the chest of drawers. The custodian lifts the chest on his back and starts to walk. A large crowd follows him. The happy face of the daughter pointing to the chest. The custodian happily shows his daughter the dancing dress and other prizes.

The shooting notes (15 May) The Big Sale (night shooting) 1) Full shot of the lottery (the band, [indecipherable word]. One of the lottery clerks rings a bell to attract customers)—dissolve3 2) The music band playing heartily (MCU)—dissolve 3) Hands of people exchanging lottery tickets (CU)—dissolve 4) The first prize (chest of drawers) (CU)—dissolve 5) Sundry prizes (of different levels) (CU)—dissolve 6) Group of people receiving their prizes (LS from behind) 7) Group of people receiving their prizes (FS from the front)— dissolve 8) The custodian exchanges his lottery ticket (CU)—dissolve 9) The custodian opens up the paper—First prize! (CU)— dissolve 10) The custodian hands it to a lottery clerk—dissolve 11) A bell ringing—dissolve 12) The camera moves to find the first prize among the various prizes (FS)—dissolve 13) The custodian is overjoyed at having won the first prize (CU)— dissolve 3. There is no record of how all the film’s dissolves and double exposures were achieved. The notes sometimes specify these visual effects, but as a decoupage they might just indicate what should be done in postproduction. Some of the multiple exposures are too long and complicated to have been done in camera, but the speed of the editing process and the notations in the shooting notes suggest that some might have been done in that fashion.

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Editing and the Print

14) They take down all the prizes on top of the chest (MCU)— dissolve 15) They put the chest on the old man’s back (LS) 16) The custodian happy with the chest on his back (CU)

The Street 1) People on the street stand around the custodian making a fuss (high-angle camera movement) 2) Camera movement of the chest and lanterns 3) The custodian approaches and meets his daughter 4) Close up of the happy daughter and happy father.4

The film 1) Dissolve to “Big Lottery” sign flashing on and off 2) Dissolve to pan left of banners emblazoned with “Big Lottery” 3) Dissolve to high-angle pan left of the band drummers and women preparing balls 4) Dissolve to same speed medium shot pan left of a drummer, slight fade out 5) Fade in of baskets with balls, people exchanging tickets and picking lots; double exposure in of the first-prize chest 6) Dissolve to pan left of other prizes: pots, etc. 7) High-angle full shot of the lottery stage 8) Dissolve to high-angle medium shot of the custodian making his way laterally through the crowd 9) Dissolve to high-angle medium close-up of his hand picking a ball 10) Dissolve to high-angle, over-the-shoulder close-up of him opening the piece of paper reading “First Prize” 11) Dissolve to frontal close-up of him laughing happily 12) Close-up of bell ringing 13) Medium long shot of people preparing to take out the prize 14) High-angle extreme long shot of them taking out the chest 15) Close-up of the custodian happy as the chest is tied to his back 16) Dissolve to an extreme-high-angle-track right of the custodian in long shot walking with the chest through the crowd 17) Dissolve to a track behind the chest with a close-up of the First Prize sign 18) High angle long shot of fair, lights; the custodian walks toward the camera with the chest 19) Medium shot of the custodian with his daughter. He turns around and shows her the chest and the dress. 4. The notes for the scenes at the lottery and on the street were written by different people and thus exhibit different styles. Whoever wrote the notes for the lottery scene was the most precise of all the note takers, recording the camera distance for almost every shot. The second individual was much less exact.

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Chapter 8

As we can see, the notes clearly reveal a process of decoupage progressing from the script. The filming maintains the general narrative order, but analytically divides it into visual segments that establish the scene, identify the goal (the prize), and then efficiently renders the narrative of the custodian’s good luck by visual means. This is partially a process of condensation, as the shots actually taken were fewer than those suggested by the original script. The scene in the extant film further condenses the action, as certain shots seem not to have been used. Excess information, such as extra emphasis on the prize after the bell rings or additional reaction shots, has been trimmed out. What is evident here is a decoupage that does not presume the repeated use of the same camera position. This can represent a mode of production that sometimes shoots in order, as well as one that refrains from narrating space through back-and-forth cuts between a small number of camera positions, suturing the spectator in the diegetic space. It is relatively classical in that it analyzes space for narrative purposes but does not take advantage of the economy of shooting together different shots from the same camera framing, foregoing the efficiencies of Fordist models for the sake of spatial variation and experimentation. This is also decoupage conceived more on the set than in editing, evincing few of the discoveries on the editing table that thrilled Lev Kuleshov and his Soviet associates, leading them to theories of the power of montage. That is another reason why, especially with the decoupage notes, the film could be edited so quickly. That does not mean that the editing process lacked creativity. Just as shooting on the set involved a variety of production modes, so editing was pursued in different ways. If the lottery scene was shot in order and featured no repeated camera positions, other scenes were shot out of order, leaving it up to the editor to construct the narrative episode. For instance, many of the shots of the dancing girl in her cell at the beginning (scenes 16, 18, 20, 22, 25, and 27 in the Sawada script) were filmed together on one day and then combined in quite complicated ways with the shots of rain, lightning, and instruments photographed on another (scenes 17, 19, 21, and 26). Much of the opening sequence, then, was a tour de force created on the editing table, albeit one based on ideas laid out in the script. While such editing resembles the rhythmic cutting of French Impressionism more than the dialectic clash of opposites of Soviet montage, it evinces more than other scenes in the film an awakening to the power of editing in postproduction. A question that remains about the editing process, and one that raises fundamental issues about the print we see today, is whether any of the scenes shot were entirely cut from the film. In acknowledging the differences between Kawabata’s script and the film, Kinugasa in his autobiogra40

Editing and the Print

phy explains that some scenes were excised on the editing table.5 Not only Kawabata’s but also Sawada’s script and the shooting notes describe shots and entire scenes that are not in the extant film, especially many that center on the relationship between the daughter and her fiancé, including a particularly long and melodramatic one in which the daughter overhears a friend of the fiancé revealing to him that her mother is insane (the shooting notes for this scene are included in appendix B). We can currently get only two glimpses of the fiancé: in a short scene about halfway through the film that shows the two cavorting happily (fig. 5) and in another brief shot of him looking unhappy that is used when the daughter visits her father to visually communicate the break in their relations. Were the other scenes cut out? There is evidence that scenes are missing from the current film. Mariann Lewinsky has found a partial benshi script that describes scenes missing from our print.6 Two copies of the ken’etsu daihon (censorship script) were

Figure 5.   The daughter and her fiancé. 5. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga eiga no seishun (My Youth in Film) (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1977), 72. 6. See Mariann Lewinsky, Eine verrükte Seite: Stummfilm und filmische Avantgarde in Japan (A Page of Madness: Silent Film and the Cinematic Avant-Garde in Japan) (Zurich: Chronos, 1997) or her interview with Jasper Sharp, “A Page of Madness,” Midnight Eye, http:// www.midnighteye.com/features/silentfilm_pt1.shtml.

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found among Kinugasa’s papers, and these similarly describe scenes not visible in the current film.7 Beginning in 1925, when the Home Ministry took over censorship from local agencies, producers were obliged to submit their films to censors accompanied by a script. This script had to be an ­accurate representation of the content of the film, and a copy was kept in theaters showing the movie so that police inspectors could refer to it and make sure the theater had not tampered with the print. With each page stamped by the authorities, unauthorized modification of the censorship script was forbidden. The legal requirement that the censorship script match the film provides strong proof that the absent scenes described in the A Page of Madness censorship script were shown in theaters. The final evidence that scenes were cut after the film was released is the fact that the existing print is over 500 meters shorter than it was when it was submitted for censorship in 1926, having been reduced from 2,142 to 1,617 meters.8 At silent speed, that is about twenty-five minutes of screen time or about one-fourth of the original length of the film. We must ask why there is this drastic change. With many old Japanese films, reduced length was due to wear and tear, the loss of certain reels of the film, and sometimes abridged versions. Given the vast number of prewar films that have been lost forever, we can consider ourselves fortunate to see even an incomplete version of some productions. Thus, it was nothing short of a miracle when a print of A Page of Madness was found in 1971. Kinugasa always assumed the print of the film had remained in the Shôchiku vaults and thus went up in flames in a fire at the studio. It was to his surprise that, in searching through his old house, he found a negative and positive print of the film in some rice cans—cans he says are visible in the lottery scene. He relates checking the entire print and finding “the same clear scenes as when it was new” implying that nothing was missing.9 Adding a soundtrack, he showed it at several European festivals before reopening it in Japan on 10 October 1975 at Iwanami Hall.

7. Neither copy is the official censorship script stamped with Home Ministry seals. One is a handwritten copy, which Inuzuka says he first wrote (Inuzuka Minoru, Eiga wa kagerô no gotoku (Film Is Like a Mirage) (Tokyo: Sôshisha, 2002), 98), although it is stamped with Kinugasa’s seal; the other, a printed copy produced by the Honjô Film Distribution Company, the film’s distributor in the Kantô region, is identical to the handwritten version. It is likely that a copy of the latter was submitted for censorship. 8. There were three prints made of A Page of Madness, and each was submitted to censors in accordance with their regulations. They differ slightly in length and cleared censorship on different dates: the first on 22 June (2,142 meters), the second on 14 September (2,128 meters), and the third on 21 September (2,135 meters). The slight difference in lengths is probably due to different leader lengths. A copy of the current print, housed in the National Film Center, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is only 1,617 meters. 9. Kinugasa, Waga eiga seishun, 81.

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Editing and the Print

This print shows none of the signs of incompleteness evident in other Japanese masterpieces, such as Diary of Chûji’s Travels (Chûji tabi nikki, 1927, dir. Itô Daisuke), that were found with scenes or reels missing. While it is a disjunctive film at times, narratively A Page of Madness does not appear to bear the signs of randomly missing reels (the lack of speculation in the recent literature about missing scenes testifies to this). The most likely scenario is that the film was cut deliberately at some point after its initial release. Since there is no record of the film being re-released or even screened between 1928 and 1971,10 this may have been done by those preparing the film for the 1970s re-release or by Kinugasa himself. Given his previous prevarications, there is the possibility that upon finding the film he reedited it and excised the more melodramatic scenes, which were criticized at the time and did not quite fit the film’s established image as an avant-garde masterpiece. There is little way to prove this charge, but such doubts reinforce the impression that A Page of Madness, if only on the level of the film print, is not one but many texts.

10. After 1925, it was not the films that were censored as much as prints. Every one was viewed by censors and received a stamp on the celluloid itself. By law, any changes in a print necessitated resubmitting it for censorship, and I have found no record of an alternate version in prewar censorship records. I have also not encountered any written account of a screening of the film in the postwar before 1971.

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Chapter 9

The Exhibition of Artistry

Kinugasa first showed A Page of Madness to his cohorts in the small ­benshi screening room below Kyoto’s Shôchikuza and then carried it to Tokyo on 6  June. There he screened it for Yokomitsu and Kishida, after which the former suggested a change in the title from the original Kurueru ichipeiji to Kurutta ichipeiji (basically a change from the present to the past tense.1) Both recommended eliminating the intertitles that Kinugasa had inserted, mostly short titles that clarified character identities and their relationships.2 In line with contemporary ideals about the cinema, A Page of Madness would be a titleless film even if it was not planned as such. The director submitted a print to the Home Ministry censors, who approved it on 22 June, and then showed it to reporters in a continuation of his press strategy. Despite the significant media coverage, however, A Page of Madness did not easily find a distributor. Kinugasa, Inuzuka, and ­Sugiyama camped out at the Tokyo Station Hotel, showing the film to everyone in the industry, while their contract players waited back in Kyoto with little money. The director even ventured to Nagoya in July to show the film to the press and exhibitors there. The film was not ignored; with Shirai’s help, it quickly got September bookings at two Shôchiku-owned theaters in Kansai that showed foreign films, plus a run at one of Kobe’s premier foreign movie theaters. Luck was harder to find in Tokyo because, contrary to reports in the trade papers, A Page of Madness was not being distributed by Shôchiku nationwide.3 1. More specifically, kurueru can be one of two possibilities: (1) a more classic declension of the verb kuruu, signifying the natural appearance of a condition (thus the original title, in English, would be closer to A Page Going Mad); or (2) its potential form (A Page That Can Go Mad). Switching it to kurutta eliminates this ambiguity and makes the act of going mad a complete and finished state (A Page That Has Gone Mad). It also is a more modern declension with a contemporary ring to it. 2. Kanô Ryûichi reports that they were basically along the lines of “Father,” “The ill Mother,” or “One day . . .”. See Kanô Ryûichi, “Kinugasa Teinosuke to sono shûhen” (Kinugasa Teinosuke and His Surroundings), Kôza Nihon eiga 2: Musei eiga no kansei (Lectures on Japanese Cinema 2: The Perfection of Silent Film), ed. Iwamura Shôhei et al. (Tokyo: ­Iwanami Shoten, 1986), 98. 3. Nihon eiga’s Yamamoto Rokuyô reported that all of the Shinkankaku League films were to be distributed by Shôchiku. See Yamamoto Rokuyô, “Nihon eigakai no chikagoro”

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The Exhibition of Artistry

Yet, while Kinugasa complained that his filmic endeavor could not “avoid censure as a frightening heresy or revolt given the current state of profit-making companies,”4 it must be underlined that A Page of Madness was supported by very powerful cultural institutions. The first public screening of the film was at the Aoyama Kaikan in Tokyo on 10 July at the opening session of the newly formed All-Kantô Cinema Association (Zen Kantô Eiga Kyôkai), an organization “centered around the Tokyo asahi shinbun formed by educators, film critics, creators, producers, and other film-related individuals both inside and outside government for the purpose of improving and popularizing film art and education.”5 Modeled on such ciné clubs as the ­Society for Recommending Good Films (Ii Eiga o Homeru Kai), a group made up of journalists and literary figures that played a central role in in­ tro­ducing French Impressionist films to Japan, the association represented a major effort by an important newspaper to legitimize motion pictures by bringing them into line with established institutions. A Page of Madness fit that project well, and it was screened alongside two other art-oriented works: a three-reel film by Japan’s master of cut-out animation, Ôfuji ­Noburô, entitled The Thief of Baguda Castle (Baguda-jô no tôzoku, 1926); and Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s documentary Grass (1925). In the end, the distribution rights for the Kantô (Tokyo-Yokohama) region were acquired by the Honjô Film Distribution Company (Honjô Eiga Haikyûsha), a newly founded subsidiary of the camera equipment importer and educational film producer Honjô Trading. Honjô arranged for the film to open in Tokyo at three Paramount-operated theaters that specialized in foreign films. The screening at Shinjuku’s Musashinokan was determined in a different manner. The independent Musashinokan was the premier foreign film theater in Tokyo known for its selection of high-class films and for the voice of Tokugawa Musei, the most famous benshi at the time, who was praised for his erudite and nonobtrusive narrations. Intellectual filmgoers avidly attended this theater, and the weekly program was actually selected by a panel composed of its managers and noted critics. The critic Iwasaki Akira, who at that time was editing the Musashinokan’s weekly newsletter, tells how he and Mori Iwao (a critic and screenwriter friendly with Kinugasa who later became vice president of the Tôhô studios) pushed to have the film (Recent Events in the Japanese Film World), Nihon eiga (Japanese Cinema) 23 (July 1926): N.p. More likely, Shôchiku had only bought the distribution rights for the Kansai (OsakaKyoto-Kobe) region. 4. Kinugasa Teinosuke, “Shinkankakuha o eranda wake” (Why I Chose the Shinkankaku School), Shibai to kinema (Theater and Cinema) 3.10 (October 1926): 15. 5. “Zen Kantô Eiga Kyôkai iyoiyo seiritsu” (All-Kantô Cinema Association Finally Founded), Tokyo asahi shinbun, 13 May 1926, 5.



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shown there. Here was one case in which the critical establishment made a difference in film exhibition. Thus, despite some troubles, A Page of Madness did not suffer greatly because of its independent status. When it opened on Friday, 24 September 1926, it did so at the two best theaters in the nation—the Osaka ­Shôchikuza and the Musashinokan—and at the flagship theater in Japan—the ­Tokyokan—of an American major, Paramount. Since all were foreign film theaters, Kinugasa’s was one of the few Japanese works to be treated as the “equal” of foreign motion pictures in a culture that still looked down on domestic productions. This exhibition strategy did much to define the film’s status as art, as in some ways “non-Japanese” or different from the commercial studio output. Yet this programming also articulated this film as the equal of some very normal Hollywood movies. At the ­Tokyokan, ­Kinugasa’s work, narrated by Ishii Masami and Tamai Kyokuyô and with music selected by Ôshima Kyûtarô,6 was shown along with Herbert Brenon’s The Song and Dance Man (1926) and Frank Tuttle’s romantic drama The Manicure Girl (1925). The Musashinokan showed it with narration solely by ­Tokugawa in a triple bill with two comedies, Alfred Green’s Irene (1926) and Frank Borzage’s Wages for Wives (1925). In an interesting twist, the Osaka ­Shôchikuza showed A Page of Madness together with Victor Schertzinger’s Bread (1924) and Shôchiku’s all-girl dance and theater troupe performing live a section of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird.7 Each of these runs was the usual week in length. Following them, the film was shown, on 1 October, at Kobe’s Kinema Kurabu and Tokyo’s Nanmeiza and Shibazonokan. The latter two were Paramount theaters that featured the same triple bill as the Tokyokan, with the ­Nanmeiza offering benshi narration by Higuchi Kyokurô and Ogawa Kojirô and the Shibazonokan by Izumu Torao and Kinoshita Shirô. It then moved to Kyoto’s Shôchikuza on 8 October, where it was narrated by Ishida Kyokka, with music arranged by Sasai Sei, and ran alongside The Black Pirate (1926), a swashbuckler directed by Alan Parker and starring Douglas Fairbanks, and Robert G. Vignola’s action drama The Way of a Girl (1925).8 The last confirmed theatrical run was at Fukuoka’s Kirakukan starting on 15 October. In a change from other theaters—but one that underlines the variability of 6. It was still the custom at the time to have two benshi share the narration of a single feature film, switching in the middle. Tokugawa Musei was one of the first to introduce the practice of using one benshi for an entire feature film. 7. The programs are taken from contemporary newspaper ads, theater programs, and Kinema junpô’s regular listing of theater schedules. 8. Chûkyô kinema reported in August that the film was scheduled to run at Nagoya’s main foreign film theater, the Chitose Gekijô, in September, but it does not show up in Kinema junpô’s listings of films showing in Nagoya at that time. Beyond the seven theaters listed here, I have not been able to confirm any theatrical runs of A Page of Madness.

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The Exhibition of Artistry

the film’s contexts—it was shown there with two Japanese films made by Nikkatsu in 1926: the jidaigeki comedy Yaji and Kita (Yaji Kita, also known as Shinsaku hizakurige, dir. Nakayama Donkai); and Abe Yutaka’s Mermaid on Land (Riku no ningyo), which is based on a Kikuchi Kan story. After that, A Page of Madness enjoyed some special screenings, including two in Nagoya, but no regular theatrical runs.9 If A Page of Madness was programmed like the usual high-class foreign film, its advertising emphasized its avant-garde dimension and the narrative of its creation. The two-color ads that Honjô ran in September and October issues of Kinema junpô ran the gamut in design from cubist to dadaist, with the copy resembling the typography of the futurist poems of Hirato Renkichi (figs. 6 and 7). The posters at the Osaka Shôchikuza, more expressionist in design, were created by that theater’s Yamada Shinkichi, who played an influential role in Taishô film poster design.10 All of these visual discourses clearly tied the film to the burgeoning modern art movement but again in a manner that syncretically and on a popular level joined the various European art styles as tools to designate the film’s modernity and contemporary chic.11 Newspaper advertisements played up the story of the film’s difficult creation (figs. 8 and 9). The ad for the Tokyokan used a military metaphor to loudly proclaim in large lettering: Original Story: Kawabata Yasunari, General of the Shinkankaku School Director: Kinugasa Teinosuke, the Film Artist fighting alone . . . The art film the Loyalists of the film world toiled and shed tears

of blood to realize!12

9. Itô Shiei reports that A Page of Madness was given special single screenings to packed audiences at the Nagoya Industrial High School (Nagoya Kôtô Kôgyô Gakkô, now the Nagoya Institute of Technology) on 12 October and later that week at Nagoya’s Chitose Gekijô. See Itô Shiei, Nagoya eigashi (A History of Film in Nagoya) (N.p.: Itô Shiei, 1980), 58. These screenings illustrate the film’s special relationship with Nagoya’s film culture, one represented by the vibrant debates about the film in Chûkyô kinema in which Itô took part. Kinugasa’s papers contain a letter from Kawabata requesting his cooperation in enabling a friend to screen the film in 1927 in Aomori. I have found no record confirming whether this screening took place. 10. See Kayano Yatsuka, Kindai Nihon no dezain bunkashi, 1868–1926 (A History of Design Culture in Modern Japan, 1868–1926) (Tokyo: Firumu Âtosha, 1992), 386. 11. Ads for commercial products at the time also used cubist and expressionist design, a fact that relates the syncretic appropriation of these styles to an emerging consumer culture. The use of such designs in the advertising for A Page of Madness connects the film not only to the original art movements but also to these consumerist trends. 12. Miyako shinbun, 24 September 1926, 1.

47

Figure 6.   Cubist advertisement for A Page of Madness published in Kinema junpô 239 (11 September 1926).

48

Figure 7.   Advertisement for A Page of Madness showing a syncretic combination of art styles. It was published in Kinema junpô 240 (21 September 1926).

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50

Figure 8.   Advertisement for the Musashinokan showing that A Page of Madness was second on a three-film bill. It was published in Tokyo nichinichi shinbun, 24 September 1926.

51

Figure 9.   Advertisement for the Tokyokan, a Paramount theater, emphasizing the hentai (perverse) theme of its program using tilted and upside-down kanji characters. Here A Page of Madness was first on the bill. The ad was published in Tokyo nichinichi shinbun, 24 September 1926.

Chapter 9

The advertisement for the Musashinokan turned the movie into a cinematic crusade. The great artistic opus that has shaken the Japanese film world . . . Director: Kinugasa Teinosuke, Japan’s Joseph von Sternberg . . . The touching struggle and suffering of those involved in production. The devotion to the true cinematic way. A film never seen before!!13

Both ads seemed to stress less the content of the film than its artistic aura, largely by invoking such tried-and-true images as artists sacrificing everything for cinema. Even Sternberg was cited less for his stylistic similarities than for the fact that his debut film, Salvation Hunters (1925), was, like Kinugasa’s, praised as an example of cinematic art produced independently. In some ways, A Page of Madness was promoted less as a film than as an act of labor, an almost religiously produced idol dedicated to cinema. Such discourses shaped the expectations of audiences before they entered the theater and perhaps even the way they watched the film. Many thus anticipated a piece of artistic originality, if not modernist spectacle, but in a way that was still largely confined to existing narratives, be they artistic (the myth of the independent artist), Hollywood (the other films on the bill), or even shinpa. Once audiences entered the theater, even the program distributed at the door provided viewers with plot summaries that could easily be perused beforehand, ones that had a distinctly melodramatic tone. Discourses operating during the film likely echoed this tone. There is no record of what music accompanied A Page of Madness, which is unfortunate given the way the film has maintained its popularity today in part because of the number of music groups that have utilized it to experiment with film scoring and the combination of sound and image.14 Nor are there extant audio recordings of any contemporary benshi narrations, which could of, course, vary from benshi to benshi and even from performance to performance. How benshi could have dealt with this peculiar text is of great interest. Some historians have mistakenly claimed that the film was shown without benshi narration, while others have argued that

13. Ibid., 6. 14. The musical groups In the Nursery and Ao no Jikken have both released albums of music for A Page of Madness. Other musicians or groups that have performed or written music for the film include Phillip Johnston, Takahashi Yûji, Superchunk, and Bill Cahn with Nexus.

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“it is a criticism of the benshi system insofar as its very aesthetic strategies close off the possibility for a benshi to participate properly.”15 This is a difficult claim to justify, not only because, as we shall see in the next chapter, ­Kinugasa was criticized by some for not taking a stance on the benshi but also because narrators such as Tokugawa Musei were quite successful in working on the film. Iwasaki Akira, in fact, lauded Musei’s narration as “film explanation (setsumei) of the new impressionist school.”16 Yet Musei’s narration was probably as unique as Musei himself. What can give a more uniform indication of the kind of narration provided with A Page of Madness is the censorship script, which, while it was intended first for censors, was written in an oral style probably also intended as a guide for benshi narration.17 The following excerpt offers a version of the film reminiscent of shinpa. This is how it describes the scene in which the daughter visits the custodian to tell him her marriage is off. “Oh, Ayako!” How surprising it was that his daughter had come to see him. But couldn’t he sense a tinge of sorrow on her face? A premonition of misfortune pierced the custodian’s heart. This daughter, who had shown him such resentment, was now coming to see him of her own free will. “Father, I can no longer marry.” Sharing this sadness with someone, surely that could only be done with her sole blood relative—her father. 15. Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 213. Cazdyn sees A Page of Madness as plotting a “new path” between using benshi as a kind of “talkie . . . modeled on classical Hollywood cinema” and “a reactionary defense of the benshi system” aligned with “anti-Westernism.” As indicated in the next chapter, however, debates on the system were much more complicated than that, as critics objecting to benshi can be divided between those who were promoting classical continuity and those who were rejecting it. As I have argued elsewhere, those defending benshi as a means of protecting spectators from dangerous outside thoughts could also end up favoring a classical style as an extra means of spectator control. See my book, provisionally titled Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). As a rule, it is difficult to judge a film’s stance on benshi based on style because both style and benshi practice are polysemic and polymorphous (and, in the case of style in A Page of Madness, possibly subject to physical alteration). 16. Iwasaki Akira described Musei’s narration in the following terms: “His achievement was to play up the atmosphere of Kinugasa’s images, adding an accent, while allowing the audience considerable freedom in interpreting the story. The spectators left the theater feeling they had understood something.” See Iwasaki Akira, “Kinugasa Teinosuke no seishun” (Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Youth), Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 7. 17. In an era in which film programs changed once a week, most benshi had to prepare their narrations after viewing the film only once the night before it opened. Texts such as censorship scripts helped benshi get ready quickly. They also, it should be noted, were a tool for studios attempting to standardize benshi narration.

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“Yes, you are the daughter of an insane woman.” “Yes, I am.” “This is all my fault. Please forgive me! Just think it is your fate and give up thoughts of marriage.” “I will!” “There is no choice but to give up.” To the daughter, these words of her father expressed unexpected affection.18

Much of the script is written in this style. The censorship script largely matches the plot of Kawabata’s script (except that some scenes are in a different order), but its strong emotionality, lack of ambiguity, and prominent use of dialogue provide a very different image of a film usually considered an avant-garde production. Whether it was sold as an artistic film or a melodrama, A Page of Madness made little money despite the showers of praise it received from the artistic and journalistic community. Kinugasa remembers that rental fees for all theaters totaled 7,500 yen, a figure that is, unfortunately, impossible to confirm, though it does seem a little low.19 It also does not indicate how many tickets were sold since rental rates were apparently fixed. It seems certain, however, that A Page of Madness lost money due mostly to the lack of venues. At the time, some films only made money by showing at many theaters across the country over a period of months, not weeks. Before the film was released, the Film League was set to shoot an adaptation of the fantasy and mystery novelist Edogawa Ranpo’s Dancing Tom Thumb (Odoru Issun Bôshi), but the project was soon abandoned for lack of funds.20 In debt, partially to Shôchiku, Kinugasa accepted an offer from Ôtani Takejirô, then 18. As a possibly ironic example of how A Page of Madness allows for multiple interpretations, the scene narrated in the censorship script differs from that in Kawabata’s script. There the daughter resists her father’s call for her to give up the idea of marriage. The existing film seems to fit Kawabata’s version better. 19. Naoki Sanjûgo reports a figure of 7,000 yen and breaks it down as follows: Musashinokan, 1,500; Osaka Shôchikuza, 2,000; Kyoto Shôchikuza, 1,000; Kobe Kinema Kurabu, 1,000; Tokyokan, 1,000; and Fukuoka Kinema Kurabu, 500. See “Shinpen eigakai dorobanashi (sono yon)” (New Dirty Tales of the Film World: Number Four), Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.6 (December 1926): 21. Naoki probably mistook the Kinema Kurabu for the Kirakukan, which is where the film actually played in Fukuoka. He also neglected to include the Nanmeiza and the Shibazonokan, as well as such extra venues as the Aoyama Kaikan screening. Whether these figures represent Kinugasa’s or the distributor’s take is not clear. 20. Earlier there were reports that the second film was to be an adaptation of Kishida’s “Zenmai no tawamure” (Kataoka Teppei, “Kurutta ichipeiji ni tsuite” [On A Page of Madness], Engeki eiga [Theater and Film] 1.7 [July 1926]: 33) or another of Edogawa Ranpo’s works, the famous Yane no ura no sanposha (Stroller in the Attic) (“Eiga mandan” [Cinema Chat], Chûgai shôgyô shinpô, 28 June 1926, 7.

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vice president of the studio, to make two jidaigeki a month at the Shimokamo Studios.21 Kinugasa’s company, the name now changed to the Kinugasa Film League, lived on as a subcontractor to Shôchiku, but the New Impressionist Film League faded away without ever making a second film. Kinugasa once more trod the independent road with Crossroads (Jûjirô, 1928), a significant work but one far less experimental in terms of film form.22 He never again produced a work like A Page of Madness,23 although he would continue to be an important presence in the Japanese film industry, first for jidaigeki with the actor Hayashi Chôjirô (later known as Hasegawa Kazuo) and subsequently for postwar costume pictures such as the Cannes prizewinning Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, 1953), which again teamed him with Sugiyama Kôhei. The production and exhibition of A Page of Madness thus walked the line between independent and established modes. Kinugasa and his colleagues’ determination to disregard commercial success is remarkable, but theirs was less the effort of starving artists than of a well-funded group of recognized cultural figures who showed their film at elite, not alternative, venues. Divorcing their project from the realm of economy aligned it with bourgeois definitions of art and gave them cultural capital that brought returns in the form of critical praise and made the film one of the most publicized of 1926. This image of cinematic art was not unusual in a sector of the commercial exhibition industry devoted to selling cinema, especially foreign films, as respectable artistic entertainment. Thus, while A Page of Madness presented itself as a challenge to the dominant commercial cinema, its production and exhibition were by no means atypical.

21. Tanaka Jun’ichirô speculates that it was Kinugasa’s debt to Shôchiku that forced him to sign with that company. See Tanaka Jun’ichirô, Nihon eiga hattatsushi (History of the Development of Japanese Cinema), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1976), 68. 22. On a biographical note, Kinugasa would eventually marry Chihaya Akiko, the star of Crossroads. 23. Kinugasa visited the Soviet Union and Europe in 1928 and 1929. In what was perhaps a quirk of film history, he decided to bring Crossroads with him, showing it to Soviet directors and even gaining a commercial release for the film in Europe. Foreign reception was not favorable, however. One wonders what would have happened to him—and perhaps to Japanese and world film history—if he had brought A Page of Madness instead.

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Understanding and the Problem of Reception

After the completion of A Page of Madness, critics were the first to attempt to articulate what kind of film it was. Receiving rare attention, it was reviewed by almost every major newspaper and film magazine, and even the critic Iwasaki Akira who never watched Japanese movies, felt compelled to comment on it. Working to introduce German cinema and the theory of absolute film to Japan, Iwasaki was an avowed enemy of Japanese movies, quipping once that “the greatest harm confronting contemporary Japanese cinema is the fact that Japanese films exist.”1 But it was his encounter with A Page of Madness that, “if not undermining, at least shook the foundations of my almost complete lack of hope in Japanese cinema.”2 He summarized his opinions in the 21 October issue of Kinema junpô (see appendix A for the full text). It is the first filmlike film born in Japan. I can declare that with certainty. And, further, it is the first international film made in Japan. . . . To begin with, I shall give Kawabata Yasunari the silent treatment. . . . This motion picture is from beginning to end the property of the film director Kinugasa Teinosuke and his skilled assistant Sugiyama Kôhei. And that’s it. When I saw The Sun (starring Ichikawa Ennosuke) before, I was furious at the unbelievable incompetence of this Kinugasa. But afterward, when I viewed A Page of Madness, I suddenly shuddered, my body went tense, a few tears of joy welled up in my eyes, and I felt a respect for Kinugasa that I had never felt for a Japanese filmmaker before. He, at any rate, knows cinema. No, maybe he doesn’t know it yet, but he feels it. The beauty he sketches is neither theatrical nor novelistic nor painterly; it is, in the end, unrelated (one can say) to any of the existing arts. It is cinematic beauty.3 1. Iwasaki Akira, “Nihon eiga to seikatsu yôshiki” (Japanese Cinema and the Form of Everyday Life), Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.1 (July 1926): 54. 2. Iwasaki Akira, “Zatsu” (Miscellanea), Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 19 (July 1926): 37. 3. Iwasaki Akira, “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness), Kinema junpô (The Movie Times) 243 (21 October 1926): 48. In a clever touch, Iwasaki cites a famous phrase from Yokomitsu Riichi’s “Head and Belly” (Atama narabi ni hara)—“a small wayside station was ignored like a stone”—to ridicule Kawabata’s involvement.

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The discourse is very typical of the Pure Film Movement and encapsulates much of what was written about the film. First, there was the praise based on comparison with an existing Japanese cinema assumed to be neither cinematic nor respectable. When Kikuchi Kan could exclaim, “I was happy just with the fact that it didn’t exhibit the bad elements of Japanese film style,”4 the film’s difference from the usual fare was all it needed to garner attention. Many latched onto A Page of Madness as a film that should, in the words of one, “replace the values of existing Japanese cinema” and provide “the most powerful guide for future cinema in approaching its essence.”5 It was also seen to challenge the film industry by striving for the international. A Page of Madness was considered “the first step on the ladder toward ruling the world market,”6 promising fulfillment of a dream of reformers that Japanese cinema could stand tall as the equal of foreign films. Part of the reason critics thought A Page of Madness could appeal to global audiences was because, to them, it had broken free of Japanese cinema’s dependence on literature—or, more specifically, the word—to transmit its meaning. The Tokyo nichinichi shinbun declared A Page of Madness “an extremely high-class picture compared to the reigning novelistic or ­kôdan-like—that is, explanatory—films,”7 distinguishing it from works that were recordings of literary stories or dependant on benshi to be understood. If Kinugasa’s film was, then, a “good opportunity for pure film,”8 it was a matter of course that the role Kawabata played must be denied since he, as a literary figure, might have introduced corrupting novelistic elements. In a burgeoning auteurism, good cinema was seen as the product of motion picture artists such as Kinugasa. The appraisal of A Page of Madness as Japan’s first pure film, however, exposed inherent contradictions in the dominant critical discourse over what constituted such a work. Kinugasa’s film was, in the words of a ­Nagoya critic:

4. Kikuchi Kan, “Eigakai jiji” (Current Topics in the Film World), Eiga jidai 1.2 (August 1926): 13. 5. Katô Eiichi, “Eigatekina Kurutta ichipeiji” (The Cinematic A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 45. 6. Toshima Sôzô, “Shukufuku shiyô” (Let’s Celebrate), Chûkyô kinema 2.9 (September 1926): 44. 7. I My Me, “Shinkankaku no eiga Kurutta ichipeiji” (The Shinkankaku Film A Page of Madness), Tokyo nichinichi shinbun, 3 July 1926, 6. Kôdan was a rhythmic form of storytelling popular in the Meiji era. Many of its tales of legendary heroes were adapted to the screen. 8. This phrase was part of a long letter published in Kinema junpô. See Takahashi Nobuo, “Kinugasa Teinosuke-shi e no kôkaijô” (A Public Call to Kinugasa Teinosuke), Kinema junpô 249 (1 January 1927): 115.

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[A] picture that is in the end difficult to explain in words. If a regular photoplay is a novel, this is a poem. If a normal film drama is matter-of-fact, this is something that exceeds the ordinary in an exceptional way. It is a film that clearly embodies the epithet “rhythm of light,” an impressionistic work that has won victory over reason and human feeling. A work that apparently has no need for such standards of value as “enjoyable” or “serious”—that tries to represent cinema itself.9

This statement is clearly an extension of the discourse on pure film, but it has shifted slightly away from the ideals of the Pure Film Movement in the late 1910s. At that time, the example given of communication without the need of a benshi through unique cinematic techniques was Bluebird films, constructed in (what was to be) the classic Hollywood style. Here, however, was a different ideal, one emphasizing light and sensation over dramatic emotion and motivation and thus cinema over all other measures of judgment, including comprehension. One of the reasons for the change was the influence of European film theory. The vocabulary of such theories—light, rhythm, music, photogénie, and so on—is found in much of the writing on A Page of Madness but particularly in that of critics who upheld Kinugasa’s work as not simply a pure but an absolute or impressionist film. It was this discourse that read A Page of Madness as a nonnarrative, avant-garde film. In a discussion of the movie, Iwasaki declared: When I saw that picture, I didn’t understand the plot from the very beginning. But I think cinema is not a question of the story but of something sensed more directly. I believe that films from now on will in no way be something that audiences will understand.

In that sense, A Page of Madness was to him more an “absolute film” than the European works his fellow critics cited in comparison.10 This discourse, however, raised the ire of both defenders and critics of the film. First of all, praise of its incomprehensibility revealed a form of elitism not uncommon in the Pure Film Movement. Some proponents of the film could not hide their glee at finding a Japanese film that “appealed to people other than little brats and nursemaids” in an industry in which “producers have ignored us so much.” Commending Kinugasa and his colleagues for 9. Tonoshima Sôjin, “Kurutta ichipeiji sonota” (A Page of Madness, etcetera), Chûkyô kinema 2.8 (August 1926): 60. 10. See Iwasaki’s comments in “Kurutta ichipeiji gappyôkai sokkiroku” (Transcript of the Group Evaluation of A Page of Madness), Eiga jidai 1.2 (August 1926): 61.

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avoiding commercialism was soon conjoined with praising them for “ignoring the likes and dislikes of popular taste.”11 Kawabata himself said this was their attempt to “give pure joy to a small number of high-class fans” who “completely despise Japanese cinema.”12 Iwasaki argued that the film would not likely be understood outside the big cities, as it overlapped class differences with geographic divisions caused by Japan’s uneven development.13 Implied in these expressions was the assumption that it was not the film’s fault that it was not understandable to the general population but the result of the latter’s ignorance. In contrast, as one critic proclaimed, “People who have been baptized by the modern should be able to understand [this film]. . . . In that sense, A Page of Madness is a trial ground for measuring character.”14 And, one could add, cultural capital as well. Not a few critics lashed out at this elitism by attacking the incomprehensibility of the film. Naoki Sanjûgo was in the forefront in criticizing the producers of this “titleless, plotless, feature-length” film, quipping, “If you’re satisfied with racking up ‘artistic’ works for a minority of people, you’d be much better off with literature and not film.”15 Many said the film was too long, and some offered historical arguments asserting that it was “too new and descended into formalism.”16 Others claimed that it “jumped one step too far ahead” of contemporary Japanese cinema and its audiences.17 Interestingly, some commentators, as if defending the film against such charges, emphasized its adherence to the codes of realism that the Shinkankaku school was supposedly opposing. Despite the general opinion of the film as antirealist, several critics praised it for its accurate depiction of the insane,18 arguing a realistic motivation for what others were claiming was an exercise

11. Tateishi Seifû, “Watashi wa hajimete ‘Nihon eiga’ no yoi mono o mita” (I Saw a Good Japanese Film for the First Time), Eiga ôrai 23 (November 1926): 43–44. 12. Kawabata Yasunari, “Shinkankakuha Eiga Renmei ni tsuite” (On the New Impressionist Film League), Yomiuri shinbun, 28 April 1926 reprinted in Kawabata Yasunari zenshû (Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol. 32 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1982), 513–14. 13. Iwasaki, “Kurutta ichipeiji.” For more on uneven development in Japanese modernity, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14. Toshima, “Shukufuku shiyô,” 44. 15. Naoki Sanjûgo, “Hankan o kaubeki sûkô” (Trends That Should Bring Hostility), Eiga jidai 1.2 (August 1928): 33. 16. Ishimaki Yoshio, “Kamera no yûgi” (The Play of the Camera), Chûkyô kinema 2.9 (September 1926): 44. Ishimaki was one of Japan’s first film historians and industry analysts. 17. This was Okazaki Masao’s comment in the Eiga jidai roundtable discussion “Kurutta ichipeiji gappyôkai sokkiroku,” 60. 18. See, for instance, Fujimori Seikichi, “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness), Eiga jidai 1.3 (September 1926): 15; or Niwa Shin, “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema 2.8 (August 1926): 55.

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in light or cinematic purity. Some even wanted more realism in the film.19 But it was the fact that it could be seen as both realistic and experimental that infuriated at least one critic. Purposely stomping on the content, shaving half of it off and forgetting it in the garbage is such wondrous cinematic recklessness. As a result: Grim naturalism loses its way and gets into a grand battle with so-called pure film snobbery. Confusion. Confusion. Everything is confused. Impressions go out the window. Just what the hell have I been watching? Incomprehension. Chaos. Nonsense?20

It is not certain what other audiences thought of A Page of Madness amid this conflict over who the film was for. In an age when the line between professional film critic and intellectual film fan was blurred, much of the discourse in the press could be said to accurately reflect that sector of the audience. But there are few statements about the film from other spectator groups, especially those on the lower rungs of the cinematic social ­ladder. There were descriptions of audience reactions in the film press,21 but most of those functioned as rhetorical elements in the debates I have just described. One writer, after seeing the film for the second time at the Tokyokan, reported that he was “able to see clearly behind the sour grimaces of laborers or the words blurted out by an office worker, ‘So it was all just an illusion— nothing at all,’ the lonely figure of you [Kinugasa] having to shake hands with Shôchiku.” While he ruefully pointed to the existence of such “mentally retarded masses” as the reality that forced Kinugasa to return to producing commercial cinema, it is important to note that what he was relating here was less spectator incomprehension than miscomprehension.22 “It was all just an illusion” was an understanding of the film, albeit a supposedly incorrect one. 19. While praising the film’s originality, Fujii Tetsurô complained that it was too dark and expressed his hope that the next Shinkankuha film would be more “realistic and deeply human.” See Fujii Tetsurô, “Kurutta ichipeiji o mite” (Viewing A Page of Madness), Kyûshû nippô, 19 October 1926, evening ed., 3. 20. Yoshida Yasuji, “Nansensu” (Nonsense), Chûkyô kinema 2.9 (September 1926): 46. 21. As one critic reported of audience reactions at the 10 July screening alongside Grass, “Although I saw Grass with a relaxed feeling, with this film, I heard discordant cries of ‘I give up!’ or ‘What is this?’ I’m sorry to say this of a work into which so much effort was poured, but it is true that when I finished watching it I, too, thought, ‘What was that?’” See Kodera Yûkichi, “Shin no eigageki sakusha ide yo” (Let the True Film Dramatists Emerge), Eiga jidai 1.5 (November 1926): 17. 22. Takahashi, “Kinugasa Teinosuke-shi e no kôkaijô,” 116.

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Naoki took up the fact that audiences could understand the film under certain circumstances to level what to him was the most damning blow against A Page of Madness. Complaining about the excessive praise of Kinugasa’s work, the novelist asked intellectual fans what they thought of “the seemingly wrong but true fact that Tokugawa Musei was explaining a titleless movie? No one says a word about such a bizarre phenomenon but just exclaims, ‘Musei’s great! He made me understand that incomprehensible film!’”23 Though stripped of the intertitles that, as words, might have sullied this experimental work, one that was, at least to critics such as Iwasaki, meant to stymie comprehension, it was being shown with a benshi who articulated the text to ensure viewer understanding.24 Naoki identified this as the film’s central contradiction, and even some of the film’s supporters noted similar problems with the lack of titles and use of the benshi. The Eiga jidai roundtable discussion began with the French film specialist Uchida Kisao asking Kinugasa if he meant to release the film without intertitles from the beginning. When the director said no, Uchida declared the film “extremely impolite toward the audience.” Furukawa Roppa added, “I think it’s bad [that] this picture doesn’t have titles. I’m opposed to leaving things up to the benshi. At any rate, you can’t understand the plot with only what’s there.”25 Even Iwasaki acknowledged in his Kinema junpô review that this was a complication. Each of the individual parts is in isolation brimming with a surprising degree of cinematic beauty, but when you look at the film as a whole it is confusing and contaminated with numerous foreign elements. . . . (The fact that it cannot be understand without explanation, even though it is a titleless film, derives from this contradiction.)26

It was the film’s impurity as cinema that supposedly necessitated its reliance on the explanation of the benshi. The ideal of the titleless film maintained a strong presence in the discourse of the Pure Film Movement. Early Japanese cinema was largely bereft of intertitles and cinematic forms of narration such as the close-up or crosscutting because benshi could be relied on to convey necessary story information. Reformers in the 1910s called for the use of intertitles and cinematic 23. Naoki Sanjûgo, “Shinpen eigakai dorobanashi (sono san)” (New Dirty Tales of the Film World: Number Three), Eiga jidai 1.5 (November 1926): 25. 24. It should be noted that many critics who commented on the film’s incomprehensibility probably had seen it at press screenings, which were often not accompanied by benshi. 25. “Kurutta ichipeiji gappyôkai sokkiroku,” 59–60. 26. Iwasaki, “Kurutta ichipeiji,” 48.

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devices as a means of freeing film from the power of the benshi and returning the source of narration to the film text.27 By the beginning of the 1920s, however, as intertitles became a more regular feature of Japanese films, proponents of a pure, visual cinema began pointing to the linguistic titles as another “foreign element,” like the benshi, that should be expelled from the cinematic body. Some defended their utilization as a narrational expedient, but purists were encouraged by the appearance of such titleless films as The Last Laugh. Yet the elimination of intertitles did not imply a return to the days of the titleless film or a subversion of understanding. Midorikawa Harunosuke championed the silent, titleless film precisely because of its significance, writing, “Even if silence is meaningless, . . . the silent drama of pantomime is significant. At times, it possesses much deeper meaning than a drama with dialogue.”28 Titles and the benshi were to be dropped only when the image could assume its semiotic and narrative functions and viewers anywhere, regardless of the conditions of reception, could understand the film. The form, as described by Kataoka Teppei when expressing his desire to make a titleless film, was not unlike that of classical Hollywood analytic editing. The filmmaker or artist emphasizes seeing “this part or that,” and gives the order, “You must look a those parts.” The selection of those “parts” from the entirety of a certain event, their arrangement in order, and the addition of a continuity are what constitute an artistic progression.29

The ideal was almost utopian: a new, modern, visual language free of the restrictions of the word that could cross national and linguistic boundaries and remain communicative. For Japanese cognizant of their linguistic isolation, this was a powerful dream; for modernist writers of the Shinkankaku school it presented another strategy in their war against the Japanese language, though, it must be stressed, not against linguistic meaning itself. If we are to take Kataoka’s comment as representative, the attraction of film to the Shinkankaku writers was its ability to impress a set meaning on viewers directly, without recourse to words; less interesting was its potential to undermine meaning itself or allow for alternative spectator interpretations. 27. For an analysis of these debates, see my “The Benshi’s New Face: Defining Cinema in Taisho Japan,” Iconics 3 (1994): 69–86. 28. Midorikawa Harunosuke, “Jimaku zakkan” (Random Thoughts on Intertitles), Katsudô kurabu (Movie Club) 4.7 (July 1921): 41. Midorikawa was a critic who later came to fame as Noda Kôgo, Ozu Yasujirô’s main screenwriter. 29. Kataoka Teppei, “Kurutta ichipeiji ni tsuite” (On A Page of Madness), Engeki eiga (Theater and Film) 1.7 (July 1926): 33–34.

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As the comments of Uchida and Furukawa reveal, the logic of the titleless film dictated that the decision to eliminate intertitles must be accompanied by a purely visual assurance of spectator understanding. If the result was as difficult to comprehend as A Page of Madness, the filmmakers could be blamed for irresponsibly leaving the task of explanation to the benshi instead of assuming it themselves. Kinugasa’s confession that he did not originally plan to make a titleless film was treated as an admission that he did not sufficiently organize his visuals with the audience in mind; the lack of statements from him and others involved in the film protesting the use of benshi also damned them for relying on benshi explanations. The main current of pure film discourse assumed that motion pictures were a narrative medium meant to be understood, that images, even if they were not words, functioned like a fully coded, self-sufficient language in accurately and certainly conveying meaning. A film not understood by audiences was a failure. To function as cinema, A Page of Madness either needed to be reconstructed or, to some, have intertitles.30 The assumption was that cinematic style “must have a line of synthesis and must have order,”31 that it must possess motivation and meaning. This was a belief that, while linked to European examples of titleless films, was also an extension of classical Hollywood cinema’s stance, which subjected form to narrative and pursued redundancy to ensure understanding. It was, then, the assertion that a film need not be understood that opened the way for a profoundly different conception of cinema if not modernism as well. Traces of it can be found in much of what was said about the film, for instance, in Niwa Shin’s exclamation that “there’s no need at all to understand the damn narrative,”32 or in Tonoshima Sôjin’s call for Kinugasa to “eliminate even more of that ‘story,’ leave absolutely no room for intellect or feelings to operate, and just directly appeal to the senses through the eyes.”33 Here the image was not bound to narrative, no longer obligated by the laws of language to provide meaning. The image itself could function as the radical other to semiosis, an exercise in meaninglessness that could even better fight the “war on language.” Cinema would part from literature not because its language was different from writing but because it potentially undermined the processes of signification, understanding, and reason. Whereas the linguistic conception of cinema advocated self-sufficiency in order to suppress the role of intertextuality and reception conditions in 30. See, for instance, Moriyama Toyosaburô, “Kurutta ichipeiji gûkan” (Musings on A Page of Madness), Eiga ôrai 21 (September 1926): 61. 31. Tateishi, “Watashi wa hajimete ‘Nihon eiga’ no yoi mono o mita,” 45. 32. Niwa, “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru,” 55. 33. Tonoshima, “Kurutta ichipeiji sonota,” 60.

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the ­production of filmic meaning, the alternative proposed the cinematic undermining of coded textuality itself, one partially fueled by viewers unbound by the commands of the text that Kataoka envisioned. This may be expecting too much of a film that is, after all, ultimately narrative, but A Page of Madness brought out these expectations at the same time that it frustrated them. The fact that the most vocal proponents of this alternative definition of film, such as those writing for the Nagoya coterie magazine Chûkyô kinema, were also the deftest critics of A Page of Madness— even as they applauded it—reminds us how deeply divided this film was. Niwa complains about sections early in the film that are “too explanatory, developing a tragedy of life that is a superior narrative as a photoplay or as a novel, and unfortunately incorporating it throughout the film.” These sections, he explains, create expectations of narrativity that are only partially fulfilled by the rest of the film. Such a contradiction, he concludes, is not only rude to the audience, but it invites censure by “naturalist film criticism” that the film lacks unity.34 The film would have been better off without such moments. His colleague, Okuya Yoshiyuki (in a text reproduced in appendix A), ultimately declared A Page of Madness to be literature, not cinema, since he could not “sense from the raw material, which possesses a literariness that is organized too essentially, a whole, unified rhythm.” His complaint was precisely that the film did not maintain the cinematic style of the opening sequence throughout. “At some point in time the rhythm retreats from impression and provides literary material through the faculty of reason.”35 A Page of Madness, he argues, was ultimately unable to free the cinematic image and its sensibility from the rule of reason and narrative (literary) order. To the same degree, then, while the writers of Chûkyô kinema praised A Page of Madness for showing the potential of a cinema free of the restrictions of meaning and reason, they also noted its failures. It was to them both an exciting glimpse of a cinematic future and a sad admission of the dominance of literary style in contemporary Japanese film. Okuya stressed that it was a transitional work, bearing the marks of both the old and the new, and much of the discourse we have seen so far upholds his intuition about the film’s mixed nature and its historical liminality. Kinugasa’s film appeared at a time when there were still vociferous debates over how cinema should develop, when modern Japan itself was in transition. It remains for us, however, to closely analyze the film before we can truly determine where A Page of Madness was hoping to lead Japanese cinema. 34. Niwa, “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru,” 55. 35. Okuya Yoshiyuki, “Kurutta ichipeiji kan” (Views on A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema 2.9 (September 1926): 26, 27.

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Divided Styles

We have seen how A Page of Madness was produced and marketed on the borderline between independent and studio structures, or between the artistic avant-garde and commercial narrative cinema, as well as how, in the historical context of intense divisions over the definition of cinema, opposing camps read significantly different meanings from the same film and not always so predictably. This should remind us of, if not the problems that are present in the reading of any text, at least the specific contextual and intertextual issues that cannot be ignored when interpreting this work. These difficulties are only exacerbated by the fact that, even if we wish to ground a reading of the film in the contemporary historical context, the print that has been left to us is likely not what was produced and received at the time; there exists an unbridgeable gap between the film today and its original historical context. This is a colossal loss for Japanese cinema and world film history as a whole, but neither this nor the apparent polysemy of the film prevent us from performing a close analysis of the existing text. Not only does the current print bear traces of what was likely cut (still showing glimpses, for instance, of the fiancé’s house), it still manifests the divisions that crisscrossed the film when it was first shown. A Page of Madness was a divided if not a multiple text then; the existence of a different version now ironically only underlines the polyvalence the film was subject to from the start. In engaging in a close analysis of the text, I argue that Kinugasa’s work, while reminding us of the problems of interpreting a film, does so in part by narratively foregrounding the violation of borders, the influence of perception (reading) on meaning, and the multiplicity of textual modes. A film with such multiple personalities then demands a spectatorship that must straddle adjoining yet often contradictory textual tendencies. As we have seen, the film then, as today, has been read as either a work emphasizing purely visual technique over story or a strongly narrative film under the influence of a benshi. Even recently, Park Sungbae has argued that A Page of Madness, including its more visually experimental sections, operates under a clear, understandable code (one functioning ­primarily to ­elucidate the custodian’s psychological state, his desires and feelings of ­rebellion) that makes the film a “cinematic re-creation of 65

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l­ iterary elements.”1 Such interpretations may surprise some who see the film for the first time, but we should note Jonathan Abel’s point that this feeling in part stems from differences in reception conditions.2 Without a benshi or the long and extensive plot summaries printed in such magazines as Geki to eiga, 3 present-day spectators are much less likely to perceive the narrative that Kinugasa and Inuzuka inscribed, for instance, in the censorship script. However, this is not simply an issue of today versus yesterday or of seeing with a benshi versus seeing without one; as we have seen, commentators in 1926 were able to provide a wide variety of readings of the film after having seen it in a number of contexts. The film style of A Page of Madness cannot be considered in isolation in terms of either its immediate intertexts (benshi, plot summaries) or its general contexts (that of reigning film norms or the historical transformations of modern Japan). As perhaps one would expect given the varied reactions it received, Kinugasa’s film reveals multiple relations with its different contexts, ones that both fulfill and undermine audience expectations. Park poses an interesting thesis about the individual text’s intrinsic norms, but he does not fully pursue the fact that A Page of Madness also contains many sections that stylistically exceed the motivations of contemporary narrative cinema and confront its viewers with images that upset classical modes of understanding film that, at least by the mid-1920s in a Japanese market where Hollywood played a significant role, were well established, especially at the foreign film theaters where Kinugasa’s film was shown. The opening sequence is probably the boldest of these and was praised as such at the time. While the film itself is composed of 822 shots, not including the opening titles (for an average of about 5.7 seconds a shot at silent speed),4 the 12-minute, 56-second initial sequence (up to the first daylight shot calculated at 18 frames per second) totals 232, a remarkable average of 3.3 seconds per shot, with some only one or two frames in length.5 While I will discuss in a moment how unusual this might have been in the Japanese cinema of 1. Park Sungbae, “Kurutta ichipeiji no monogatari to shudai” (The Narrative and Themes of A Page of Madness), Eigagaku (Film Study) 19 (2005): 133. 2. Jonathan E. Abel, “Different from Difference: Revisiting Kurutta ichipeiji,” Asian Cinema 12.2 (fall–winter 2001): 72–96. 3. See especially “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness), Geki to eiga (Drama and Film) 4.10 (­October 1926): N.p. 4. Levinsky-Straüli counts 803 shots, but in a film with many dissolves, multiple exposures, swish pans, and dark, low-key shots it is frequently hard to determine where a shot begins and ends. The 19-shot discrepancy probably arises more from differences over how to define a shot than from mistakes. Adding the titles to the total should only result in 823 shots since they simply consist of a single shot of the credits being turned like a page. 5. David Bordwell reports that the average shot length (ASL) for Hollywood cinema between 1917 and 1928 was between five and seven seconds. There was, however, a range of choices

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the time, the sequence does clearly stand out in the film itself. Noël Burch’s analysis focuses on this section, using it to argue the film’s radical difference from contemporary European avant-garde works.6 The first few shots feature impressive images of a man meeting a car arriving in a rainstorm, intercut with a montage of windows, rain, and rushing water. The usual expectation is that the car’s arrival signals a significant narrative departure— the arrival of a character whose actions will set the story in motion—but such a reading is never played out; we never find out who the man is, who was in the car, and what the purpose of the visit was.7 It ultimately has no connection to the subsequent narrative and exists, at best, only to establish a mood, though one tainted by the ambiguous narrative status of the images. Subsequent editing sequences also seem to stand out. In the first thirty or so shots of the opening sequence, the length of each piece is gradually reduced from several feet to five frames as the film begins to rhythmically cut between images of a telephone pole, water rushing, and a lightning rod. The combination is not random as the last rush of shots obeys the order ­ABCABCABCABD, with the last shot showing a car wheel (previously seen) upside down (fig. 10). The flurry of shots of the frenzied dancer is similar even if the rule of combination is different. Working with pieces only a few frames long, Kinugasa overlaps a long shot of the dancer with two doubleexposed images: one of a drum over a barred window, another of the same window with a trombone (an example of how the director repeatedly visualizes sound). This time the order is ABACABAC, leading to a series of oneframe shots that seem to explode into a montage of swish pans around the cell and inverted versions of the long shot of her dancing. While such sequences would certainly have upset the expectations of spectators who, knowing little about A Page of Madness, had come to the theater only to see The Manicure Girl or Wages for Wives, audiences versed in European or even Japanese cinema would not have found them to be wholly unfamiliar. Although Burch argues that these and similar sequences in the film are stylistically bolder than the best examples of Gance or L’Herbier, it is clear that A Page of Madness is working in the same tendency. The French

at the time, with Douglas Fairbanks’s or Erich von Stroheim’s films sometimes being closer to an ASL of three seconds and Maurice Tourneur’s of ten seconds. See ­David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 61. 6. Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, rev. and ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 126–36. 7. We can, of course, suppose that a patient is being delivered secretly at night away from the public eyes that the custodian will later become so concerned about. This is supported by the fact that the film shows another patient being delivered later on, but at least that episode shows us the face of the struggling patient, confirming the situation.

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theoretical emphasis on meter (cinema as poetry) and rhythm (cinema as music) resonates with these sequences, the montage of the dancer being one scene that epitomizes a synesthetic effort to express music in film (fig. 11). Other shot sequences, such as the one with the dog running toward and away from the camera, work through the rhyme and rhythm of action and film form. Given the influence of French rhythmic montage on many contemporary Japanese films, not everything in A Page of Madness would have been strange to Japanese cinema fans either. Yamamoto Kikuo, in his study of the effects of foreign cinema on Japanese motion pictures, notes that beginning around 1925 there was a rush of films noted at the time for bearing the mark of French film technique.8 Most were cited for the use of very quick cutting and short cut backs that were termed furasshu (flashes).9 Murata’s The Sun

Figure 10.   An upside-down car wheel from the opening sequence.

8. In his research, Yamamoto lists seventeen films that were cited for such influences in 1925. See Yamamoto Kikuo, Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyô (The Influence of Foreign Film on Japanese Cinema) (Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shippanbu, 1983), 165. 9. The term derives from flashback, which, while denoting in English a cut back to some moment temporally antecedent to that point in the story, came to be used in Japan to name any form of cut back regardless of its temporality. The designation was later shortened to flash to emphasize especially fast editing. See ibid., 165–67.

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was a prominent example, one frequently discussed alongside ­Kinugasa’s film, but others include Ushihara Kiyohiko’s The Earth Smiles (Daichi wa ­hohoemu, 1925) and Shimazu Yasujirô’s The Evening Bell (Yû no kane, 1925). The use of such fast editing was becoming so prevalent, and in some minds so inartistic, that one exasperated critic lamented, “Recently, there has been a drastic increase in the number of screenwriters who hold the shameful opinion that as long as you use flashes your film will be praised by the world as a great piece of art.”10 As the French influence on Japanese film theory later merged with that of the Soviets, moments of fast, rhythmic cutting would become a staple of much silent Japanese cinema. Editing like that found in A Page of Madness could be seen other films, most prominently in the jidaigeki of the time. Orochi from 1925 (dir. Futagawa Buntaro), for instance, features a startling use of a dozen jump cuts connected in an “edited pan” at the conclusion of the final battle, and another 1926 Bandô Tsumasaburô film included an

Figure 11.   Expressing the sound of music in silent cinema.

10. Hanamura Kiyoshi, “Ranpitsu ôrai” (Random Writings Here and There) Kinema junpô (The Movie Times), 21 October 1926, quoted in Yamamoto, Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyô, 165.

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inverted shot.11 Inagaki Hiroshi, who confessed to being strongly influenced by French cinema, reproduced the kind of ABCABCABD montage ending in an inverted shot in his Fashionable Manliness (Otokodate bayari, 1931). But it was the similarly French-influenced Itô Daisuke who was best known at the time for his fast cutting and bold camera movements, creating a style that would influence the jidaigeki for a decade. Burch has analyzed a film in the Itô style, Tanaka Tsuruhiko’s The Red Bat (Beni kômori, 1931), to emphasize its stylistic excess: a use of swish pans, dissolves, and fast cutting without clear narrative motivation that creates a “patently random, unorganized circulation of free-floating signifiers.”12 It is in such works that one can locate an experimentalism that is neither marginal nor anticommercial but central to facets of Japanese cinema in the prewar period, the “experimentation within the dominant” that historian Nada Hisashi has used to claim a history to Japanese experimental film before World War II.13 If Kinugasa’s cinematic style amazed his contemporaries, possibly it was only because it was different in degree, not in kind, from the other films of the time. Perhaps one reason why the fast editing sequences in A Page of Madness were so conspicuous was because they were unusual even within the film itself. Although the rhythmic cutting may have been remarkable compared to that of other works, it did not monopolize the stylistic vocabulary of the entire film. This was, in fact, one of the complaints of the Chûkyô kinema writers, who lamented the way in which very experimental sections were intermixed with sequences exhibiting conventional realism. Again we do not have access to everything these writers viewed, but some of the scenes in the existing film, such as the one in which the daughter visits her father in his room, differ little stylistically from contemporary Japanese fare in their use of analytic editing (close-ups), point of view structures, matches on action, and shot-reverse shots obeying the axis.14 The decoupage notes, 11. This was reported in a letter to a newspaper. See Ichirô, “Jôen ruten” (Shifting Performances) Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, 24 September 1926, 6. 12. Burch, To the Distant Observer, 132. 13. Nada Hisashi, “Nihon kojin eiga no rekishi (senzen hen 1): Kinugasa Teinosuke to iu senpai” (History of Japanese Personal Film [Prewar Edition 1]: Our Precursor Kinugasa Teinosuke”), Fs 1 (1992): 68–75. Without such antecedents, the history of experimental film in Japan is usually said to have begun in the 1950s with groups such as Jikken Kôbô and the Eiken (Film Study Group) at Nihon University. 14. As with many prewar Japanese films, the more conventional scenes in A Page of Madness do not rigorously follow the codes of continuity editing. The scene in which the daughter visits her father’s room, for instance, seems to feature one instance of crossing the axis, as well as matches on action that would have been considered clumsy by Hollywood standards. This is not the place to debate whether such aberrations are evidence of an alternative code or just instances of flourishes; the point is merely that even with them such scenes differ little stylistically from scenes in contemporary Japanese films.

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especially those for the scene in which the fiancé confronts the daughter about her mother, also indicate scenes edited in the style of contemporary melodrama not as an “utter rebellion against film language.” Viewers coming to the theater, then, were confronted not only with a program featuring films of very different styles but also a single work, A Page of Madness, that exhibited a similar variety in itself, offering both the conventional and the unconventional.15 This multifarious, even self-contradicting work raises an important question about the status of experimental style in narrative cinema. Whereas Burch has used such examples of excessive, random stylishness in silent Japanese film to argue “a challenge to the very notion of the code” in popular Japanese cinema, David Bordwell has called these moments of formal bravura “flourishes” because, while they may exceed a denotative, thematic, or expressive function and call attention to themselves as a form of selfconscious narration or cinematic virtuosity, to him they always depend on a stable set of stylistic norms.16 Using his definition, we might call the swish pan that prompts a brief flashback in the scene in which the daughter visits her father’s room a “flourish” because it is not necessary from the standpoint of transmitting meaning but still firmly operates within an established convention for denoting a narrated return to the past. While this is not the time to argue the merits and demerits of Burch’s and Bordwell’s conceptions of prewar Japanese cinema, I see A Page of Madness as treading the boundary between the cinemas they envision, in effect embodying a conflict between both definitions that were equal historical possibilities at the time, definitions that viewers sometimes had to confront in the same film. Different aspects of Kinugasa’s film, then, embody both a cinema of flourishes grounded in an emerging code and formal experimentation bent on seeking alternatives to such codes. A Page of Madness was not alone in treading the line between these, but it put these issues into relief more than any other film.

15. This was also often the case with the writings of the Shinkankaku school. Without a strong continuity of style between the various writers, critics have often focused on particular sentences or passages in the work of Yokomitsu and others as evidence of their experiments in perception and subjectivity. Such experimentation, however, rarely extended throughout the entire work in question. 16. David Bordwell, “A Cinema of Flourishes: Japanese Decorative Classicism in the Prewar Film,” in Reframing Japanese Cinema, ed. Arthur Nolletti Jr. and David Desser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 328–46.

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Narrating Divisions

We have seen how A Page of Madness offers a variety of different cinematic possibilities in terms of film style and narrative. The question is how the film narrates these different possibilities: how they are arranged on the temporal axis and how the spectator processes them. Again Park Sungbae has argued that attentive viewers should be able to construct an intrinsic code on viewing A Page of Madness, but he does not consider the narrative processes by which these codes or readings can also be overturned later in the film. Take, for instance, the opening sequence. We first assume that the narration at the beginning is objective because, with only glimpses of the car and the man in the rain, we have not yet seen a character who could be the source of subjective narration. But this interpretation is problematized in the next scene, that of the dancer. Shot 1. Very slow dissolve to large, glittering spinning wheel. A dancer in a lavish costume appears from below, and the camera begins to track back (fig. 12). Shot 2. Dissolve to same angle but now with a slow track up to medium shot of the dancer (fig. 13). Shot 3. Slow dissolve to track back from medium long shot to extreme long shot, revealing window bars in the foreground. Fade out (fig. 14). Shot 4. Fade in of a cell door and window from the hallway. The dancer’s shadow in costume is visible through the barred door (fig. 15). Shot 5. Dissolve to the dancer in medium shot dancing in her hospital rags in front of her cell wall (fig. 16).

The dissolve to the dancer is certainly unexpected since she appears to bear no relation to what we have seen so far, yet we initially accept her dance as an objective event. The track back to reveal the bars, however, breaks down the “fourth-wall” realism of the scene, as well as spatially locating the ­camera—and in some ways us—in the diegetic space. The disjunction between the lavish stage and the bars also calls into question the objectivity of our view and the certainty of the narrative voice in the previous shots (including, perhaps, the previous scene), a suspicion that is somewhat confirmed in 72

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Figure 12.   Shot 1.

the subsequent shot of the costumed shadow of the dancer visible through her cell door. It and the next shot, which reveals the dancer’s “reality” retrospectively, rewrite the stage scene as her illusion or past memory but still without providing a stable ground from which to judge the image’s status. When what we saw as objective turns out to be subjective, that subjectivity cannot simply be the dancer’s and must also be ours, implicating us in her insane visions to the degree we had accepted her hallucination as objective. A similar experiment with narrative voice can be seen in the famous first sentences of Yokomitsu Riichi’s short story “Head and Belly” (“Atama narabi ni hara”): “Noon. A crowded special-express train ran at full speed. The small station was ignored like a stone.”1 The literary critic Nakagawa Shigemi emphasizes the radical ambiguity of the first two sentences. According to his reading of the Japanese, “noon” not only offers little information about the time (is it exactly noon or just around noon?) for alone in the sentence it bears neither a subject nor a clear narrative voice. The second 1. I have taken the translation from Dennis Keene’s Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 72, and modified it slightly in line with Nakagawa’s interpretation. The original was published in Bungei jidai (Literary Age) 1.1 (October 1924): 50.

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Figure 13.   Shot 2.

Figure 14.   Shot 3. 74

Figure 15.   Shot 4.

Figure 16.   Shot 5. 75

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sentence provides us with a grammatical subject (the train) but no clear subject of narrative enunciation. From whose point of view can we say the train “ran”? The train? The passengers? A third person? The last sentence seems to clarify matters somewhat, urging us to locate the subject of enunciation in the train, but the unexpected and unusual metaphor “like a stone” still leaves us reeling and without a clear ground on which to approach the sentence. While the paragraph is not without meaning, to Nakagawa: The meaning that is variably determined on the minimal linguistic level warps the kind of temporal axis found in linear novels, one that had until then been directed by the hand of the narrator. It realizes a speed of “story” that freely moves in and out of the text. . . . This narrative expression conceals both the enunciated and enunciating subjects. A form of expression established here, one without either of those two subjects, is in fact Yokomitsu’s “discovery,” one made while immersed in twentieth-century currents that saw a turnabout in the dualistic understanding of “subject” and “object.”2

It was the participation of A Page of Madness in a similar play of subject and object, one that Abel considers to be “of its time,”3 that prompted some contemporary observers to call it “the attempt to express in cinema what is expressed in the writing of the Shinkankaku school.”4 One must not conclude, however, that Kinugasa’s film thereby eliminates these narrative distinctions. Burch’s analysis comes closest to saying that it does, emphasizing the fourth shot of the dancer’s shadow, for instance, as an impossible conjunction of past and present that expels the images from the diegesis and toward the surface of the film, creating a “purely visual simultaneity, in which such distinctions as past/present, absent/present, and real/imaginary are absorbed by a single, polyvalent surface.”5 However, Burch’s desire to appropriate this film as a nonlinear approach to the sign, a text radically different from linear Western cinema, causes him to overlook many of the work’s subtleties. For instance, in emphasizing the fourth 2. Nakagawa Shigemi, “Shinkankaku to iu ‘genshô’” (The ‘Phenomenon’ of New Impressions), in Bungakushi o yomikaeru 1: Haikyo no kanôsei—Gendai bungaku no tanjô (Rereading Literary History 1: The Possibilities of Ruins—the Birth of Modern Literature), ed. Kurihara Yukio (Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 1997), 97. 3. Jonathan E. Abel, “Different from Difference: Revisiting Kurutta ichipeiji,” Asian Cinema 12.2 (fall–winter 2001): 76. 4. Isamu, “Shin eiga hihyô: Kurutta ichipeiji” (New Film Reviews: A Page of Madness), Miyako shinbun, 24 September 1926, 9. Others were less certain about relating the film’s style to the Shinkankaku school, but most recognized the parallels in approach. 5. Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, rev. and ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 134.

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shot of the dancer sequence he ignores how the third can maintain the same temporal impossibility at the conclusion of the shot without foregrounding the signifier because it strongly asserts syntactic linearity and the camera’s physical presence in the diegetic space. This positioning in relation to the bars overlaps with the switch from an omniscient view to one tied to a perspective in the diegesis. This is not the flat “presentationalism” that he sees as defining prewar Japanese cinema, in which spectators relate to a film less as a diegesis than as a text to be read, but a subtle play of spectator positioning. The introduction of the bars, in fact, establishes a major motif of looking through barred gates and windows, either from the inside or the outside, one in which A Page of Madness often involves the audience through camera movements that “insert” them in the space. The third shot also introduces the issue of the spectator’s involvement in the film’s temporality. What we believed was present and objective is confronted by another present objectivity that forces us to rewrite our reading of the first, demanding a spectatorship that pays attention to images currently unfolding before us while simultaneously considering their implications for what was seen before, creating a circle or overlap between past and present in our minds. The film thus prompts a spectatorship that not only moves between possible readings, maintaining a foothold in each of them, but that also remains conscious of the complex interplay between these interpretations, none of which are ever completely eliminated. The fourth shot, in fact, can be interpreted as a visual representation of the kind of viewership the film expects of us, one in which the different times/texts/readings are separate but in some ways simultaneous, coexisting in dynamic conflict. At the same time, the third shot is the introduction of a narrative strategy seen several times throughout the film. While most of its subjective visions are marked as such at the start by means of a variety of devices— dissolves, double exposures, agitated looks, and so on—several, such as the custodian’s fantasy about the festival lottery, present themselves as objective until a point at which we notice elements (for example, the dissolve to the custodian laughing at his window, the place where the fantasy began) that indicate that what we have seen is subjective and unreal.6 Such moments 6. The linearity of these shifts is emphasized by the scene of the custodian’s failed attempt to escape with his wife. This begins with a shot of him sitting with his head nodding, an action that in retrospect could, with the subsequent fade-ins and fade-outs of the cell door, indicate that the coming sequence is his dream. There is, however, no matching moment at the end of the scene confirming that this is subjective. It is, in a sense, the opposite of our other cases in that the sign of the subjective is at the beginning not the conclusion. The fact that this, unlike the other cases, is insufficient to mark the scene as subjective is an indication that the order of these signs—especially the privileging of posterior ­marking—is crucial to the subjective structures of the film.

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approximate the first revelation of the dancer’s reality by again forcing us to reconsider our readings, to retrospectively rethink past or subjective images in light of and while viewing the present or objective, but here they are more clearly tied to the perspective of an individual character. The strategy again invites spectator involvement in positions within the diegesis by having the viewer experience a similar overlap of past and present, objective and subjective, as the characters do, effecting a homology between spectator experience and character psychology. The custodian, as a possible representative of the viewer in the text, is one who is especially prompted to rethink past events or pose alternative realities in light of events in the present. Such a doubling of past and present, reality and illusion, within a single psyche can be related to the Shinkankaku critique of the unified subject and is exemplified by visual splitting in many of the film’s subjective sequences. Most are cued or concluded by a character looking at something and, especially in the case of the custodian, often involve that character as a protagonist in the vision (fig. 17). The character is then split between the seeing self and the self seen or envisioned. It is true that A Page of Madness does not fully obey the classic codes marking subjective images (though in most instances it does), but that repre-

Figure 17.   A look out a window sparks a subjective illusion (the lottery scene). 78

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sents less a refusal than a different strategy of distinguishing between subjective and objective. Dominant narrative cinema in Japan, as in Hollywood, usually effects a demarcation between past and present, reality and fantasy, on the levels of both the diegesis and our textual experience through such recognized devices as dissolves or character looks. By eliding the first set of markers yet keeping the second, Kinugasa upsets the certitude of such discrimination without eliminating the difference altogether. In a film that abounds in double exposures, laying subjective images over objective ones, this strategy is part of a larger effort to signify the simultaneity or overlap of different registers. The film seeks to objectify the subjective but without losing hold of the fact that it is subjective. The linearity of classical narration is often incapable of presenting such simultaneity, so A Page of Madness looks to alternative forms of representation. The result is not as nonlinear as Burch suggests, however. Not only does the narrative depend crucially on a distinction between past (the custodian’s cruelty as a sailor) and present (his remorse and regret), but it demands a certain order to the signifiers to effect the circulation between these registers, an order spatially exemplified by the camera movement from the dancer’s stage through the bars. A Page of Madness does cloud the difference between such registers as subjective and objective but not without maintaining each as a different option for the spectator to experience. The film maintains its fascination not because it elides all perspectives but because it forces us to rethink the status of our perception by shifting us from one view to another. Such a strategy still depends on the spectator’s ability to make distinctions because the shifts would be ineffective otherwise. James Peterson stresses the inconsistencies in the coding of subjective images in the film, but he adds, nonetheless, that “viewers can still identify subjective images and attribute them to characters because the mise-en-scène is carefully constructed to mark shifts between narrative levels that stylistic devices do not always highlight.”7 While we may not always be able to quickly identify whether a subjective sequence is a memory or a hallucination, in almost all cases we can subsequently determine whether it is subjective, even without the assistance of the script or a plot summary (which are even less equivocal). A Page of Madness, as Peterson argues, fails to create a strict filmic code differentiating between its different narrative and temporal registers. But it nonetheless has a strategy that does. It is the lack of a code, in fact, that allows the film to conjoin these different states, and it is the presence of this strategy that prevents it from losing their distinction. 7. James Peterson, “A War of Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa’s Page of Madness and the Japanese Avant-Garde of the 1920s,” Cinema Journal 29.1 (fall 1989): 43.

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The fact that this strategy is conjoined with a homology between spectator experience and character psychology indicates that the film’s distance from the classic form is less a result of a deconstruction or play on those codes, as Burch suggests, than of a larger narrative project. Most of the subjective moments in the film are narratively motivated; even those that are more ambiguous (the opening sequence, for instance) still operate partly as a filmic approximation of disturbed mental states. While the film is more complex than that (moments of excess style not attributed to character psychology work to problematize the border between subjective and objective), this is how many observers read A Page of Madness at the time.8 The approximation was certainly effective, with one critic claiming, “I was not necessarily the only one who felt that even viewers would go insane.”9 But, as the visualization of psychology, style became subordinate to its requirements, with Okuya Yoshiyuki noting that, “Technique . . . continues to be utilized for the creator’s cinematic critique in the name of description. It is no longer primary.”10 Style, he said, functioned not for itself but for psychological depiction. A Page of Madness certainly shares with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari the mental hospital location and the effort to visualize disturbed mental states, but its cinematic choices have more in common with the Impressionist The Smiling Madame Beudet (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1922) than Weine’s Expressionist work because psychology is rendered more through camera techniques than mise-en-scène. Stark, low-key lighting and the dreary, cavelike walls of the main hall in the women’s ward definitely contribute to the oppressive mood, but Kinugasa and others have always spoken of the set design in realist terms. I believe this is indicative not only of Kinugasa’s decision to maintain a degree of distinction between objective reality and how it is perceived (making subjectivity mostly a matter of the manipulation of optics) but again of the film’s connection to French Impressionism. Many at the time noted that its modes of psychological description resembled those of French film,11 with some going so far as to charge it with copying them.12 The 8. Recall the office worker who said “it was all just an illusion” or the Yomiuri shinbun reviewer who described the film as presenting not so much a plot as an “expression of delusion.” See Yoshi, “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness), Yomiuri shinbun, 28 June 1926, 9. 9. Niwa Shin, “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.8 (August 1926): 55. 10. Okuya Yoshiyuki, “Kurutta ichipeiji kan” (Views on A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema 2.9 (September 1926): 27. 11. See, for instance, Tateishi Seifû, “Watashi wa hajimete ‘Nihon eiga’ no yoi mono o mita” (I Saw a Good Japanese Film for the First Time), Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 23 (November 1926): 44. 12. See Hitomi Naoyoshi, “Kankaku eiga wa odoru” (Impressionist Film Dances), Engeki eiga (Theater and Film) 1.8 (August 1926): 88–90.

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other major intertext for the film was Murnau’s The Last Laugh, which also effectively uses camera technique to depict psychology and which Kinugasa himself cited as the best “artistic film” of 1926 in a magazine poll.13 This connection with French Impressionism is important not only in terms of a history of influence or an analysis of style but also when considering the film’s attitude toward spectatorship. The emphasis on camera and editing techniques over mise-en-scène in the rendition of subjective states already indicates the film’s stress on perception over what is perceived, and the proposed homology between film form and spectator experience further amplifies the fact that A Page of Madness is significantly directed toward shaping a particular form of cinematic perception. Charles Musser has noted how the conflict between the wife and the husband in Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet is crucially signified through artistic sensibility, his oppressiveness being tied to his love of theater, something the wife can only oppose through her subjective impressions, made possible through the camera and thus cinema.14 A Page of Madness does not offer such binary oppositions in order to side with cinema against another art; rather, it offers a variety of modes of signification and perception, asking us less to choose one over another than to manage these overlapping but different, melding but contradictory modes together as shifting but distinct layers of simultaneity and diachronicity. These modes are sometimes so distinct (for example, the avant-garde and the melodramatic) that one wonders how much the creation of this spectatorship was intentional; its association with madness also raises the question of how much it was prescribed. Yet I would contend that it is this management of multiple texts, readings, and perceptions, and not the singular vision of experimental modernism that came to dominate interpretations of the text, if not perhaps Kinugasa’s later reshaping of it, that constitutes the film’s experience of modernity in 1920s Japan. Such divisions echo with what Seiji M. Lippit sees as “the collapse of a certain totalizing understanding of modernity” in the culture of the period.15 Its multifaceted nature makes it difficult to simply term it “vernacular modernism” in Miriam Hansen’s definition of the concept. On the one hand, A Page of Madness inserted shinpa melodrama into avant-garde style and rendered its modernism on a more “low-art” level through ads that 13. “Taishô jûgo-nen ni okeru yoi eiga” (Good Films of 1926), Eiga sekai (Film World) 5.1 (January 1927): 16–21. 14. See Charles Musser, “The Senses and Subjectivity: Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923),” in The Five Senses of Cinema (Udine, Italy: Ninth Congress of the Study of the Film, 2005), 127–29. 15. Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 82.

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cited cubism and futurism as popular fashions. On the other, it armed ­itself with discourses that resolutely trumpeted the highbrow at a time when Japanese film culture was still deeply divided by class. The conflicts over the film—if not also in the film itself—suggest that, far from operating as “the single most inclusive cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity’s ­experience were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated,”16 it became a symptom of the sensory upheavals and cultural contradictions of Japan’s confrontation with westernized modernity and of a film world struggling under different conceptions of how it should modernize. William O. Gardner has tried to see A Page of Madness as an instance of vernacular modernism because to him it simultaneously “reflects” and “disavows” the “traumatic effects of modernity” by both pursuing a ­Shinkankakuha-like exploration of new sensations and warning of their ­excesses.17 While he is correct to see these contradictions, it is debatable how much this divisive film could have provided the kind of negotiations of modernity that Hansen sees her example of vernacular modernity, classic Holly­wood cinema, performing. It rather seems that A Page of Madness, less in its narrative of madness than in its polyvalent form and the reactions it provoked, only foregrounded the problems of the different possibilities of Japanese modernity that were already suffering the contradictions not only of class, economy, and geopolitics but also of a non-Western nation striving for ­Western modernity. Rather than providing an “inclusive cultural horizon,” its contradictions represent the difficulties of formulating such a ­horizon at the time. It also became a sort of Rorschach test in which commentators from different social and cultural forces conceived of differing visions of modernity—or of a vernacular modernism—without reaching a consensus. If the film offers any positions for negotiating modernity, it is likely in the spectatorship that, while divided and rarely inclusive—and thus, perhaps, necessarily associated with insanity—attempts to manage these different and distinct forms in a single film. While embodying desires, such as those expounded by Kataoka Teppei, for a medium that could ­efficiently manage perception from the top down, it also recognizes the limits of that, as well as the psychologically difficult yet still necessary operations of the spectator in appreciating and accommodating the modern flood of perceptual information. I should stress, however, that the failures of this attempted negotiation are as important in understanding the modernity of A Page of Madness as the 16. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (April 1999): 69. 17. William O. Gardner, “New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films and Japanese Modernism,” Cinema Journal 43.2 (spring 2004): 73.

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successes, especially when compared to the supposed unities that classic Hollywood films were offering a global audience. To appreciate this, it is vital for us to recall this divided spectatorship in our own perception of the film and try to manage the conflicting histories, interpretations, and even texts of A Page of Madness in our analysis, just as contemporary spectators had to deal with that mad combination of experiment and melodrama. Our spectatorship in that sense must match theirs.

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The Logic of Separation and the Masking of Cinema

With William Gardner posing the issue of critique through his definition of disavowal, we need to examine further whether A Page of Madness on the thematic level was offering any particular perspective on modernity or the spectatorship it was implying. Scholars have offered a range of readings for the possible political message of A Page of Madness. To some it is an expression of the desire to overturn dominant values; to others it is a portrayal of modern culture in which delusions conceal the state repression represented by bars and cells.1 Satô Tadao sees the filmmakers equating the socially low status that they, as entertainers, had been given in Japanese society, with the insane in the film, and thus using a radical film form to escape from the restrictive space in which they had been placed.2 Kinugasa relates another possible meaning in his autobiography. He writes that his decision to make a film about the insane was prompted by a experience he had when, getting off the train one day to visit Yokomitsu, he saw “the entourage of a certain noble gentleman” whom everyone “through secret whisperings” knew was suffering from a mental illness.3 This “noble gentlemen” was none other than Emperor Yoshihito, a fact that reminds us that the society that gave birth to A Page of Madness was led by a figure whose mental state was hidden from the world; it was an emperor system that masked its own contradictions and delusions in social propriety, national ideology, and abstract order. The critic Kawamoto Saburô finds this connection between the mad emperor and Taishô modernism significant,4 but we should temper any temptation to 1. For the former, see Park Sungbae, “Kurutta ichipeiji no monogatari to shudai” (The Narrative and Themes of A Page of Madness), Eigagaku (Film Study) 19 (2005): 122–37; for the latter, see Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 147. 2. Satô Tadao, “Kinugasa Teinosuke no Kurutta ichipeiji to Jûjirô” (Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Page of Madness and Crossroads), Kinema junpô (The Movie Times) 669 (1 November 1975), 151–52. 3. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga eiga no seishun (My Youth in Film) (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1977), 63. 4. Kawamoto Saburô, “Kawabata Yasunari no eiga: Kurutta ichipeiji o megutte” (Kawabata Yasunari’s Cinema: On A Page of Madness), Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû (Japanese Literature: Studies of Interpretations and Educational Materials) 32.15 (December 1987): 59.

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read Kinugasa’s work as an immediate political intervention. The difficulty with such interpretations is that, while they are certainly possible, no one at the time offered them, even though this was a moment of increased political cultural activity with Kataoka Teppei, for one, joining the proletarian literary movement not long after A Page of Madness was made. Furthermore, the state censors did not register a single problem with the film. On a more abstract level. Eric Cazdyn offers two potential interpretations of the film as political allegory. The first follows an inside-out conceptualization of the film’s representation of insanity: if in the individual case mental disturbance becomes manifested in the deformed bodies of the patients, so on a national level “the original trauma (modernity) produced psychological damage (ultra-nationalist ideology), which then produced physical damage (aggression and imperialism abroad), only to be exacerbated by corrupt state officials and gratuitous scientific experimentation.” Against this, Cazdyn’s more privileged reading sees Kinugasa’s film “disrupting this inside-out view” by suggesting “an outside-in view in which the psychic is an effect of the body and its inscription by sociocultural practices and institutions.” This narrates a story in which “the extended and undisciplined body is being institutionalized just as much as the sick mind,” which on the allegorical level reads as “an exteriority (the world system) that produces an ultra-nationalist interiority.”5 Such a move allows Cazdyn to perform the very important task of pushing Japanese film studies away from a myopic focus on domestic factors and toward a perspective cognizant of the transnational nature of cinema, politics, and economy. The question is whether, in attempting to do this, such readings shift the focus too much in the other direction, privileging the external at the expense of internal factors, both in the text and in the ­local sphere of discursive struggle, that might not only exhibit their own contradictions and power struggles but also complicate the internal/­external framework if not the interpretation itself. Cazdyn’s reading of A Page of Madness, for instance, argues that its radical stylistic and industrial practice “rehearses in an aesthetic register a solution to the historical problem of colonialism,”6 primarily by imagining practices free of external institutionalization.7 That may be one interpretation, but we must not forget how, as 5. Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 211–15. 6. Ibid., 214. 7. Unfortunately, some of Cazdyn’s textual examples of bodies free of—and then subject to— institutionalization are problematic. I noted in chapter nine the complications behind his claim that the film attempts to free itself of the institution of the benshi, but, to offer another example, his description of the lottery as a Bakhtinian space where the “body is

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shown in previous chapters, the film itself could be drafted to institutionalize class-based modes of cinematic knowledge in 1920s Japan, or how it may have been external pressures that led to the text being altered so as to perform a radical stylistics.8 We have already seen how, viewed within its historical context, A Page of Madness is complexly located inside and outside various contemporary institutions, a fact that underlines both its ambivalent politics and the difficulty of instituting internal/external boundaries at the time—or completely avoiding them. A closer examination reemphasizes a text that is in many ways about the complication of boundaries and institutions such as cinema and modernity that attempt to create them. One could say that A Page of Madness is at its most basic level a film about opposing elements and the often problematic boundaries between them. We have seen how past and present, objective and subjective, reality and illusion have been doubled and differentiated and their copresence, as well as their conflicts, emphasized, often in relation to the film’s central opposition between the sane and the insane. These distinctions are frequently represented in the construction of space and mise-en-scène. It is true that the eye-line mismatches and cutting across the axis that Peterson and Burch both cite do not help provide a crystal clear geography. Many cutaways are not fully spatially explained (for instance, the cutaway to the inmates, who seem to look at the custodian and his daughter before she visits her mother’s cell) and ambiguities in offscreen space augment the fearsomeness of the asylum, especially to the daughter, who is repeatedly confronted by inmates who suddenly appear from offscreen. Yet it is not as if we remain unaware of crucial spatial distinctions. After beginning a scene with close-ups, Kinugasa will, more often than not, later include a full shot that reveals relations within that space. It is the relation between spaces that is more crucial. We do not know precisely how the corridor in the women’s ward connects to the other hallways we see, the hospital entrance, or the custodian’s room, but that spatial separation is itself important. It is often marked by a sharp contrast between light and dark at

free to travel the edge of alterity” (ibid., 212) not only fails to square with descriptions of the scene offered by pertinent intertexts (such as the censorship script or Sawada’s script [see chapter eight]) but fails to note that the narrative goal of the custodian’s delusion is precisely to fulfill his institutional role in patriarchy of providing his daughter with a traditional dowry composed of a fine chest of drawers. More textual evidence is needed to support Cazdyn’s otherwise provocative allegorical readings and avoid externally imposing meanings on a text that certainly does “travel the edge of alterity.” 8. We have already seen how the film could be used by intellectuals as a form of domestic cinematic colonization, imposing their class-based conception of not only cinema but also perception, knowledge, and modernity (themselves partially an internalization of Western models) on competing modes in 1920s Japan.

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the entrance and is accented by the barred gate we see at the end (fig. 18). That gate, as well as all the barred doors and windows in the film, operates to underline a crucial spatial distinction between sane and insane, one that is doubled by a contrast between indoors and outdoors, between claustrophobic rooms and corridors and the more expansive garden. The mental hospital itself is portrayed as a technology of separation, dividing through bars, gates, and doors, which remain dominant motifs, the inmates from the outside world and the staff from the patients. Even the fiancé’s room seems to be cut off from this world by means of a window crisscrossed with barlike frames. In the asylum, men are segregated from women, and each patient is placed in a separate cell that is barred and locked. The staff’s main duties involve enforcing these divisions, including the most final form of isolation, that of the patient within his or her own mind. Such separation is visualized not only through the bars and lattices that appear throughout the film but also through the continued motif of the circle (the wheels, the dots on the cell walls, and so on), which underlines fears regarding the fate of repetition (for example, the fear that the insane [the mother] will breed the insane [the daughter]). Certain types of social conduct are restricted as the bearded inmate’s oratorical performance

Figure 18.   The ward hallway and the errant patient. (Still photograph courtesy of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute.) 87

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is stopped and the riot, the ultimate form of crowd behavior, quelled. It is the dancer’s social form of insanity, a form of performance for others, that makes her uniquely dangerous as evidenced by the sexually driven riot. Given these distinctions, passages between spaces assume paramount importance: the gates and doors as well as all the corridors and windows. Much of the editing allows the camera to move back and forth over the axis formed by a barred door, thus giving it a significant power over space. Crossing over these thresholds is treated as narratively significant and a frequent source of character conflict; thus, the custodian tries to stop his daughter from entering the ward, and his wife refuses to leave through the back entrance. It is the seemingly magical opening of gates that begins the custodian’s second fantasy. Even looking through doors and windows can mark shifts in the narrative as, for instance, the sight of the dancer through her cell door sparks the inmates to riot.9 These moments assume importance because they represent a threat to the separations essential to the hospital system. The narrative is generated by a series of violations of these boundaries. First, there is our unwitting entry into the space of the dancer’s fantasy and her cell, certainly a narrational privilege usually accorded to the camera, but here rendered problematic by the subsequent introduction of barriers—the window bars—which retrospectively mark this as restricted space. The second violation, where one of the major threads of the narrative begins, occurs when the custodian enters the ward at night. His cautious behavior then and in similar circumstances indicates that such entry is forbidden and the keys he uses not his own. Finally, the subplot with the daughter is introduced when she crosses the threshold between outside and inside, between the space of the sane and the insane.10 From the very beginning, then, the structural order of the hospital and its reality has been disturbed, though not, I must stress, overturned. These boundary crossings are significant only to the degree that the borders retain some effectiveness. The disturbances are mostly due either to unauthorized transgressions into forbidden spaces (the custodian and the camera are the main culprits here) or to the uncontrollable power of insanity, that which the asylum system is supposed to repress in the first place. The vectors of transgression are multiple as the outside invades the inside and vice versa. At the 9. Interestingly, it is the female inmates’ act of looking that initiates the fury of spectating that leads to the riot. This reverses the usual gendering of the gaze (evident with the fiancé, for instance) in a film in which the familial patriarch is emasculated by the blank gaze of a woman. While he attempts to restore the respectable bourgeois family through the daughter’s marriage, his delusions unwittingly mock that attempt. 10. The Sawada script focuses on the problem of her entry into the asylum, including a scene in which she is initially refused entrance.

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same time that the camera first breaks into the asylum, the psychology of the disturbed begins to prompt an invasion of the subjective/­unreal into the objective/real (insanity invading our vision in the form of the dancer’s fantasy). The bodies of the mentally ill also repeatedly violate the geographic order. This begins during the scene in which the custodian first visits his wife in the ward and sees a female inmate walking down the hall (fig. 18). This shot remains ambiguous, but one would assume she is not where she is supposed to be: locked and isolated in her cell. In another scene, in the garden, in which the custodian and his daughter are graphically divided from the wife by a tree in a high-angle long shot (fig. 19), it is the tantrum of the bearded inmate that upsets this division between the sane and insane, scares the daughter, and sends her running past the boundary and onto her mother’s side. The film creates a series of similar character doublings that cross the boundary between the sane and the insane such as those between the daughter and the mother, the daughter and the dancer (who are joined by editing and the shawl), and the daughter and the “groom” inmate. The custodian, with one foot in each realm, forms the pivot point in these problematic relations. What presents an issue much more difficult than the power of insanity is the sociality that the asylum suppresses as a result. Invasions by the

Figure 19.   The border separating the sane and insane, a boundary soon to be crossed. 89

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custodian and daughter of spaces not their own are prompted by familial relations that do not accord with the technology of separation in the hospital. While this is only hinted at by looks and gestures in the film text, the script makes it clear that the custodian’s relation to his wife and daughter is not known to the asylum’s authorities. Such sociality is dangerous, leading first to the fistfight between the custodian and the bearded inmate, then to the old man’s attempt to help his wife escape, and finally to his imagined slaughter of the hospital staff, an act that makes way for the ultimate socially generated boundary crossing, the taboo marriage between the sane (the daughter) and the insane (the bearded inmate). Jonathan Abel considers A Page of Madness to be a “film . . . of its time” in part because it reflects a shift in thinking about mental illness in 1920s Japan away from the rigid separation encouraged by Meiji law and toward a notion that the mentally ill are not significantly different from the sane and can be cured.11 He finds evidence for this in the way the film implicates both the custodian and the spectators in the perceptions of the insane, thus shifting madness away from its previous exclusive residence in the realm of the other and into the world of the self. While that may be true, the technology of the hospital in the film is one modernity, still focused on separation and otherness, in conflict with another: the nuclear family. The former, however, is breaking down, with chaos being one of the results. The custodian’s solution to the problem he perceives (the threat to the daughter’s engagement) is to disappear with his wife, perhaps making her invisible even to the invasive camera. It fails because it is a violation of boundaries that the wife, at least, understands, yet it is based on a social logic that is not anathema to the structure of the hospital. While the tech­ nology of separation demands the suppression of intimate social relations such as ­familial bonding or connections based on desire or other primitive drives, it depends on a more abstract social vision, a modern society of ­atomistic individuals regulated through institutions such as the asylum. This logic also threatens the daughter’s engagement, fearing the union that is realized in a different form in the custodian’s fantasy. To this society, the central narrative difficulty is knowledge of the wife’s existence. The custodian’s attempt to hide his wife perversely tries to preserve the new family by following this modern logic, yet fails because he commits the crime of boundary crossing. 11. Jonathan E. Abel, “Different from Difference: Revisiting Kurutta ichipeiji,” Asian Cinema 12.2 (fall–winter 2001): 80–85. Abel writes that the hospital that Kinugasa visited when researching the film was that of Kure Shûzô, a significant reformer in mental health care in Taishô Japan.

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When his plan fails, the final solution is to conceal the insane in another way: through masks. Kawabata wrote at the time that he wanted to use aesthetically pleasing masks to “save the custodian, his insane wife, and the patients in the mental hospital. I wanted to wrap up their suffering and their insanity in a gentle smile.”12 Kinugasa, who also took credit for the masks, said he hoped to reproduce the expressions of the insane he had met, which were both singular and revealed a “silent lack of individuality.”13 These different intentions are related in the text. The masks the custodian places on the inmates do calm their impulsive, orchestrated behavior, less curing them than covering their ugliness with an aesthetic veneer, one that reestablishes the divisions of the hospital precisely by effacing the existence of the insane (invisibility being the ultimate division). The masks become the new cells for the inmates (something emphasized by the fact that bars are superimposed over the entire scene), locking away their individuality in an atomistic homogeneity little different from the numbers on their cell doors, accepting uniqueness to the degree that it accords to such abstract social types as old man, woman, clown, and so on. Abel notes that some of the masks might constitute further boundary crossings (women, for instance, donning masks that in Noh only men wear), but most, like the custodian’s old man mask, do not. The function of the masks is seemingly revealed when the fantasy ends and peace seems to have returned to the hospital with the patients safely in their cells or, as with the bearded inmate, appropriately sedate. Even the dancer stops her performance under the watchful gaze of the head doctor. Perhaps this is the world of the new modern hospital. The custodian’s fate, however, complicates this conclusion. By losing his keys in the escape attempt, he does, in one way, unwittingly solve the problem of boundary crossing by forfeiting his ability to enter the ward at will. He is now more firmly located in the space of the staff and the sane, cut off from a connection with his wife. Yet his decision to don a mask himself offers a different solution. While it does present the facade of husband and wife reuniting, coming as it does after his fantasy of killing the staff and marrying his daughter to an inmate, it is practically his recognition of his own insanity or, more formally, of his decision to side with the insane. Peterson cites the bearded inmate’s bow to the custodian at the end as another mark of ambiguity since the inmate, previously antagonistic to the old man, bows to him seemingly because he is now his son-in-law—a status only accorded to him in the custodian’s fantasy (fig. 20). The subjective has apparently seeped 12. Kawabata Yasunari, “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei yodan” (An Account of the Filming of A Page of Madness), Geki to engei (Drama and Entertainment) 4.8 (August 1926): N.p. 13. Kinugasa, Waga eiga no seishun, 77.

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into the objective, signaling a lack of resolution. Similarly, as a sign of mutual recognition now that the custodian is one with the inmates, it reminds us that there is one “insane” individual who is not being escorted around by the asylum staff, one who lives out of the ward and cannot return to it. The potentially radical nature of this ending is rendered ambiguous, however, by the fact that both the custodian and the inmate act perfectly sociable, presenting none of the outward signs that would offend the abstract society of power and order. They have assumed the masks of proper society. This may suggest a political stance in A Page of Madness, but, given how contemporaries elaborated on it as an example of the possibilities of cinema in 1920s Japan, I want to relate this to a possible politics of cinema. First, we can say that the decision of Kinugasa and his colleagues to make the first “pure film” in Japan on the subject of the insane was not accidental. The combination of “the impressionistic mode of pure film expression and the delusions of the insane” was, argued one commentator, intentional,14 and others claimed that the subject matched the form.15 It is understandable that a story of mental delusion would have been attractive both to modernist

Figure 20.   The bearded inmate bowing to the custodian. (Still photograph courtesy of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute.) 14. Katô Eiichi, “Eigatekina Kurutta ichipeiji” (The Cinematic A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 45. 15. See, for example, Kikuchi Kan, “Eigakai jiji” (Current Topics in the Film World), Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.2 (August 1926): 13.

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writers interested in perception and to film reformers hoping to show the potential of cinema as a pure art for it allowed for a variety of experiments within the bounds of narrative. It was for this reason that these filmic depictions of disturbed mental states represented cinema to many observers, so much so that not a few downplayed their narrative motivation to speak of a film devoted to cinema itself. At the same time, this could signal something disturbing about cinema. In the context of 1920s Japan, the cinema was related to insanity in another, more problematic fashion. From early on, motion pictures were frequently the object of censure by government officials and social leaders as a medium that was corrupting youth and undermining social values. Central to this critique was a view of spectator psychology that saw the cinema as breaking down normal modes of reasoning and socialized self-control, encouraging the expression of irrational and asocial thoughts.16 Literature of the fantastic similarly used the mysterious medium to tell tales of viewers going insane.17 Even newspapers published serious stories about moviegoers who had supposedly lost their minds.18 In this discursive context, attempting to depict the psychology of the mentally unstable in film would have to appear as a discussion of the psychology of cinema itself. This psychology is explored in the film in the way the custodian is himself a spectator or even a camera. In a film that is often a drama (or melodrama) of looks, he is one of the few characters to have the power to cross over barred gates like the camera does. He is constantly looking through windows or doors, and it is at those times that he has his visions. Most of his subjective sequences are either preceded by or end with shots of him looking, rendering his psychology as a visual projection onto another, often framed space. What he or we see are different forms of cinema, ranging from the impressionist introductory sequence to the surrealist fantasy about killing the staff, from the more classically constructed “happy ending” of 16. For examples of this psychology, see Sugawara Kyôzô, “Setsumeisha to kôshû” (Film Narrators and the Public), in Dai ikkai setsumeisha kôshûkai kôenroku (Transcripts of the First Lecture Course for Film Narrators), ed. Takaoka Kokugan (Tokyo: Dai Nippon ­Setsumeisha Kyôkai, 1921), 219–49; or Unno Kôtoku, Gakkô to katsudô shashin (Schools and the Moving Pictures) (Kyoto: Naigai Shuppan, 1924). 17. See, for instance, Akutagawa Ryûnosuke’s “Unrequited Love” or “The Shadow,” both of which I discuss in my “The Self Seen as Other: Akutagawa and Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly 23.3 (1995): 197–203. Thomas LaMarre has translated and analyzed Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s “The Tumor with a Human Face” in Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2005). 18. For a contemporary article on a recent outbreak of “film sickness,” see “Eigabyô: Konna ­yamai ga chikagoro ôi” (Film Sickness: This Ailment Is Recently on the Rise), Hôchi ­shinbun, 7 April 1926, 4.

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the festival scene to the almost documentary shots of the streets of Kyoto before the mask episode. A Page of Madness can be seen as an exploration of these alternatives, maintaining a dialogic, even multivalent structure that allowed different observers to see quite opposite cinematic styles. While we have noted how the film proposes a spectatorship that can manage these different visions—the inherent discontinuity of cinema—while still recognizing their divisions, this nonclassical spectatorship (nonclassical because it does not suture these discordant spaces into a continuity that projects a unity on the viewing subject’s own identity) borders almost literally on the schizophrenic. The problems of the custodian as a viewer reflect this, as does the hospital riot that starts through spectatorship (fig. 21). It is again the mask sequence that, by partially solving the problem of insanity, presents one possible resolution to the film’s debate on cinema. A relevant intertext here is a short story Kawabata wrote based on his experiences on the set of A Page of Madness, “The Man Who Did Not Smile” (“Warawanu otoko”).19 I have discussed elsewhere how the masks symbol-

Figure 21.   Unruly spectators and the insanity of looking. 19. Kawabata Yasunari, “Warawanu otoko” (The Man Who Did Not Smile), in Kawabata ­Yasunari zenshû (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1980–82), 265–70. An English translation is available in Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-theHand ­Stories, trans. Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman (San Francisco: North Point, 1988). One of the options when they were collecting the masks was to get celluloid ones.

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ize the cinema in this story, promising a “happy ending” to a dreary tale.20 Although effectively surreal in themselves, they provide a conventional end to an unconventional story, instituting a cinematic regime that, by stopping the inmate’s repetitive motions, suppresses the avant-garde rhythm valorized in Impressionism. The film returns to reality with a relatively classically edited scene in which the disturbing subjective images have subsided and the grayish tone of shinpa realism dominates—as if A Page of Madness has itself put on a mask, presenting a familiar and nonthreatening cinema as its final face.21 Applied from without, like a mask, the institution of cinema imposes itself on the body of the film at the end. Masking the difficulty, the troublesomeness, the otherness of an incomprehensible cinema that, after all, was linked to the visions of the insane, could be taken as Kinugasa’s answer to the question of the motion pictures, a decision siding with continuity and narrativization, a corralling of the image and those unruly spectators favoring hybridity and mixture, one that saw its consequence in his return to conventional filmmaking at Shôchiku. Rejecting the insane psychology of cinema for a more pleasing image, his exploration of different alternatives seems to have ended with the cessation of border transgressions and finally obeyed the logic of separation that founded not only the asylum but also the conventional cinema that would win out in the debates over film. Although the mid-1920s presented the historical possibility of an alternative form of film, an insane cousin to the emerging norm, A Page of Madness pushed that into the past in the change of the original title from present to past tense, pointing the way to a future, more ordered cinema, a Japanese film that would reduce experimentation to mere flourishes by the 1930s. This conclusion, however, while valid in its own right, is opposed by another possible reading of the masks. Remember that the mask sequence is preceded by what is clearly the most realistic section of the film, a series of documentary-like shots that finally present the outside world (fig. 22). The mask episode is not initially signaled by an image of a character looking nor does it shift from objective to subjective unnoticed, but it just suddenly begins when a shot of a house is abruptly overlapped by an image of a gate. Nor does this sequence end with a shot of the custodian looking, as most of his subjective visions do. It is true that his gesture of banging his head 20. See my “Celluloid Masks: The Cinematic Image and the Image of Japan,” Iris 16 (spring 1993): 23–36. 21. That such a masking of unpleasantness could be perceived as necessary is evident from the number of critics who complained about Kinugasa’s choice of such an “unhealthy” topic. That word is used in Ôshima Tokurô, “Eigadô sanpo” (Strolling the Film Way), Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 21 (September 1926): 43. See also Kisaragi Bin, “Rokugatsu no inshô” (Impressions from June), Eiga ôrai 19 (July 1926): 73–75.

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Figure 22.   Naturalism introducing the last fantasy.

with his fist, as if trying to get his mind back in order, seems to confirm that the episode is his fantasy (something corroborated by the script), but without his strong presence the text appears to mark it as equally the subjective fantasy of the objective world itself or, more precisely, of the realist cinema that precedes and follows this sequence. What is seen in this dream, the unconscious of realism, is the unruly image that was artificially repressed in order to make the reality effect pleasing and consumable. Note that in “The Man Who Did Not Smile,” the masks equally constitute a signifying system that threatens to turn reality itself into an image, which is what the hero fears when he reveals his suspicion “that the ever-smiling gentle face of my wife might itself be a mask or that my wife’s smile might be artifice, just like the mask.”22 The masks here are not a matter of the external suppressing the internal but rather the transgressive facade that threatens not only to disturb the exterior (reality or the real face) by undermining through simulation its

22. Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 132. The story concludes with the hero asking that the masks not be used.

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e­ xclusive claim to truth but also to actually become the exterior by threatening the boundaries between inside and outside. On the level of cinema, A Page of Madness, then, both announces the failure of an alternative cinema and sounds a critique of the commercialization of the image and the consumption of the real that was coming to dominate modern Japanese film and culture. In its ambiguous resolution, the film concludes its debate on the cinema by both predicting the triumph of a coded naturalism that would actually come to define prewar Japanese cinema, especially after the mid-1930s, and revealing the repressions necessary in such an institutionalization of narrative. On the level of the modern, A Page of Madness both resolves itself to an efficient, realist modernity imposed from outside and challenges that exteriority by asserting local and different forms of modernist experiment that complicate the divisions between inside and outside when conceiving modernity in Japan. The masks are not, in Cazdyn’s sense, modernity imposed from without but rather a provocative challenge to the distinction between a “real” Western modernity and its “inauthen­tic” masquerade in Japan. The film also marked an intervention in the debates over the relationship between cinema and literature, debates that often equated literature with narrative and a literary-free film with the absence of story. The victory of naturalism at the end of the film represented for the writers at Chûkyô kinema nothing less than the victory of literature over cinema. Perhaps this signaled the formation of a film culture, which peaked in the period between the beginning of sound and the 1950s, dominated by literary adaptations and the celebration of the screenplay as both literature and the cornerstone of cinema.23 As a kurutta ichipeiji, a single page gone “crazy” or “out of order,” A Page of Madness emphasized both its cinematic particularity and its literariness. It was simultaneously the page modernist writers took out of cinema, not simply to add “visuality” to their work in an effort to explore new forms of language and perception and undermine literary convention, but also a means of inserting an errant page of literature into the text of the motion pictures, confirming literature’s own processes of signification and knowledge in the new medium. Conversely, the literary page in cinema could form the center of conflicts over defining the nature of the image as either a new, utopian form of perceptive clarity or as a means of undermining such epistemological certainties. 23. For more on the literariness of prewar Japanese film culture, see my “The Word before the Image: Criticism, the Screenplay, and the Regulation of Meaning in Prewar Japanese Film Culture,” in Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, ed. Carole Cavanaugh and Dennis Washburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–35.

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As a text out of order, however, as a hybrid body that mixed opposite and divergent substances into a conflicted treatise on cinema and modernity, A Page of Madness both invited and complicated attempts to capture a single perspective on it. We have seen how many have been tempted to read it through narratives of modernism or political allegory. It is certainly tempting here to try to privilege one of these divergent tendencies, either melodrama or avant-garde, naturalism or modernism, literature or cinema, repression or liberation, interior or exterior. We would be remiss, however, to simply impose an external privileging on a film that complexly and sometimes contradictorily navigates between such poles, particularly, as we have seen in this chapter, between interior and exterior. A Page of Madness can serve as an example of the problems of interpretation, showing the troubles, to rephrase Cazdyn, that occur when an “extended and undisciplined” text “is being institutionalized” by external modes of reading. They can not only efface the alterity of the text and its context but also do violence to the work—a fact most vividly testified to by the scarred body of A Page of Madness itself, which quite likely was disfigured—and rendered to look more “insane”—under external pressure to live up to being an unequivocal modernist text. My reading has attempted to follow the film’s lead by navigating—and complicating the divisions—between exterior and interior, between the local and the global, between attending to inner textual complexity and expanding beyond that to engage outer forces that connect with the film but also try to impose their rule on this unruly text. As I have argued, ­Kinugasa’s work itself suggests a way to read it, asking readers to be similarly unruly, reordering different parts of the text to continue those debates on what composing in light could mean without offering a set conclusion. Its contradictions represented both the divisions that defined that historical conjuncture, ones that shaped the production and reception of the film, and a plea to avoid monosemic interpretations of cinema and its particular manifestations. Perhaps this was the film’s intervention in the struggles over the place of cinema, if not of mass culture itself, in modernity—and possibly over which modernity would be developed in Japan. Was the cinema to become like the mental hospital, a Foucauldian technology of surveillance and separation that reproduces efficient modes of knowledge under a strict hierarchy, or was it to be like the women inmates viewing the dancer, crossing boundaries and undermining that division of epistemological labor? I believe it is because A Page of Madness ambivalently stands in the middle—not on one side—of these debates that it bears so many contradictions on its body, has been read in so many ways, and can offer us a much richer and more complex understanding of the interrelations between cinema and modernity. 98

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This is what makes A Page of Madness a far more interesting film than the one celebrated as the avant-garde masterwork of a lone genius. It carries in its images and intertexts the traces of a history both complex and contradictory, one that is fascinating and illuminating and gives depth to a film that is often hard to approach. But it is its imperfections, its contradictions, and its ultimately divided nature that remind us of the richness and variety of cinema, how important it is for us to understand the ways in which people have tried to deal with this text, as well as our own role, through reading this film, in continuing the debates on cinema and modernity that A Page of Madness originally posed.

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Translations of Contemporary Reviews

With contemporary reviews proffering different versions of A Page of Mad­ ness, it will help the reader to view some of these discourses in full. This appendix offers translations of three reviews written by different authors and published in different kinds of print media. They do not offer the full spectrum of views of A Page of Madness, but together they represent some of the major positions at the time. They also provide illuminating examples of the state of film criticism in mid-1920s Japan. The first comes from a film magazine: the famous review by Iwasaki Akira published in Kinema junpô, the most prominent movie journal in Japanese history.1 The second is an example of a newspaper review penned by the film journalist—and later film historian—Tanaka Jun’ichirô, which appeared in the Hôchi shinbun.2 Finally, I include a longer piece from a coterie magazine published outside Tokyo, a review in the Nagoya journal Chûkyô kinema by a presumably amateur film critic named Okuya Yoshiyuki.3 Translation 1 Iwasaki Akira’s role in promoting A Page of Madness was considerable. Not only did he pen the following favorable review, but as a member of the selection committee of the Musashinokan he helped get it released. His review is quite representative of the position of intellectual film critics in the wake of the Pure Film Movement. It begins with a blanket condemnation of Japanese cinema and then registers delight at a film that finally realizes the ideals of pure film. It is almost a necessity, then, that Iwasaki goes out of his way to downplay the involvement of literary figures such as Kawabata and lay the laurels at the feet of the professional filmmakers Kinugasa and Sugiyama. He is still reluctant, however, to admit Kinugasa into the circle 1. Iwasaki Akira, “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness), Kinema junpô (The Movie Times) 243 (21 October 1926): 48. 2. Tanaka Jun’ichirô, ”Hyôgen shugi no eiga” (An Expressionist Film), Hôchi shinbun, 23 June 1926, 4. 3. Okuya Yoshiyuki, “Kurutta ichipeiji kan” (Views on A Page of Madness), Chûkyô kinema (­Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 26–28.

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of conscious—and thus intellectual—film artists, and he takes note of the film’s cinematic impurities and problems in the episodes with the daughter and her fiancé, scenes that are missing from the surviving print. Iwasaki Akira (1903–81) was only twenty-two and a student at the University of Tokyo when he wrote this review, but he had already achieved some status for having helped introduce German cinema and film theory to Japan. It is not yet evident in this review, but he would later become ­Japan’s most prominent left-wing film critic, and he was actually jailed for his opposition to government film policy in 1939. He was the author of dozens of books, ranging from collections of criticism and personal memoirs to introductions to film theory and history. He had some jobs in the regular commercial industry, working as a representative of UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) or for the Manchurian Motion Picture Association (Man’ei) during the war, but his participation in left-wing film movements was most significant. He served as secretary of the Proletarian Film League (Prokino) in the early 1930s, produced films such as A Tragedy of Japan (Nihon no higeki, 1946) at Nichiei Shinsha during the American Occupation and assisted with independent film productions in the 1950s.4 Kinema junpô was founded in 1919 as a coterie magazine by a group of young intellectual film fans, but by 1926 it was firmly established as the country’s most prominent film journal. It was half a trade journal—which is why Iwasaki had to comment on the box office potential of A Page of ­Madness—but its editorial staff and much of its readership were composed of intellectual film fans and critics sympathetic to “pure films” and critical of the majority of Japanese movies. Making an effort to review almost every film released, its role in the development of film criticism in Japan was enormous, and it has continued publishing, with a few breaks during and after the war, to the present day.5 Iwasaki’s review represents the burgeoning of an impressionist form of film criticism that would long dominate writing on cinema in Japan, one centered on the critic’s personal experience of the film, evaluating it especially through the extent to which it fulfilled the critic’s standards of true cinematic effect.6 4. For more on Iwasaki in English, see Abé Mark Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: The Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1992); and Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 5. For more on the early history of Kinema junpô, see the commentaries written by Iwamoto Kenji and Makino Mamoru in Yûshôdô’s reprint of the first seven years of the journal. Kinema junpô (The Movie Times), fukkokuban (Tokyo: Yûshôdô, 1993–1995). 6. For a brief history of Japanese film criticism, see Iwamoto Kenji, “Film Criticism and the Study of Cinema in Japan: A Historical Survey,“ Iconics 1 (1987): 129–49.

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A Page of Madness Iwasaki Akira

It is the first filmlike film born in Japan. I can declare that with certainty. And further, it is the first international film made in Japan. I will ignore all the external facts, such as that the motive for producing this film was purely artistic or that painful efforts were expended to make it, and just discuss its aesthetic value. To begin with, I will give Kawabata Yasunari the silent treatment (mokusatsu). Those who know about the process of making this film, or, more specifically, those who know about its beauty, can feel that the rights Kawabata Yasunari holds over this film are like those of a small wayside station. This motion picture is from beginning to end the property of the film director Kinugasa Teinosuke and his skilled assistant Sugiyama Kôhei. And that’s it. When I saw The Sun (starring Ichikawa Ennosuke) before, I was furious at the unbelievable incompetence of this Kinugasa. But afterward, when I viewed A Page of Madness, I suddenly shuddered, my body went tense, a few tears of joy welled up in my eyes, and I felt a respect for Kinugasa that I had never felt for a Japanese filmmaker before. He, at any rate, knows cinema. No, maybe he doesn’t know it yet, but he feels it. The beauty he sketches is neither theatrical nor novelistic nor painterly; it is, in the end, unrelated (one can say) to any of the existing arts. It is cinematic beauty. If perhaps he was attempting to depict the entirety of life with this method, then he completely failed. He should be satisfied with just representing a purely cinematic moment from a single fragment of human life and fixing it onscreen. He was, of course, aware of this. On the other hand, he was carried off by Kawabata’s story and ended up stuck in a certain dilemma. This is the weak point of the film if you consider it carefully. Each of the individual parts is in isolation brimming with a surprising degree of cinematic beauty, but when you look at the film as a whole it is confusing and contaminated with numerous foreign elements. It is like fine champagne diluted with 50 percent water or gold nuggets mixed with chaff. (The fact that it cannot be understood without explanation even though it is a titleless film, derives from this contradiction.) Even if we overlook this dilemma, Kinugasa has many faults that should be criticized. But let us respect the fact that not only the film’s strong points but even its weaknesses are purely cinematic. He is at any rate a film artist. That is sufficient. Not only is there no director in Japan who effectively uses the camera as liberally and free of restraint as Kinugasa (although there seem to be some immoderate instances of repetitive emphasis), there are few such film­ 102

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makers in the world. Cameramen who can as freely and effectively use the camera as Sugiyama also deserve the highest praise. In the hands of these two, the camera becomes an organic being capturing the object. This is not a mechanical application. It is an artistic composition. Considering the intrinsic nature of this film, there is no need to deeply evaluate the actors or their performances, but I at least respect the supreme ability of the two leads, Inoue and Nakagawa, and of Kinugasa in directing all the extras. In fact, the type and movements of the extras in this film were of a kind I have never seen before in a Japanese film. Inoue Masao also offers the best performance of all his films to date. However, the daughter and her lover, the literary youth, make a poor impression—aesthetically they are bad. This couldn’t be a caricature of the Shinkankaku school, could it? This is an extremely rough review. It is unfortunate that there is no room to specifically argue about the wonderful new ideas in the details or the function of the sets or lighting. Box Office Value: It has been sufficiently proven that the film can be understood in first-class theaters in the big cities, but it will probably not be shown in the countryside. Let us take comfort in whatever box office value this kind of picture can produce. Translation 2 Newspaper film criticism had existed since late in the Meiji era (1868– 1912), as Yoshiyama Kyokkô, a prominent early critic, penned reviews for the Miyako shinbun starting around 1911. Many papers ran reviews by the mid-1920s, but it would be many years before they all had staff reviewers. Tanaka Jun’ichirô (1902–89) had just left Tôyô University and was working at Kikuchi Kan’s magazine Bungei Shunjû when he wrote this review for the Hôchi newspaper. The Hôchi shinbun had shown considerable interest in the New Impressionist Film League, first reporting its creation and then taking the liberty of naming it. While today the Hôchi is just a sports and entertainment paper owned by Yomiuri Newspapers, it was then one of the five major newspapers in Tokyo. Tanaka’s review suggests how much the language of European art cinema—light, shadow, music, even the German word ­Lichtspiel—were ­accommodated by the popular press and had become normal to the general vernacular on cinema. His piece does not merely cele­ brate A Page of Madness as an expressionist film signaling the coming of a future, possibly non­narrative cinema; it attempts to evoke its form through its own expressionist/impressionist language. It is one of the most succinct and celebratory of the reviews of Kinugasa’s film. 103

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While adroitly attempting here to write a review that is expressionist, Tanaka Jun’ichirô eventually secured his place in Japanese film history less as a critic than as a journalist, editor, and historian. He served as the editor of such journals as Kinema shûhô and Kinema junpô and was particularly adept at reporting on industrial issues. He also worked for a time at the Shinkô Kinema and Tôhô studios. He was one of first to research Japanese film history, collecting resources and interviewing old film professionals. The series of articles and books he published on Japanese film history, starting as early as 1925, culminated in the five-volume The History of the Development of Japa­ nese Cinema (1980), which remains the standard for the field. With his vast knowledge, he became one of the first film historians to teach at a Japanese university, lecturing at Nihon University from 1958 to 1980.7 An Expressionist Film: Viewing A Page of Madness Tanaka Jun’ichirô

I use the word expressionist, but this is different from Expressionism. I am referring to a film that has been tenaciously produced according to the ingenious methods of cinema. I feel no reluctance in dedicating the New Impressionist Film League’s first production, A Page of Madness, to tomorrow’s motion picture world as an expressionist film. Oh, the tumult of tremendous images! The commotion! The rupture! The horror! The screams! The howls! The shrieks! The remarkable rampage of images that cannot remain motionless for a fraction of a second! Oh, what does this awesome riot mean? What does it say? Don’t be foolish! This is nothing as lukewarm as storytelling. Look at the extraordinary representation of the psychology of insane patients incarcerated in a mental asylum. The earth peels off in the middle, the sky melts and eerie ripples emerge, the face of an old custodian warps into something like a horse, a dancing girl becomes like the pendulum of a clock. Oh, the insane mob opening their mouths wide and howling like mad. Past and present become one, the future becomes the past. Time and space—everything—becomes muddled. Illusion and reality combine. In this place the perceptions of the insane, which have lost their unity, whirl about with abandon. This is the music of cinema. No, not music—optics. Lichtspiel. The magic of light itself. These are not things but light. Light and shadow. 7. Tanaka Jun’ichirô, Nihon eiga hattatsushi (The History of the Development of Japanese Cinema) (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1980). A chronology of Tanaka’s life, as well as articles and interviews about his career, can be found in Eigashi Kenkyûshi Kankô Iinkai, ed., Eiga e no omoi: Nihon eigashi tanbô (Feelings for Cinema: Investigations in Japanese Film History) (Nitta-chô: Tanaka Jun’ichirô Kinen Nihon Eigashi Fesutibaru Jikkô Iinkai, 1998).

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The director has parted from the old notion in cinema of trying to film “things” and has become conscious of the attempt to take in “light.” The play of light, the melody of light, the speed of light—this is the way films will be made. No matter how much cinema tries to make things its object, the images captured on the film stock are the commemoration of light. In the end, it is just light. Because it is light, it conquers all forms of space and time. Light is not troubled by anything. Light and movement—when these two elements combine, cinematic expression is acomplished. Lichtspiel is realized. Isn’t it only natural to consider A Page of Madness—expressionist and without intertitles, containing only a two- or three-line theme in 6,500 feet of film—as the preeminent guidebook for the trip to cinema’s future essence? (June 17) Translation 3 As I have argued elsewhere,8 the Pure Film Movement and other efforts to reform Japanese cinema in the late 1910s and early 1920s were not developments confined to the sphere of production. In many ways, they were led and shaped by writing on cinema. This could mean criticism written by both dedicated amateurs and those paid for their services since neither film journalism nor film criticism had yet developed a clear distinction between the two. There was a proliferation of film magazines around 1920 constituted by both commercial and coterie publications (dôjinshi), but the line between those two kinds of publishing was not always clear. A coterie magazine such as Kinema junpô could quickly rise to the top of the film journalism world while journals printed by commercial publishers often included amateur criticism. Coterie magazines published outside Tokyo could act as a corrective against the centralization of the film world, focusing on local issues even as they reported on the same movies as the Tokyo journals or invited Tokyo critics to write for them. Chûkyô kinema, based in Nagoya, was one of the most successful local coterie magazines. Founded in 1923 by Karasawa Hiroyuki, a reporter for the Nagoya shinbun, it was later taken over by Tonoshima Sôjin, who was ­Karasawa’s replacement at the paper and later head of publicity at the Daiei studios. Chûkyô kinema lasted for nearly ten years as a result of, ­Tonoshima’s 8. See my book, provisionally titled Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); and “The Word before the Image: Criticism, the Screenplay, and the Regulation of Meaning in Prewar Japanese Film Culture,” in Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, ed. ­Carole Cavanaugh and Dennis Washburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–35.

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efforts but also because of its professional look, its fresh mixture of professional and amateur writers, and a vibrant cultural environment that some have termed “Nagoya modernism.”9 It was the broad interest in new artistic forms of expression that led Chûkyô kinema to create special sections on A Page of Madness in two of its issues and generated packed houses for two special screenings of the film in October 1926. Tonoshima invited a large number of individuals to write on A Page of Madness in pieces ranging in length from one paragraph to several pages. They represent a variety of opinions, but as a whole they offer some of the most astute commentary on the movie, praising its ambitions while also noting its contradictions and shortcomings. Okuya Yoshiyuki’s essay is representative, even though nothing is known about the author. It could be a pen name, but the awkward writing, somewhat inconsistent thinking, and occasionally uncritical use of French film terminology and English words likely indicate an amateur writer. The piece, then, suggests how much these terms had spread throughout Japan and how they were being used. Like the French writers he cites, Okuya defines film as a temporal medium embodied by movement, and thus valorizes a musical or poetic ordering of rhythm in cinematic form. That rhythm, however, must stem from truly cinematic material, which to him is fundamentally visual, emotional, irrational, and non-literary. Cinematic technique should not be subordinated to narrative, description, realism, or even to strict authorial intention, but should investigate material that is essentially cinematic, which to Okuya should be absolutely abstract. Echoing the Shinkankaku school, he seeks in film an objectification of subjective sensation, but he faults A Page of Madness for reducing such sensations to the narrative of mentally unstable characters. Okuya refuses to be dogmatic, however, and while completeness occupies the center of his aesthetic standards, he still praises Kinugasa’s work even if it does not maintain a whole symphonic structure. In what he sees as a transitional era, A Page of Madness offers moments such as the beginning and the custodian’s delusions that are signs of the future, and sufficient for now. While Okuya’s essay remains uneven, partially due to his attempt to offer a series of individual thoughts instead of a continuous argument, it shows flashes of brilliance and a perceptive concern for the contradictions of A Page of Madness coupled with a desire for a more radical cinematic future. It is valuable both as an example of what a well-educated fan thought of the film at the time of its release and as an insightful analysis that can be instructive even today. 9. For more on film and Nagoya modernism, see the special section “Eiga kara mita Nagoya modanizumu” in the journal C&D 126 (October 2001): 21–41.

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Views on A Page of Madness Okuya Yoshiyuki

“This film reveals the potential value of images alone.” I am deeply happy to be able to apply this one line from a Jean Epstein review to A Page of Madness. Cinema is sensual poetry aimed at the musical progression of vision. Standing on this theory, the author (director) [of A Page of Madness] has studied pure cinema aesthetics and, in a revelatory flash of the will opposed to the existing arts’ conception of creation, better substantializes an absolutely abstract theory than The Last Laugh.10 We can say it formulates a new cinematic beauty. Of course, this is the supreme form of “light” in this country, the first pure example of photogénie. We saw it: the exhilarating stampede of temporal motion. No, before that, or perhaps at the same time, sensations were already dashing about madly, piling impression on impression. Illusions and delusions intermix, getting caught in the spinning whirlpool of spatial dreams. In that, absolute abstract beauty makes leaps and bounds. The threedimensional functions of a vigorous cinema are in motion. When this rhythm, running and jumping in a linear fashion, courses throughout the work on the basis of a total unity, that’s when we discover a completeness in the form of a pure film. The question is whether A Page of Madness is complete in this way in its linear dash of rhythm. A Page of Madness is in all respects a transitional film. An incomplete work. But it is nonetheless already in motion, already conscious and hurtling forward with hidden potential in reserve. It flows into the font of our beliefs and our enlightenment like the wind and the rain. One cannot say that we do not see cinema functioning here as a medium of [reality-bound] expression. One can sense the vivid rhythm of cinema in those sections other than the literary moments of A Page of Madness, but they should be seen as essentially used to merely display the leaps of expression. One cannot sense from 10. Okuya uses the katakana term sabusutansharaizu, which I have translated as “substantializes.”

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the raw material, which possesses a literariness that is organized too essentially, a whole, unified rhythm. In other words, as a symphonic composition it is still a trial experiment. The rhythm is most cinematic in the prologue. There figures of motion completely dominate figures of stillness, excluding them. The pulse of emotion heats up the nervous flow and, ignoring everything of substance, radiates out. This is a current dynamically swirling amid chaos, a marvelous allegro. It is good that the rapid rhythm gradually slows or even stops. But when sections that bear essential defects slacken or stagnate because they use raw materials offering no themes or elements calling forth cinematic beauty, that in the end is a compromise. At some point in time the rhythm retreats from impression and provides literary material through the faculty of reason. The bastard face of old realism rises in a rage. In this fashion, technique bears an effect simply as technique and continues to be utilized for the creator’s cinematic critique in the name of description. It is no longer primary. In reality, this condition is not the result of a lack or weakness of expression. It is just the effect of the story itself not possessing as raw material a cinematic theme. That is because the narrative that has been chosen is one kind of literature, fabricated from the unbearable human conflicts of a complex real world—it is thus traditional and as dull as a cow. It is also because it does not have the degree of modesty or frankness to lose itself to the brightness of cinematic beauty. An obsession that does not forgive inattention spreads like a spider’s web. With the last delusion, the rhythm again swells up in a linear fashion, builds up a kind of internal combustion, spreading and extending both smoothly and deftly. The fantasy swings between two kinds of light, establishing a free form of emotion. A Page of Madness signals the birth of a transitional era. We must say that it is incomplete. For the above reasons, it is impossible to perceive an integrated musical rhythm throughout the entire work. At diverse moments, we come in contact with several examples of the absolute beauty of cinema, but the film is organically too weak to unite these isolated instants of rhythm. 108

Translations of Contemporary Reviews

In this way, in my impression, A Page of Madness appears under the atmosphere of the dim “fourth wall” of realism. However, while this worked against my passionate delight, it did not produce despair. As long as A Page of Madness, as a work founded on the theory that film first becomes valuable by becoming a complete visual symphony, proceeds along the rails befitting that theory one must recognize its possible value, even in cases in which one deeply resents it. I am not so foolish as to perform a small escape by just criticizing the unacceptable compromises. Just as we saw with the repeated off-the-mark criticism of L’Inhumaine [dir. Marcel L’Herbier, 1923], this is just the monologue of conventional reason. The objective visualization of the author’s subjectivity (prologue) The crazed dancing girl The old man’s delusions (the last movement, centered on an illusion doubling the target movement) It is these three partial orchestras that are the joy of cinema, the intoxication. In this aspect, the intention of the author has clearly been realized and, at least in terms of an aim-centered rationalism, accomplished. It has managed to superbly exhibit the unique musical beauty of plastic form. Moreover, anything more adventuresome than this would be dangerous at this time in that possible allusions would become too obvious. This is what I think: the author was seeking out oppositions that lay too much in the [characters’] subjective realm. In the sense that this sends off a wave of appeals directed more at pure emotion than reason, enticing an internal emotional movement through our vision, it is on the mark. That said, the eerie rhythm of the deformations itself presumes insanity and through a commonplace and modern method makes us rationally recognize the wild dance of a mad soul. Does that not also create a handicap? With cinema, there is no particular need to ask why something moves. Movement as movement forms the center of rhythm and transcends the cause-effect relations of the representation. What I yearn for is the composition of rhythm through objective elements, the objectification of the subjective image of the author. 109

Appendix A

Let us throw the dirty drosky in the smelter and see the future in the fittings and trappings of a new carriage. We will get drunk on the invigorating beauty of cinema. Toward sensations. Toward emotions. Toward rhythm. While smashing the intentions of the author on my conceptual system, I let out a cheer and gush out a kind of affection, a form of respect. The French “dream of movement” gallantly blossoms through a realization of the theory of Marcel L’Herbier. Now, Japan’s cinema is beginning to bud. A fresh, cool breeze is rushing forth, knocking on this country’s windows. The light steps of a stroll at dawn. Stars shining on the verdure of roadside trees. On this morning, let us take the belt and sword of a knight and listen to the sound of the first volley—the magical operation of human creativity on the mechanism, the beloved child of civilization. Kinugasa Teinosuke, the director of an emerging Japan, a pioneer proceeding on an endless path of light. I cannot help but wish that his epochmaking efforts will establish a certain tomorrow.

110

Appendix B

A Sample of the Shooting Notes of Missing Scenes

The notes for 25 May 1926 (fig. 2) cover two scenes that do not exist in the surviving print and provide a good indication of what these scenes were like. Both are cited in the censorship script and Kawabata Yasunari’s published script, a fact that provides strong evidence that they were in the film on its first release. Shots 1–24 match a scene in reel 5 described in the censorship script that immediately follows the scene in which the inmates are fed and the dishes washed (the broken bowl seen there must symbolically foreshadow the couple’s possible breakup in the next scene), and shots 25–48 appear to correspond to a scene in reel 1 (Kawabata’s script places it immediately after the mother is introduced). Their romantic or melodramatic content represent tones less evident in the print we see today and reinforce how variegated A Page of Madness was originally. Narratively, they tell us a lot more about the relationship between the daughter and her fiancé, showing, for instance, that the mother’s threat to their engagement was more the product of the daughter’s fear than a reality (both Kawabata’s and the censorship script suggest a final scene, again one missing from the extant print, that implies that the two will indeed get married). It thus may have been another case of fear and illusion exceeding reality. Formally, the scenes appear to be classically edited using especially close-ups to narratively analyze space and focus attention on psychology, something that is reinforced by the use of mental flashbacks, already quite conventional in silent cinema of the time. There seems to be little of the formal experimentation evident in other scenes, but motifs do connect the first scene to the rest of the film, something that is apparent in the way the scene differs from what was originally planned. Kinugasa’s papers contain a twopage outline of the first scene that possibly served as the blueprint for shooting. Narratively it is the same (although use is made there of a calendar— and the need to set a wedding date—to underline the fiancé’s determination to still marry), but when filmed the daughter’s location was spatially shifted from the hallway to the veranda outside, separated from the room by a glass door. This allowed Kinugasa to continue the film’s crucial thematization of the borders between inside and outside—the camera actually tracks between the two—and the significant role of doors and windows. The ­incident 111

Appendix B

in the second scene, the manuscript blowing off the table, also relates to entire film because, occuring at the beginning of A Page of Madness, it may give a narrative basis for the film’s title, as the mess the fiancé cites—the pages out of order—can serve to segue into the film out of order. These shooting notes are in many ways illustrative of the rest of the notes contained in Kinugasa’s papers. First, they contain the handwriting of several individuals (one of whom was apparently Sawada Bankô) who do not keep to a strictly consistent style or format even in terms of film terminology (switching, for instance, between close-up, up, and CU). The notes were likely passed around on the set, and the note taker could change from shot to shot (and use different pens), a fact that shows the lack of a clear division of labor. The quickly written and occasionally indecipherable notes were also appended and revised, though often by the same person, suggesting that each note was first speedily jotted down and then supplemented when there was more time on the set or clarification was thought necessary afterward. While most of the notes show that shots were taken in order and noted one by one, the occasionally uneven spacing here indicates that some shots were filmed out of order (the note for shot 18, for instance, was probably written after 17 and 19 and squeezed in between them, the consecutive numbers being added later). This and the inclusion of inserts probably not filmed that day (signified by an N) suggest that the notes were not just the record of what was shot but also a blueprint for how they would finally be put together. They thus give one indication of how these two scenes, missing from the existing print, actually appeared in the final film. In general, the notes speak of a mode of production that was industrious (recording forty-eight shots in one day, one of the more productive days on the A Page of Madness set), collaborative, makeshift, and brimming with tension and enthusiasm. The process was not completely free of economies of rationalization, however, as these two scenes, if not some of the shots as well, were shot out of narrative order according to similarities in location and content. This also reminds us that A Page of Madness was a film subject to varying, if not sometimes contradictory, systems of production and narration. 25 May 1926 The Fiancé’s Room 1) Fade in. The fiancé. His friend approaches him, whispering the daughter’s secret. 2) Fiancé (listening to the friend’s story) close-up N) Insert of the insane wife 3) Friend (The father is a custodian) close-up 4) Fiancé (feeling heavyhearted) close-up 112

A Sample of the Shooting Notes

N) Flash of the custodian1 5) Conversation between fiancé and friend. The camera goes out to the outdoor veranda and there, sitting on the side bench listening to them inside, is the daughter. (Lateral track) 6) The friend (That’s bad, isn’t it?) close-up 7) Daughter (deep in thought) close-up 8) Fiancé’s perplexed face (CU) 9) The worried daughter (CU) N) Flash of the insane wife 10) The worried daughter (father) (CU) N) The custodian 11) Daughter (thinking of her father) (CU) 12) The fiancé in thought. His friend lights a cigarette, smiling, and spots the daughter on the veranda (LS) 13) The daughter on the veranda hangs her head (through the glass door) (MC) 14) The friend notices the daughter and, embarrassed, says “I think I’ll go now.” (MC) 15) The fiancé turns toward his friend. “You’re going?” 16) The friend turns toward the fiancé and, wrapping up his book, says “Excuse me” and leaves. 17) Anguished fiancé (close-up) 18) The daughter through the glass door and the fiancé inside (close tracking shot, three times) 19) The fiancé flips through pages of a book. (CU of book) expression of thought 20) The fiancé looks up and smiles, “That’s not important.” He then looks towards the veranda and notices the daughter. 21) The fiancé calls to the daughter through the glass door: “What are you doing there? Come inside!” (close-up) 22) “What are you doing? Come inside!” The fiancé opens the door and leads her inside. 23) The fiancé leads the daughter inside. She sits on the sofa. “What’s wrong?” “I think I’ll be going. I have an appointment, so I think I’ll go.” The daughter brushes him off. The fiancé sees her off. (long shot) 24) The fiancé looks on as the daughter leaves. He scratches his head at the unfortunate situation. (close-up)

Inside the Cell 25) The wife asleep (doubled with the bars seen by the custodian) 26) The wife asleep (tracking shot) [indecipherable word]

1. In contemporary Japanese usage, flash (furasshu) referred less to a flashback (although that was one meaning) than to a single shot or set of shots that are short and quickly edited.

113

Appendix B

The Fiancé’s Room 27) The fiancé takes out a book of plays. From the lightning on the window to the fiancé (tracking shot), slight double exposure with 25 and 26. 28) CU clock 29) Daughter puts on clothes in front of a mirror. Fiancé looks on with pleasure. Lightning. MCU 30) The fiancé’s roughly written manuscript and his drawing of the daughter (CU) 31) The daughter says she is leaving but suddenly sees the drawing. Saying “Oh, no!” she goes and takes the paper. 32) The daughter approaches the fiancé to take the paper and goes to the window (veranda) to throw it out. 33) Daughter. The daughter tries to go out onto the stormy street. She hesitates: “What a horrible rainstorm! What am I to do?” (close-up) 34) Daughter and fiancé. (Daughter looks to be truly at a loss [from outside]. The fiancé goes outside to look: “This won’t do. Tonight, you stay here.” Daughter’s confounded face, continuing to think.) 35) Daughter and fiancé. (The fiancé tells the daughter, “It’s raining, so stay the night.” Daughter: “I can’t do that.” The fiancé says, “Well . . . but there is something [indecipherable word] I want to give you,” and looks off.) 36) Ring (sack [indecipherable word]) (CU) 37) Fiancé and daughter. “Guess what this is.” “I wonder.” close-up 38) Daughter. “I can’t imagine what it could be.” Close-up. 39) Manuscript pages fly in the wind. 40) Fiancé. The fiancé picks up the manuscript. 41) Daughter. She looks at the fiancé’s figure and laughs hysterically. 42) Fiancé. Laughed at by the daughter, the fiancé asks, “Would anyone laugh at such a thing? But . . .” He hands over the ring sack. 43) Daughter. The laughing daughter receives the ring sack. Close-up 44) Daughter and ring. The hands of the daughter open the ring sack. The shining ring. (Close-up) 45) Daughter. The daughter looks at the ring but suddenly recalls her mother. N) Flash of mother (Book inserted in place of N) 46) The daughter thinking of her mother. Looking toward the fiancé, she smiles. 47) Fiancé throws away pieces of paper. 48) The fiancé looks back at the daughter and says, “This is a mess” 114

Film Credits for Kurutta ichipeiji

Except where noted, these credits were taken from a print of the film. They largely confirm those given by Mariann Lewinsky-Sträuli in her Eine verrükte Seite: Stummfilm und filmische Avantgarde in Japan (A Page of Madness: Silent Film and the Cinematic Avant-Garde in Japan) (Zürich: Chronos, 1997). See chapter six for a discussion of the problem of who wrote the screenplay. Alternative Japanese romanization: Kurutta ippeiji English title:

A Page of Madness A Crazy Page

Production: Shinkankakuha Eiga Renmei and Nashonaru Âto Firumusha Director:

Kinugasa Teinosuke

Original Story: Kawabata Yasunari Screenplay: Kawabata Yasunari,* Inuzuka Minoru,* Sawada Bankô,* and Kinugasa Teinosuke* Director of photography:

Sugiyama Kôhei

Art direction: Hayashi Kasaku and Ozaki Chiba Lighting:

Uchida Masao

Editing: Numazaki Umeko** Developing:

Abe Shigemasa (Genpachirô)* and Tomita Jûtarô***

Directorial assistants:

Koishi Eiichi, Ôsugi Masami, and Murata Takerô*

Camera assistant:

Tsuburaya Eiichi (Eiji)

Titles:

Takeda Kiyoshi

115

Film Credits

Additional crew:

Gotô Yoshio****

Cast: Inoue Masao (the custodian), Nakagawa Yoshie (his wife), Iijima Ayako (their daughter), Nemoto Hiroshi (her fiancé), Seki Misao (the chief doctor), Takase Minoru (patient A), Takamatsu Kyôsuke (Kinnosuke) (patient B, the bearded “groom”), Tsuboi Tetsu (patient C), Minami Eiko (the dancer), Takiguchi Shintarô (the gateman’s son),*/***** Akimoto Umeko (a patient),* Oldenbourg (a foreign doctor),***** Kawai Kimiko,* Kiso Jûsaburô,*/*** Minakami Jôtarô,* and Okajima Tsuyako****** 35mm, silent, black and white First original print: 2,142 meters (7,002 feet), 103 minutes at 18 frames per second Second original print: 2,128 meters (6,956 feet), 103 minutes at 18 frames per second Third original print: 2,135 meters (6,979 feet), 103 minutes at 18 frames per second Existing print at National Film Center: 1,617 meters (5,286 feet), 78 minutes at 18 frames per second Sound version: Music performed by the Modern Bamboo Flute Ensemble, composed by Muraoka Minoru, and arranged by Kurashima Yo, 1971, 59 minutes at 24 frames per second First public screening:

Aoyama Kaikan, Tokyo, 10 July 1926

Commercial release:

Shinjuku Musashinokan, Asakusa Tokyokan, and Osaka Shôchikuza, 24 September 1926

Awards: Fourth place, Kinema Junpô’s Ten Best Japanese Films of 1926 (behind Abe Yutaka’s The Woman Who Touched the Legs, Murata Minoru’s The Sun, and Abe Yutaka’s Mer­maid on Land) Best Film of 1926, All-Kansai Film Society

*Kawabata Yasunari’s “Kurutta ippeiji satsuei nikki” **Kanô Ryûichi’s “Kinugasa Teinosuke to sono shûhen” ***Kinugasa Teinosuke’s “Watashi no rirekisho” **** Bandô Tetsuo, Tokushima eiga sandaiki (Tokushima-ken Kyôikukai Shuppanbu, 1965) *****Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Waga eiga no seishun ******Takenaka Tsutomu’s “Nihon eiga ôdan 27: Boseki ga ibikisuru koro/Rokuhei, Itarô no sekai 1”

116

Selected Bibliography

Works by Kinugasa Teinosuke Kinugasa Teinosuke. “Ano koro no koto” (In Those Days). In Yokomitsu Riichi no bun­ gaku to shôgai (Yokomitsu Riichi’s Life and Literature). Ed. Yura Tetsuji, 181–84. Tokyo: Ôfûsha, 1977. ———. “Le cinéma japonais vers 1920” (Japanese Cinema around 1920). Cahiers du cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) 166–67 (mai-juin 1965): 43–47. ———. “Kinugasa Eiga Renmei no sôritsu” (The Founding of the Kinugasa Film League). In Nihon eiga sakuhin taikan (Complete Catalog of Japanese Films), vol. 4, 25–26. Tokyo: Kinema Junpôsha, 1960. ———. “Kurutta ichipeiji shimatsu” (A Page of Madness from Start to Finish). Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 8–9. ———. “Shinkankakuha o eranda wake” (Why I Chose the Shinkankaku School). Shibai to kinema (Theater and Cinema) 3.10 (October 1926): 14–15. ———. Waga eiga no seishun (My Youth in Film). Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1977. A partial French translation by Lewinsky-Sträuli is listed below. ———. “Watashi no rirekisho” (My Résumé). In Watashi no rirekisho: Bunkajin 10 (My Résumé: Cultural Figures 10). Ed. Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 375–454. Tokyo: ­Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 1984. Kinugasa Teinosuke. Uchida Kisao, Kimura Chiyoo, Okazaki Masao, Satô Yukio, ­Iwasaki Akira, Furukawa Roppa, and Kondô Keiichi. “Kurutta ichipeiji gappyôkai sokkiroku” (Transcript of the Group Evaluation of A Page of Madness). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.2 (August 1926): 59–63. Niogret, Hubert. “Entretien avec Teinosuke Kinugasa” (Interview with Kinugasa Teinosuke). Positif (Positive) 150 (May 1973): 69–75.

Works by Kawabata Yasunari Kawabata Yasunari. Kawabata Yasunari zenshû (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari). 37 vols. Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1980–82. ———. “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.1 (July 1926): 122–31. Reprinted in Kawabata, Kawabata Yasunari zenshû. ———. “Kurutta ichipeiji satsuei yodan” (An Account of the Filming of A Page of Mad­ ness). Geki to eiga (Drama and Film) 4.8 (September 1926): N.p.

117

Selected Bibliography

Contemporary Reviews and Commentaries “Eigakai kakushin no tame” (For Reforming the Film World). Hôchi shinbun, 11 April 1926, evening ed., 11. Fujii Tetsurô. “Kurutta ichipeiji o mite” (Viewing A Page of Madness). Kyûshû nippô, 19 October 1926, evening ed., 3. Fujimori Seikichi. “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.3 (September 1926): 14–15. Hitomi Naoyoshi. “Kankaku eiga wa odoru” (Impressionist Film Dances). Engeki eiga (Theater and Film) 1.8 (August 1926): 88–90. I My Me. “Shinkankaku no eiga Kurutta ichipeiji” (The Shinkankaku Film A Page of Madness). Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, 3 July 1926, 6. “Ikiru tameni umareta: Shinkankakuha no eiga” (Made to Live: The Shinkankaku School Film). Tokyo asahi shinbun, 6 June 1926, 4. “Inoue o uwaoki ni” (Bringing in Inoue). Tokyo asahi shinbun, 11 April 1926, 5. Isamu. “Shin eiga hihyô: Kurutta ichipeiji” (New Film Reviews: A Page of Madness). Miyako shinbun, 24 September 1926, 9. Ishiguro Sadao. “Komatta Shinkankaku” (Problematic New Impressions). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 45. Ishimaki Yoshio. “Kamera no yûgi” (The Play of the Camera). Chûkyô kinema (­Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 44–45. Itô Shiei. “Shigeki o motomemasu” (Seeking Stimulation). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 44. Itô Yukio. “Hôga suntetsu” (Warnings for Japanese Film). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.2 (August 1926): 84–85. Iwasaki Akira. “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness). Kinema junpô (The Movie Times) 243 (21 October 1926): 48. ———. “Zatsu” (Miscellanea). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 19 (July 1926): 37. Kataoka Teppei. “Kurutta ichipeiji ni tsuite” (On A Page of Madness). Engeki eiga (Theater and Film) 1.7 (July 1926): 30–34. Katô Eiichi. “Eigatekina Kurutta ichipeiji” (The Cinematic A Page of Madness). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 45. Kikuchi Kan. “Eiga zakkan” (Miscellaneous Views on Film). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.5 (November 1926): 20. ———. “Eigakai jiji” (Current Topics in the Film World). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.2 (August 1926): 12–13. Kisaragi Bin. “Rokugatsu no inshô” (Impressions from June). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 19 (July 1926): 73–75. Kisaragi Shinju. “Iwayuru Shinkankakuha eiga” (The So-called Shinkankaku School Film). Chûgai shôgyô shinpô, 28 June 1926, 7. Kodera Yukichi. “Shin no eigageki sakusha ide yo” (Calling for a New Film Dramatist). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.5 (November 1926): 15–17. “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness). Tokyokan shûhô, 24 September 1926. Miyamori Kikujirô. “Kurutta ichipeiji no chiiteki kachi” (The Positional Value of A Page of Madness). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 24 (December 1926): 54–55. 118

Selected Bibliography

Moriyama Toyosaburô. “Kurutta ichipeiji gûkan” (Musings on A Page of Madness). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 21 (September 1926): 61–62. Nakanishi Kazuo. “Eiga manpo” (Cinema Strolling). Eiga sekai (Film World) 4.5 (November 1926): 42–43. Naoki Sanjûgo. “Hankan o kaubeki sûkô” (Trends That Should Bring Hostility). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.2 (August 1928): 32–33. ———. “Shinpen eigakai dorobanashi (sono san)” (New Dirty Tales of the Film World: Number Three). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.5 (November 1926): 22–25. ———. “Shinpen eigakai dorobanashi (sono yon)” (New Dirty Tales of the Film World: Number Four). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.6 (December 1926): 19–23. Niwa Shin. “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.8 (August 1926): 54–55. Okuya Yoshiyuki. “Kurutta ichipeiji kan” (Views on A Page of Madness). Chûkyô ­kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 26–28. Osanai Kaoru. “Nihon eiga no tame ni” (For Japanese Cinema). Tokyo asahi shinbun, 28 June 1926, 4. Ôshima Tokurô. “Eigadô sanpo” (Strolling the Film Way). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 21 (September 1926): 42–43. Sasaki Shigemoto. “Eiga hahen” (Film Fragments). Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.5 (November 1926): 18–19. Satô Yukio. “Manpitsu” (Stray Thoughts). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 19 (July 1926): 68–69. Shimizu Tamaaki. “Kyûjin to raidôsei” (The Insane and Following the Crowd). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 44. Takahashi Nobuo. “Kinugasa Teinosuke-shi e no kôkaijô” (A Public Call to ­Kinugasa Teinosuke). Kinema junpô (The Movie Times) 249 (1 January 1927): 115–16. Tanaka Jun’ichirô. “Hyôgen shugi no eiga” (An Expressionist Film). Hôchi shinbun, 23 June 1926, 4. Tateishi Seifû. “Watashi wa hajimete ‘Nihon eiga’ no yoi mono o mita” (I Saw a Good Japanese Film for the First Time). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 23 (November 1926): 43–47. Toda. “Kyokugen chokugen” (Twisted Talk, Straight Talk). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (1926): 29. Tonoshima Sôjin. “Kurutta ichipeiji sonota” (A Page of Madness and Other Matters). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.8 (August 1926): 59–61. Toshima Sôzô. “Shukufuku shiyô” (Let’s Celebrate). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 44. Yamamoto Rokuyô. “Yamu enai koto” (Something Inevitable). Eiga ôrai (Film Traffic) 23 (November 1926): 36–37. Yoshi. “Kurutta ichipeiji o miru” (Viewing A Page of Madness). Yomiuri shinbun, 28 June 1926, 9. Yoshida Yasuji. “Nansensu” (Nonsense). Chûkyô kinema (Nagoya Cinema) 2.9 (September 1926): 46.

119

Selected Bibliography

Historical Accounts in Japanese Gerow, Aaron. “Eiga no ta no kanôsei: Kurutta ichipeiji no juyô to eizô no kôdo-ka” (The Other Possibilities of Cinema: The Reception of A Page of Madness and the Codification of the Image). Gengo bunka (Meiji Gakuin Daigaku Gengo Bunka ­Kenkyûjo) (Linguistic Culture [Meiji Gakuin University Linguistic Culture Research Center]) 15 (1998): 66–80. Iijima Tadashi. “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness). In Eiga shijô besuto 200 shirîzu: Nihon eiga 200 (The Best 200 of Film History Series: Japanese Cinema 200), 20–21. Tokyo: Kinema Junpôsha, 1972. Itô Shiei. Nagoya eigashi (A History of Film in Nagoya). N.p., 1980. Iwasaki Akira. Eiga ga wakakatta toki (When Cinema Was Young). Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1980. ———. “Kinugasa Teinosuke no seishun” (Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Youth). Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 4–7. Kanô Ryûichi. “Kinugasa Teinosuke to sono shûhen” (Kinugasa Teinosuke and His Surroundings). In Kôza Nihon eiga 2: Musei eiga no kansei (Lectures on Japanese Cinema 2: The Perfection of Silent Film). Ed. Iwamura Shôhei, Satô Tadao, Shindô Kaneto, Tsurumi Shunsuke, and Yamada Yôji, 94–115. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986. Kawanishi Ran. “Nôbyôin no shizukesa: Kurutta ichipeiji” (The Silence of the Mental Hospital: A Page of Madness). Shinchô (New Tide) 89.6 (June 1992): 278–79. Kawamoto Saburô. “Kawabata Yasunari no eiga: Kurutta ichipeiji o megutte” (­Kawabata Yasunari’s Cinema: On A Page of Madness). Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû (Japanese Literature: Studies of Interpretations and Educational Materials) 32.15 (December 1987): 58–61. Kobayashi Ichirô. “Kurutta ichipeiji ron” (Analysis of A Page of Madness). In Kawabata Yasunari kenkyû sôsho 3: Jitsuzon no kashô (Kawabata Yasunari Research Series 3: Existence and Appearance). Ed. Kawabata Bungaku Kenkyûkai, 69–82. Tokyo: Kyôiku Shuppan Sentâ, 1977. Kyoto Shinbunsha, ed. Kyoto no eiga 80-nen no ayumi (The Eighty-Year History of Kyoto Cinema). Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha, 1980. Nada Hisashi. “Nihon kojin eiga no rekishi (senzen hen 1): Kinugasa Teinosuke to iu senpai” (History of Japanese Personal Film (Prewar Edition 1): Our Precursor Kinugasa Teinosuke). Fs 1 (1992): 68–75. ———. “Senzen Nihon no jikken eiga: Nômitsuna deai no ba toshite no Kurutta ­ichipeiji” (Prewar Japanese Experimental Film: A Page of Madness as a Space for Solid Encounters). Imêji fôramu 155 (December 1992): 90–94. Nakatani Masao. “Kinugasa Shiryô ni tsuite: Nihon eigashi o kataru kantoku no ichiji shiryô” (On the Kinugasa Papers: Primary Documents of a Director Narrating Japanese Film History). In Shinema no seiki: Eiga tanjô 100-nen hakurankai (A Cinema Century: An Exhibition on Film’s One-Hundredth Birthday). Ed. ­Kinema Junpôsha, 64–67. Kawasaki: Kawasaki Shimin Myûjiamu, 1995.

120

Selected Bibliography

———. Nokosareshi mono: Taishô-ki no Kinugasa Teinosuke shiryô (Things Left Behind: Documents from Kinugasa Teinosuke in the Taishô Era). Tokyo: NHK Hôsô Bunka Kenkyûjo, 1997. Okumura Masaru. “Kurutta ichipeiji” (A Page of Madness). In Eiga 100 monogatari: ­Nihon eiga hen, 1921–1995 (Cinema 100 Story: Japanese Film Edition, 1921–1995). Ed. Okano Toshiyuki, 22–23. Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1995. Park Sungbae. “Kurutta ichipeiji no monogatari to shudai” (The Narrative and Themes of A Page of Madness). Eigagaku (Film Study) 19 (2005): 122–37. Sasô Tsutomu. 1923: Mizoguchi Kenji Chi to rei (1923: Mizoguchi Kenji’s Blood and Soul). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 1991. Satô Tadao. “Kinugasa Teinosuke no Kurutta ichipeiji to Jûjirô” (Kinugasa ­Teinosuke’s A Page of Madness and Crossroads). Kinema junpô (The Movie Times), 669 (1 November 1975), 151–52. ———. Nihon eiga no kyoshôtachi (Masters of Japanese Cinema). Tokyo: Gakuyô Shobô, 1979. ———. “Sakuhin kenkyû: Kurutta ichipeiji” (Film Analysis: A Page of Madness). ­Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 12–13. Suzuki Akinari. Jinsei shikatabanashi: Kinugasa Teinosuke to sono jidai (Tales on Living Life: Kinugasa Teinsuke and His Age). Tokyo: Waizu Shuppan, 2001. Suzuki Tadashi. “Kurutta ichipeiji o mite” (Viewing A Page of Madness). Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 24. Takano Etsuko. “Kurutta ichipeiji no koto” (On A Page of Madness). Iwanami Hall 8 (1975): 22. Takenaka Tsutomu, “Nihon eiga ôdan 27: Boseki ga ibikisuru koro/Rokuhei, Itarô no sekai 1” (Traversing Japanese Cinema 27: When Tombstones Snored/The World of Rokuhei and Itarô), Kinema junpô (The Movie Times), 640 (15 September 1974): 116–20. Tanaka Jun’ichirô. Nihon eiga hattatsushi (The History of the Development of Japanese Cinema). 5 vols. Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1976. Toeda Hirokazu. “‘Shinkankakuha Eiga Renmei’ to Yokomitsu Riichi: 1920-nendai Nihon ni okeru geijutsu kôryû no ichisokumen” (The New Impressionist Film League and Yokomitsu Riichi: One Aspect of Artistic Exchange in 1920s Japan). Kokubungaku kenkyû (Studies in Japanese Literature) 127 (March 1999): 33–44. ———. “Shinkankakuha no hikari to kage” (The Light and Shadows of the Shin­ kankaku School). Bungaku (Literature) 3.6 (November–December 2002): 123–32. Yamaguchi Masao. Shikake to shite no bunka (Culture as a Contrivance). Tokyo: ­Seidosha, 1980. Yamamoto Kikuo. Nihon eiga ni okeru gaikoku eiga no eikyô (The Influence of Foreign Film on Japanese Cinema). Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shippanbu, 1983.

Historical Accounts in Non-Japanese Languages Abel, Jonathan E. “Different from Difference: Revisiting Kurutta ichipeiji.” Asian Cin­ ema 12.2 (fall–winter 2001): 72–96. 121

Selected Bibliography

Bassan, Raphaël. “Une page folle” (A Page of Madness). Telecine 199 (May 1975): 26. Burch, Noël. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Rev. and ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Cazdyn, Eric. The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Cohen, Robert. “A Page of Madness.” Film Quarterly 29.4 (summer 1976): 47–51. Gardner, William O. “New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films and Japanese Modernism.” Cinema Journal 43.3 (spring 2004): 59–78. Gerow, Aaron. “Celluloid Masks: The Cinematic Image and the Image of Japan.” Iris 16 (spring 1993): 23–36. ———. “The Word before the Image: Criticism, the Screenplay, and the Regulation of Meaning in Prewar Japanese Film Culture.” In Word and Image in Japanese Cinema. Ed. Carole Cavanaugh and Dennis Washburn, 3–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Gillett, John. “Japanese Notebook.” Sight and Sound 42.1 (winter 1972–73): 27–30, 43. Goldberg, Ruth. “Demons in the Family: Tracking the Japanese ‘Uncanny Mother Film’ from A Page of Madness to Ringu,” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Eds. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 382-383. Oxford, U.K: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Gow, Gordon. “16mm.” Film and Filming 19.9 (June 1973): 67–68. Lewinsky, Mariann. Eine verrükte Seite: Stummfilm und filmische Avantgarde in Japan (A Page of Madness: Silent Film and the Cinematic Avant-Garde in Japan). Zurich: Chronos, 1997. Lewinsky-Sträuli, Marianne. “Une avant-garde au Japon: Une page folle” (An AvantGarde in Japan: A Page of Madness). Archives 15 (1988): 1–15. Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Petric, Vlada. “A Page of Madness: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Silent Cinema.” Film Criticism 8.1 (fall 1983): 86–106. Peterson, James. “A War of Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa’s Page of Madness and the Japanese Avant-Garde of the 1920s.” Cinema Journal 29.1 (fall 1989): 36–53. Rajakaruna, D. A. Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Crazy Page and Crossroads. Sri Lanka: Kandy Offset, 1998. Richie, Donald. “Japan’s First Experimental Cinema: Two Films by Teinosuke Kinugasa.” Art and Cinema 1.2 (fall 1986): 3–4. Sharp, Jasper. “Kurutta Ippeiji/A Page of Madness.” In The Cinema of Japan and Korea. Ed. Justin Bowyer, 11–20. London: Wallflower, 2004. ———. “A Page of Madness.” Midnight Eye. http://www.midnighteye.com/features/ silentfilm_pt1.shtml. Tarratt, Margaret. “A Page of Madness.” Films and Filming 19.12 (October 1973): 50. Tessier, Max. “Yasujiro Ozu et le cinema japonais a la fin du muet” (Yasujiro Ozu and the Japanese Cinema at the End of the Silent Era). Ecran (Screen) 86 (15 ­De­cember 1979): 30–37.

122

Index

Abe Yutaka: 47 Abel, Jonathan E.: 4, 66, 76, 90–91 absolute film: 1, 56 Akasaka: 8 Akutagawa Ryûnosuke: 93n17 All-Kanto Cinema Association: 45 Ao no Jikken (music ensemble): 52n14 Aoikan: 8 Aomori: 47n9 Aoyama Kaikan: 45, 54n19 Asahi shinbun (newspaper): 23, 45 Asakusa: 9 avant-garde cinema: 4, 10–11, 20 avant-garde, Europe: 15, 20, 24, 67 avant-garde, Japan: 11–12, 16, 20n4 Bakhtin, Mikhail: 85n7 Bandô Tsumasaburô: 9, 18, 69 benshi: 9, 45–46, 53, 57–58, 61–63 Black Pirate, The (film): 46 Blood and Soul (Chi to rei) (film): 10 Blue Bird, The (stage play): 46 Bluebird films: 10, 17, 58 Bordwell, David: 66n5, 71 Borzage, Frank: 46 Bread (film): 46 Brenon, Herbert: 46 bundan (literary establishment): 13 Bungei jidai (periodical): 13 Bungei shunjû (periodical): 13, 103 Burch, Noël: 67, 70–71, 76, 79–80, 86 Bürger, Peter: 11 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (film): 1, 3, 10, 20, 80 Cahn, Bill: 52n14 Cannes Film Festival: 55 capitalism: 5, 7, 15, 23

Catelain, Jacques: 10 Cazdyn, Eric: 4n16, 53n15, 85, 97, 98 censorship: 42, 43n10 Chaplin, Charlie: 36 Chiba Kameo: 15 Chihaya Akiko: 55n22 Chitose Gekijô: 46n8, 47n9 Chûkyô kinema (periodical): 46n8, 47n9, 64, 70, 97, 100, 105–6 cinema: 6, 14, 44; cultural status of: 23–24, 93; and literature: 63, 93, 97; and modernity: 98–99 constructivism: 12 Cooper, Merian C.: 45 copyright: 28 Crossroads (Jûjirô) (film): 55 cubism: 12, 47, 48fig6, 82 dadaism: 12, 16, 47 Daiei (film studio): 34n3, 105 Dancing Tom Thumb (Odoru Issun Bôshi) (film): 54 Death of a Younger Sister (Imôto no shi) (film): 17 Delluc, Louis: 10 Diary of Chûji’s Travels (Chûji tabi nikki) (film): 43 Dulac, Germaine: 80–81 Earth Smiles, The (Daichi wa hohoemu) (film): 69 Edogawa Ranpo: 54 Eiga engeki (periodical): 21 Eiga jidai (periodical): 21, 26, 29, 33, 61 Eiga ôrai (periodical): 11n8 Eiga zuihitsu (periodical): 20n4 Eisenstein, Sergei: 20 Engeki eiga (periodical): 17, 21–22 123

Index

Epstein, Jean: 107 European art: 47 European cinema: 8, 10, 16, 20, 58, 63, 67, 103 Evening Bell, The (Yû no kane) (film): 69 experimental film, Japan: 5, 70 Fairbanks, Douglas: 46, 67n5 Fashionable Manliness (Otokodate bayari) (film): 70 fauvism: 12 Fièvre (film): 10 film critics/criticism: 5, 9, 10, 20, 57, 60, 64, 100–101, 103, 105–6; and Japanese cinema: 9, 17, 56–57, 100–102; support of A Page of Madness: 45–46, 54–57, 64, 100, 102–3, 106 film theory: 10, 20n4, 56, 58, 67–69, 101, 107, 109–10 “Fly, A” (“Hae”) (short story): 13 Fordism: 8, 10–11, 36, 40 formalism: 14, 59 Fowler, Edward: 13 French cinema: 9–10, 61, 80 French Impressionism (film movement): 10, 14, 20, 40, 45, 67–70, 80–81, 106 Fujii Tetsurô: 60n19 Fukuoka: 46 Furukawa Roppa: 61, 63 Futagawa Buntarô: 69 futurism: 12, 16, 23–24, 47, 82 Galerie des monsters, La (film): 10 Gance, Abel: 1, 10, 20, 67 Gardner, William O.: 14, 82, 84 Gate of Hell (Jigokumon) (film): 55 Geki to eiga (periodical): 66 gendaigeki (film genre): 2, 18, 24 German cinema: 10, 14, 56, 101 German Expressionism (film movement): 10, 12, 16, 20, 23–24, 80 Ginza: 9 Godzilla: 35 Grass (film): 45, 60n21 Great Kusunoki, The (Dai Nan-kô) (film): 22, 24 Green, Alfred: 46 124

Hansen, Miriam: 81–82 Hayashi Chôjirô (Hasegawa Kazuo): 55 “Head and Belly” (“Atama narabi ni hara”) (short story): 56n3, 73, 76 Higuchi Kyokurô: 46 Hirato Renkichi: 47 Hirohito (Shôwa emperor): 7 History of the Development of Japanese Cinema, The (book): 104 Hôchi shinbun (newspaper): 23–24, 100, 103 Hollywood (American) cinema: 6, 8, 10–11, 34, 36, 46, 52, 53n15, 58, 62–63, 66, 79, 83 Home Ministry: 42, 44 Honjô Film Distribution Company (Honjô Trading): 42n7, 45, 47 Ichikawa Ennosuke: 18, 23, 56, 102 “Ideas of a Flower Garden” (“­Hanazono no shisô”) (short story): 14 Iimura Ayako: 34 Iketani Shinzaburô: 22, 27 image, visual: 52, 62–64, 95–97, 107 In the Nursery (music ensemble): 52n14 Inagaki Hiroshi: 11, 70 independent film production: 9, 18–19, 24, 55, 101; Naoki Sanjûgo’s strategy for: 21–22 Inhumaine, L’: 10, 109 Inoue Masao: 3n13, 17, 22–27, 34–35, 37, 104 intertitles: 61–63 Inuzuka Minoru: 24, 26–28, 31–32, 35n6, 44, 66 Irene (film): 46 Ishida Kyokka: 46 Ishii Masami: 46 Ishimaki Yoshio: 59n16 Itô Daisuke: 11, 19, 22, 43, 70 Itô Shiei: 47n9 Iwanami Hall: 42 Iwasaki Akira: 45, 53, 56, 58–59, 61, 100–101 Izu Dancer, The (Izu no odoriko) (novel): 13 Izumi Torao: 46

Index

Japan Motion Picture Producers Association (JMPPA): 18–19 Japanese cinema: 8, 42, 65–67, 71, 77, 79, 100–110; editing in: 68–70; and flourishes: 70n14, 71, 95; inferiority of: 9, 23, 46, 57; influences from foreign film: 68–70; and literature: 57, 64, 97; reform/modernization of: 8, 10, 17, 23, 45, 61–62, 82, 93, 105, 110 Japanese film industry: 9, 24, 36, 57, 101; Four Company Alliance: 18–19 jidaigeki (film genre): 2n8, 11, 18, 24–25, 55, 69–70 Jikken Kôbô: 67n13 Johnston, Phillip: 52n14 Kabuki theater: 18 Kansai region: 44, 45n3 Kantô Earthquake: 7–8, 15 Kantô region: 42n7 Karasawa Hiroyuki: 105 Kataoka Teppei: 13–14, 21–23, 27–28, 61, 64, 82, 85 Kawabata Yasunari: 1, 3, 13–14, 34, 35n4, 47, 59; involvement in A Page of Madness: 22, 26–29, 30–33, 56, 91, 94, 100, 102; script for A Page of Madness: 22, 26–27, 29, 31, 33, 40–41, 54, 111 Kawamoto Saburô: 84 Kean (film): 10 Kikuchi Kan: 13, 18, 47, 57, 103 Kinema junpô (periodical): 10, 11n8, 46n7–8, 47, 56, 61, 100–101, 104–5 Kinema Kurabu (movie theater, Kobe): 46, 54n19 Kinema shûhô (periodical): 104 Kinoshita Shirô: 46 Kinugasa Film League: 55 Kinugasa Teinosuke: 1, 3–4, 5n19, 6, 11, 20–28, 31–35, 37, 40, 42–47, 52–58, 60–61, 63–67, 69–71, 76, 79–81, 84–86, 90n11, 91–92, 95, 98, 100, 102–3, 106, 110–11; career of: 17–19, 54–55; critical appraisal of: 17, 53, 56–60, 100, 102–3, 106, 110; foreign film, relations with: 20, 81;

memoirs of: 26, 28, 33, 37, 40–41, 84; personal papers of: 28, 42, 47n9, 111–12; Shinkankaku school, relations with: 18, 21–23, 26, 44 Kirakukan (movie theater): 46, 54n19 Kisaragi Bin: 3 Kishida Kunio: 13, 22, 27, 44, 54n20 Kishida Kyôko: 13 Kobe: 44, 45n3, 46 kôdan (storytelling form): 57 Koishi Eiichi: 33n10 Kokkatsu (film studio): 17–18, 22 Kuleshov, Lev: 40 Kume Masao: 18 Kurahara Korehito: 11n8 Kure Shûzô: 90n11 Kurosawa Akira: 5 Kyoto: 18–21, 24, 26–27, 28n3, 31, 44, 45n3, 46, 94 Kyoto University: philosophy school: 20n4 Lamarre, Thomas: 93n17 language: and cinema: 62–63, 97 Last Laugh, The (film): 1, 10, 62, 81, 107 Late Mathais Pascal, The (film): 10 Lewinsky(-Straüli), Mariann: 41, 66n4 L’Herbier, Marcel: 9–10, 67, 109–10 Lippit, Seiji M.: 81 literature, Japan: 8, 10, 12–13, 16, 92–93, 97; modernism literature: 15–16; proletarian literature: 13, 15, 85 Living Corpse, The (Ikeru shikabane) (film): 17 Living Doll, A (Ikeru ningyô) (novel): 13n4 Maeterlinck, Maurice: 46 Makino Mamoru: 20n4 Makino Productions (film studio): 18, 25, 34–35 Makino Shôzô: 18–19; “Man Who Did Not Smile, The” (“Warawanu otoko”) (short story): 94, 96 Manchurian Motion Picture Association (film studio): 101 Manicure Girl, The (film): 46, 67 125

Index

Matsuzawa mental hospital: 22, 90n11 Mavo (art movement): 11 Meiji era: 12, 57n7, 90, 104 Mermaid on Land (Riku no ningyo) (film): 47 Midorikawa Harunosuke (Noda Kôgo): 62 Minami Eiko: 34 Miyako shinbun (newspaper): 103 Mizoguchi Kenji: 10, 35 modernism: 7–8, 63, 84, 92, 97; artistic modernism: 47; of Europe: 17; in Nagoya: 106; vernacular modernism: 11, 81–82 modernity: 4–7, 14–15, 59, 66, 81–82, 84–86; competing modernities: 8, 11, 82, 90, 98 montage: 8, 11n8, 40, 67–68, 70 Mori Iwao: 45 Moussinac, Léon: 10 Murata Minoru: 9, 17–18, 68 Murata Takerô: 33n10 Murayama Tomoyoshi: 8, 11n9 Murnau, F. W.: 1, 20, 81 Musashinokan (movie theater): 45–46, 50fig8, 52, 54n19, 100 Musser, Charles: 81 Nada Hisashi: 70 Nagoya: 44, 46n8, 47, 57, 64, 100, 105 Nagoya Industrial High School: 47n9 Nagoya shinbun (newspaper): 105 Nakagawa Shigemi: 73 Nakagawa Yoshie: 34–35, 103 Nakatani Masanao: 28 Nakayama Donkai: 47 Nanmeiza (movie theater): 46, 54n19 Naoki Sanjûgo: 18–19, 21–22, 35, 54n19, 59, 61 National Art Film Company: 34 National Film Center (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo): 28 naturalism: 12–13 Negishi Kan’ichi: 18 New Impressionist Film League: 23, 27, 44n3, 34, 54–55, 60n19, 103–4 Nichiei Shinsha: 101 Nihon University: 104; Eiken: 67n13 126

Nikkatsu (film studio): 17–18, 21, 34, 47 Niwa Shin: 63–64 Nobel Prize: 13 Noh theater: 91 Ôfuji Noburô: 45 Ogawa Kojirô: 46 Okada Yoshiko: 34n3 Okuno Takeo: 15 Okuya Yoshiyuki: 64, 80, 100, 106–7 Omuka Toshiharu: 12 onnagata (acting role): 8–9, 17 Orochi (film): 69 Osaka: 24, 45n3 Osanai Kaoru: 8 Ôshima Kyûtarô: 46 Ôsugi Masami: 33n10 Ôtani Takejirô: 54 Ozu Yasujirô: 62n28 Page of Madness, A (Kurutta ichipeiji) (film): analysis of: 65–68, 70–73, 76–83, 86–99; as art film: 45, 47, 52, 54–55, 59, 93, 102; as avant-garde or experimental film: 14, 16, 20, 34–36, 40, 43, 47, 52, 54, 58–60, 70–71, 81, 83–84, 86, 93, 95, 98–99, 111; benshi narration of: 5, 41, 52–54, 61, 63, 65–66; boundary crossings: 6, 65, 86, 88–91, 95, 98, 104; casting of: 22–23, 34–35; censorship of: 42, 43n10, 44, 84; censorship script of: 27, 41–42, 53–54, 66, 86n7, 111; and cinema: 11, 56, 86, 92–95, 97–98, 102, 107, 109; as collaborative work: 23–24, 26–27, 34–35, 112; commercial qualities, presence or absence: 24, 45–46, 50, 55, 97; and consumerism: 47; and context: 6, 11, 65–66, 98; ­conventional/ industrial methods, utilization of: 34–36, 55, 112; cost of: 35; dancing girl scenes: 30fig3, 40, 68, 72–79, 88–89, 91, 109; daughter visit­ing father scene: 53–54, 71; distribution of: 35n6, 44–45; editing (decoupage) of: 32n8; 33,

Index

37, 38m3, 40–41, 66–68, 70–71, 81, 86, 88, 95, 111; ending scene: 91–92, 95; equipment for: 21, 37; exhibition of: 44–47, 52–55; as expressionist: 103–5; and film reform: 23–24, 45; film style of: 66–68, 70–71, 80, 94; filming of: 26–28, 31–32, 34–37, 40; financing of: 24; foreign influences on: 8–11, 80–81; and French Impressionism: 40, 58, 67–68, 80–81, 92–93, 95; gender in: 86n7, 87, 88n9, 91; and German Expressionism: 10, 47, 80; hybridity/multivalency of: 6–7, 19, 35, 54n18, 55, 65, 70–71, 77, 82–83, 94–95, 98–99, 111; as independent film: 20–24, 35, 46, 52, 55; and insanity: 22, 27, 59, 80–92, 95, 98, 104, 109; internal/external divide in: 85–88, 96–98, 111; as international film: 56–57, 85, 102; interpretations of: 4–6, 26, 54n18, 65–66, 77, 81, 84–85, 86n7, 95, 98; intertitles, ­presence or absence: 44, 59, 61, 63, 102, 105; and Japanese cinema: 57, 59, 64, 66–67, 70, 95, 102, 107; and language: 4, 63, 71; literary qualities, presence or absence: 57, 59, 63–65, 97–98, 107–8; lottery scene: 37–40, 93–94; masks in: 91, 94–95, 97; and meaning: 6, 57, 63–65, 71; as melodramatic (shinpa): 2–5, 41, 43, 52–54, 71, 81, 83, 95, 98, 111; missing scenes: 31, 41–42, 71, 101, 111–14; and modernism/modernity: 11n9, 47, 52, 59, 63, 81–82, 84–85, 90–92, 97–98, 109; and music: 46, 52, 67–68, 69fig11, 103–4; 106–9; narration in: 72–73, 77–80, 88; narrative qualities, presence or absence: 2–5, 3, 36, 59, 63–65, 93, 96–97, 102–3; and national cinema: 5; and naturalism: 60, 64, 96fig22, 97–98; opening sequence: 40, 66–67, 72, 80, 106, 108–9; original plan for: 21–22; and perception: 6, 65, 79, 81–83, 86n8; political

meaning of: 11n9, 84–86, 92, 98; prints of: 40, 42–43; production of: 20–24, 26–37, 55, 98, 102, 112; publicity for: 23–24, 44, 47–52; as pure film: 56–58, 61, 65, 92, 100, 102; realistic aspects of: 36, 59–60, 70, 72, 80, 95–97, 107–8; reception of: 5, 52, 54–61, 63–64, 70, 97–98, 100–110; rediscovery of: 42; relation to other arts: 23–24, 47, 56, 102, 107; revenue for: 54; screenplays for: 3n10, 22, 26–33, 36–38, 40–42, 54, 79, 86n7, 88n10, 90, 96; separation of opposites/ logic of separation in: 86–88, 90–91, 95, 98; Shinkankaku school, similarities with: 76, 78, 82; shooting notes for: 27–28, 30–34, 36–40, 70, 111–14; ­social class and: 58–60, 82, 84–86; social relations in: 87–90, 92; space in: 40, 72, 77, 86–88; and spectat­orship: 5, 65–67, 71, 77–84, 88n9, 90, 93–95, 98; studio for: 24, 27, 35; subjectivity and psychology in: 72–73, 76–81, 86, 89–96, 104, 106, 109, 111; summaries of: 2–5, 52, 66, 79; syncretism in: 47, 49fig7; temporality in: 71, 73, 76–79, 86, 95; t­itle of: 1n1, 44, 95, 112; understanding, issue of: 58–61, 63, 95, 102–3; as vernacular modernism: 81–82; versions of: 4, 26, 33, 41–43, 65, 100, 111 Paramount (film studio): 45–46 Park Sungbae: 65–66, 72 Parker, Alan: 46 Peace Preservation Law: 7 perception: 14, 97 Peterson, James: 4, 79, 86, 91 Petric, Vlada: 1 “Play of the Springs, The” (“Zenmai no tawamure”) (stage play): 22, 54n20 Polikushka: 11n8 Proletarian Film League (Prokino): 101 pure film: 1, 10, 23, 100–101, 107; and understanding: 61–63 127

Index

Pure Film Movement: 8–10, 23, 57–58, 61, 100, 105 Rashomon (film): 5 realism: 12–13, 16 Red Bat, The (Beni kômori) (film): 70 rensageki (theatrical form): 18 Richie, Donald: 20 Roue, La (film): 1, 10, 20 Russia: 16 Russo-Japanese War: 7 Ryûtanji Yû: 15 Sadoul, Georges: 5n9 Salvation Hunters (film): 52 Sanin, Aleksandr: 11n8 Sasai Sei: 46 Satô Tadao: 3, 84 Sawada Bankô: 26–34, 112; script for A Page of Madness: 28–31, 33, 34n1, 36–38, 40–41, 86n7, 88n10 Sawada Shôjirô: 18 Schertzinger, Victor: 46 Schimmel, Mariko Shigeta: 15 Schoedsack, Ernest B.: 45 Seki Misao: 34 Setagaya (Tokyo): 22 Shanghai: 21 Shibazonokan (movie theater): 46, 54n19 Shimazu Yasujirô: 17, 69 shingeki theater: 8, 22 Shinjuku: 45 Shinkankaku school: 12–16, 21, 24, 47, 59, 71n15, 76, 78, 82, 106; and cinema: 14, 21, 23, 62, 103; on language: 16, 62; politics of: 13, 16; ­relation to West: 15; and subjectivity: 14–15 Shinkô Kinema (film studio): 104 Shinkokugeki (theatrical form): 18, 34 shinpa (theatrical form): 2-3, 17, 22, 52–53 Shirai Shintarô: 24–25, 44 shishôsetsu (literary genre): 13–15 Shôchiku (film studio): 8, 18–19, 22, 34n3, 35n6, 42, 46, 54–55, 60, 95; involvement in A Page of Madness: 128

24–25, 44, 45n3; Kamata Studio of: 24; Shimokamo Studio of: 24, 55 Shôchikuza (movie theater, Kyoto): 44, 46, 54n19 Shôchikuza (movie theater, Osaka): 46–47, 54n19 Silverberg, Miriam: 8 Smiling Madame Beudet, The (film): 80–81 Snow Country (Yukiguni) (novel): 13 Society for Recommending Good Films: 45 Song and Dance Man, The (film): 46 Soviet Union: 34n3, 55n23; cinema of: 10–11, 40, 69 Sternberg, Joseph von: 52 Street Juggler, The (Machi no tejinashi) (film): 9 Stroheim, Erich von: 36, 67n5 Stroller in the Attic (Yane no ura no ­sanposha) (novel): 54n20 Sugimoto Ryôkichi: 34n3 Sugiyama Kôhei: 33n10, 35, 44, 55–56, 100, 102–3 Sun, The (Nichirin, Kinugasa) (film): 18, 21, 56, 102 Sun, The (Nichirin, Murata) (film): 9, 68-69 Superchunk (music ensemble): 52n14 Susukita Rokuhei: 19 Suzuki Tadashi: 35n6 symbolism: 12 Taikatsu (film studio): 8 Taishô era: 7–8, 11, 13, 15n12, 17, 47, 84, 90n11; culture of combination: 8 Takahashi Yûji: 52n14 Takamatsu Kinnosuke (Kyôsuke): 34 Takase Minoru: 34 Takemura Tamio: 15n12 Takiguchi Shintarô: 34 Tamai Kyokuyô: 46 Tanaka Eizô: 17 Tanaka Jun’ichirô: 55n21, 100, 103–4 Tanaka Tsuruhiko: 70 Tanikawa Tetsuzô: 21n4 Tanizaki Jun’ichirô: 8, 93n17 Teikine (film studio): 9, 18, 21

Index

“tendency” films: 13n4 Ten’ichibô and Iganosuke (Ten’ichibô to ­Iganosuke) (film): 18 Thief of Baguda Castle, The (Baguda-jô no tôzoku) (film): 45 Timoshenko, Semyon: 11n8 Tôa (film studio): 9, 18, 35 Toeda Hirokazu: 14 Tôhô (film shinbun studio): 45, 104 Tokugawa Musei: 45–46, 53, 61 Tokyo: 7, 9, 22, 24, 26–27, 44–46, 100, 103, 105 Tokyo nichinichi shinbun (newspaper): 57 Tokyo Station Hotel: 23, 44 Tokyokan (movie theater): 3, 46–47, 51fig9, 54n19, 60 Tonoshima Sôjin: 63, 105–6 Tourneur, Maurice: 67n5 Tôyô University: 103 Tragedy of Japan, A (Nihon no higeki) (film): 101 Tsuboi Tetsu: 34 Tsuburaya Eiji (Eiichi): 33n10, 35 Tsukigata Hanpeita (film): 18 Tuttle, Frank: 46 Uchida Kisao: 61, 63 UFA (Universum Film ­Aktiengesellschaft) (film studio): 101 Ultraman: 35 United Artists (film studio): 18

United Association of Film Artists: 18 Universal (film studio): 10 University of Tokyo: 101 Ushihara Kiyohiko: 17, 69 Vignola, Robert G.: 46 Volkoff, Alexandre: 10 Wages for Wives (film): 46, 67 Watase Junko: 34 Way of a Girl, The (film): 46 Wedding and a Funeral (Konrei to sôrei) (novel): 14 Weine, Robert: 3, 80 Weisenfeld, Gennifer: 11 Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) (film): 13n8 World War I: 7 Yaji and Kita (Yaji Kita) (film): 47 Yamada Shinkichi: 47 Yamamoto Kikuo: 68 Yamamoto Rokuyô: 44n3 Yokohama: 7, 45 Yokomitsu Riichi: 12–16, 18–19, 21, 56n3, 71n15, 73, 76, 84; involvement in A Page of Madness: 22, 27–28, 44 Yomiuri (newspaper): 80n8, 103 Yoshihito (emperor): 7, 84 Yoshimoto Takaaki: 15 Yoshiyama Kyokkô: 103

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About the Author Aaron Gerow is assistant professor of Japanese cinema at Yale University and has published widely on Japanese film and culture. He is the author of Kitano Takeshi (BFI, 2007) and a forthcoming book on Taishô film culture from the University of California Press, as well as the co-author of Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies with Abé Mark Nornes (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2009).

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