A Page of Madness

Hard to follow, and the finer moments disappear as quickly as they appear, but there's an undeniable creative-flow going on that must have been unrelenting and maddening in its day: dutch angles, distortion, double exposure, insanely quick cuts, dynamic lighting, formalistic choreography...Kinugasa goes all out. Even so, I'm sorry to say its power over me as a piece of cinema is more academic than emotional or visceral. I watched it from a distance and wasn't sucked in.

Fascinating depiction of mental illness. Editing, cinematography & overall narrative style are so fresh & mysterious they still feel modern. Goes way beyond the expressionists reaching out to something more surreal & dreamlike. Inriguing & atmospheric story about the fluid nature of sanity & a struggle to deal with it. The opening 3rd is some of the best stuff I've seen, the middle got a bit too obscure for me but the ending is again great. Haunting music somewhat covered for the lost narration.

i feel that this asylum is quite poorly managed

Does things I've never seen in a silent movie, it's so surreal and at times disturbing. A whirlwind of images, crazy music and insanity that unfortunately loses some impact after a while. Or maybe I was too tired when viewing it and need to give it another try.

Holy shit, this is amazing. Kinugasa pulls out all the stops in his depiction of insanity: dutch angles, spotlighting, double exposures, distorted lenses, superimpositions, fast motion... the overall effect is striking and hypnotic. You're struck with one haunting image after another. And the film isn't simply a portrait of madness, there's a story here as well. Bold, dreamlike, experimental, and just downright awesome.

I feel like a dick for saying it, but sometimes it seems like film hasn't improved much at all since the '20s.

On one hand itd be nice to have intertitles and the lost bits of the film to flesh this out more...however that would also bring a bit of sense to what's on screen and take away from the titular madness of it. Lots of great tricks combined with the disjointed "narrative" and bizarre images creates a delightful phantasmagoria. Would fit in great with David lynchs work.

Abundant with creative surrealistic imagery, but wants to have its cake as a narrative feature and eat it too, which makes it a bit unsatisfying.

This Lynchian gem's entire story is told only in visuals, completely eschewing intertitles, which sometimes makes it intriguingly mysterious and sometimes makes it simply hard to follow. Provided that you keep up and pay attention you will have a visual treat which translates horror and dread into imagery with extraordinary success. The version I saw also had a terrifically specific audio track in which music intermingled with appropriate effects work.

strange representation of a mental institution where both master and slave become equally ensnared in a maelstrom of madness. a very striking film for 1926 that contains a lot of fascinating imagery, but as far as i'm concerned it's simply too obscure for its own good. the plot in particular is impossible to decipher. apparently on release live narration accompanied the screening, which definitely would have helped. i might see this again one day after memorising the story.

A pioneering example of unusual visual techniques being used to represent insanity, in a nearly wordless narrative film. The creativity of the film's photography and editing is impressive, and the soundtrack is formidable. It's not very enjoyable in any conventional way, though.

A fascinating historical document showing many technical advances that the rest of the world wouldn't really be able to understand, let alone see, for another four decades, including advanced editing techniques, expressionistic use of lighting and scenery, surrealism and boldly fractured double exposure images, A Page of Madness might best be appreciated as a long lost cousin of the films of contemporaneous European avante gardes such as Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou.

Insane, weird but fascinating. The camera shots (which are sometimes quite frightning) and the editing are way ahead of its time.

Great nightmarish fun. Wholly captivating with its countless camera tricks and intense imagery. I thought it was a bit too experimental at times though, at least too much to leave me with any sort of emotional impact or to find it brilliant.

An scattered collage of disturbing images that convey the inner turmoil of mental illness, set to a haunting score by the Alloy Orchestra. Normally, the incompleteness of such a work would be deleterious, but in this case, it fits the theme and tone remarkably well.

been there

I watched this with the brilliant score from the Alloy Orchestra from 2016, which adds a ton. Unsure if I would have liked it this much without it. It's a surrealistic nightmare and feels fresher than almost anything I've seen from this period. The camerawork and shot choices, etc, feel lightyears ahead of their time. The narrative can be a bit difficult to follow because about a third of the film was lost. (It was previously all thought lost). An incredible, thickly atmospheric experience.

The film is more about mood than narrative. Its conveyance of insanity is perhaps not accurate or archaic but it is interesting how the film frames various different forms of insanity with surrealism, utilizing hazy motions to convey a sense of mental elusiveness with reality. Though with that said, it makes me curious what was intended for the audience considering films like these were given an in person narrator for their screenings in Japan.

Unsure if I enjoyed it but it's unlike most flicks you'll ever see. Maybe just a crumb of narration

This is not a complete movie--a third of the original film is missing. Nor is the lack of intertitles/dialog a part of the original movie experience. The viewer was not supposed to look up the cliff-notes just to figure out what was happening; this film had live narration. All that aside, there is definitely still value to this film. It conjures memorable images and scenes, and the cinematography is well ahead of its time, but I can't recommend this to anyone who's not Film Studies student.

The film making techniques used alone made this film entertaining add to that the fact that I found some of the imagery disturbing and I felt that a lot of this film would hold up today.

En man söker arbete på mentalsjukhus för att på så vis kunna vara nära sin fru. En film som i det närmaste attackerar åskådaren. Tredje tittningen och fortsatt hänförd.

I didn't understand much more than the basics of what was going on narratively, much less all of the montage sequences or overlaid shots/double exposures, but I found Page of Madness visually compelling enough that I didn't need to. Music does a fair bit of work as well for the nightmarish atmosphere.

I have no idea what's going on, but awesome!

Poetic.

Where's the chinaman telling me the story? It cannot be experienced as it was intended to be, but you can see how the director tried here every trick avaiblable in the book in 1926. Some entrancing moments happen. Are they bound to?

Essentially, the story is quite simple: a sanitarium janitor wishes to free his wife (a patient) and make his daughter (and hopefully, everyone) happy. This sets the scene for a memorable exploration of mania and self-doubt as the man and perhaps the audience are drawn into the confused and paranoid mindset of madness themselves via some very accomplished and innovative cinematic sequences. It's firmly rooted in the French Impressionists (Gance, particularly), but definitely has a lot to add.

esse filme tinha que passar nas faculdades de cinema

Uses all sorts of stylistic madness to put you in the head of a mad woman resulting in some truly beautiful and strange images. It's often hard to tell what's real and what's imagined, and quite what direction the story is taking is often very elusive, but that's part of the fun. A haunting, stunning work of art.

Probably the most impressively filmed silent film ever, just feels so modern with its nightmarish 'pink-film-meets-German-expressionism' atmosphere, grotesque performances and quick cuts. However, almost completely incomprehensible with no narration or titles to give any idea of what the fuck is going on. As a result, it sometimes drags. Still gorgeous eye candy FAR ahead of its time.

A kind of film I have never seen before. Amazing cinematography, often difficult to follow, it requires all of your attention and is fascinating.

manages to be the most frightening silent feature i've ever seen and whoever they got to rewrite the music did a bang up job. the only thing that hold this back from is that the story is incomprehensible due to the lack of intertitles. not that it would make sense anyway because it's basically just a surreal mishmash of creepy stuff held together by the setting.

Wow, this was something else. I had to keep reminding myself this was made in 1926, as the mood it creates is nothing like I've ever seen from a silent film. This has to be the most hypnotic film I've seen, though I think the music greatly aided in that. The effects and camera shots are dazzling and impressive and are quite well suited for this story of insanity. I can't say I grasped everything on an intellectual level, but I sure felt something profoundly unsettling on an emotional level.

I do not know what I just saw... Oddly, oddly hypnotic. The editing pattern seem to follow a kind of dream logic. I think I LOVED this shit! Words miscarry.

The closest to a true nightmare I have ever seen in a film. Truly unsettling because it seems to be doing everything in its power to convey mood over plot and character (although it does have a bit of that too), I have seen a lot of Japanese cinema but never quite something like this. I was surprised and damned impressed by how much I was swept up by it, and how much is conveyed without that ever-meaningless dialogue or intertitles. This is the palpable power of expressionistic cinema.

Madness is a very apt description of the film. The images and soundtrack create a depiction of insanity that is truly raw and disorienting.