Yale University

From the SelectedWorks of Aaron Gerow

2008

A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in

1920s Japan (excerpt)
Aaron Gerow

Available at: [Link]

 Excerpt from Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness: Cinema and
Modernity in 1920s Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese
Studies, University of Michigan, 2008)

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies

Number64 A Page of Madness
Center for Japanese Studies Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan
The University of Michigan

Aaron Gerow

Center for Japanese Studies

The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, 2008
Chapter 1
What Is This Film?

Kinugasa Teinosuke's A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji in Japanesd 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 Petrie, "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 ad-
vanced 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 An-
other, 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 to-
day, 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 con-
temporary 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 zenshu (Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari) (Tokyo: Shinchosha,
1982).
2. Vlada Petrie, "A Page of Madness: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Silent Cinema," Film Criti-
cism 8.1 (fall1983): 87.
3. Tonoshima Sojin, "Kurutta ichipeiji sonata" (A Page of Madness, etcetera), Chukyo /cinema
(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), Chukyo kinema 2.8 (1926):
54-55.

1
 Chapter 1 What Is This Film?
5
story." To one newspaper reviewer, this was to be the beginning of a new is identical, word for word, to the summary in the program of the Tokyo-
age in film: "The director has parted from the old notion in cinema of trying kan theater that audiences would have read when they attended a showing.9
to film 'things' and has become conscious of the attempt to take in 'light.' It is also differs little storywise from the supposed script of the film that
The play of light, the melody of light, the speed of light-this is the way Kawabata published in July of that year? 0
films will be made." 6 Far from considering A Page of Madness radically experimental, not a
Yet at the same time this discussion was taking place there was another few commentators offered opinions about its narrative normalcy [Link]-
discourse about A Page of Madness that seemed to describe a completely dif- ferent perspectives. The screenwriter Kisaragi Bin, aware of contemporary
ferent cinematic experience. For this film, which purportedly places little European productions, dismissed the notion that the film was revolution-
emphasis on story, a newspaper offered the following partial summary a ary, writing, "This degree of technique is neither very new nor difficult.
week and a half before its release, one of many published as a means of This number of stylish elements is by no means rare in a single film these
advertising the film. 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 melo-
This is the grim interior of a mental hospital, resounding with dramatic story of the daughter and her fiance, and at least one complained of
dancing, shrieking, howling, and yelling. Here a pitiful and tragic
tale is born, the drama of a sailor who had mistreated his wife, the thoroughly shinpa quality of the acting.13 In retrospect, the film historian
forgot his daughter, and eventually drove his wife insane. After a Sat6 Tadao, in arguing the film's differences from Robert Weine's The Cabinet
few years, the sailor, tired of life, returned to his hometown and of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, 1920), has defended its shinpa
learned that his wife had been saved at a mental hospital. He be- narrative.
came a custodian there to gain access. His daughter has grown up
beautifully and is about to marry a young man, but she worries This film brings out the painfulness of the familial love between
about her insane mother. The father's pain, his uneasy fear, is that husband and wife and parents and children. . . . Here are the
his insane wife will destroy their daughter's happiness. In this splendid feelings and emotions of Japan. Such Japanese feelings
way, events proceed darkly in relation to the crazy wife? were the specialty of Kinugasa Teinosuke, a veteran of shinpa, ...
and even this "Western" avant-garde film of his younger days
There is no indication here that this is an avant-garde, experimental film. was naturally permeated with it.14
It is described just like any other narrative motion picture, one featuring a
melodramatic plot not at all different from the stories of many contempo- Sat6, like some of his predecessors, rejects the notion that Kinugasa's film
rary Japanese gendaigeki based on shinpa theater. 8 One may dismiss this text was radically a-narrative.
as a mistaken effort to commercialize a noncommercial film, but much of it What, then, is A Page of Madness? Is it an avant-garde work that under-
mines the very processes of narrative in a quest for a pure and absolute
5. See the roundtable discussion "Kurutta ichipeiji gappyokai sokkiroku" (Transcript of the
Group Evaluation of A Page of Madness), Eiga jidai (The Film Age) 1.2 (August 1926): 59-63. 9. "Kurutta ichipeiji" (A Page of Madness), Tokyokan shuho (Tokyokan Weekly), 24 September
Most of the participants accepted the categorization of A Page of Madness as a "storyless" 1926.
film. 10. Kawabata Yasunari, "Kurutta ichipeiji" (A Page of Madness), Eiga jidai 1.1 (July 1926):
6. Tanaka Jun'ichiro, "Hyogen shugi no eiga" (An Expressionist Film), Hochi shinbun, 23 June 122-31. While one can say that the scenario is colder and less melodramatic than the
1926, 4. A full English translation is included in appendix A. published plot summaries, it does clarify many of the story points. An English transla-
7. "Shin eiga" (New Films), Yomiuri shinbun, 13 September 1926, 9. Most newspapers and film- tion was published in D. A. Rajakaruna, Kinugasa Teinosuke's A Crazy Page and Crossroads
related magazines published plot summaries of new films that were provided by the (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Kandy Offset, 1998).
distributor. Many, such as the long summary of A Page of Madness the Yomiuri shinbun 11. Kisaragi Shinju, "lwayuru Shinkankakuha eiga" (The So-called Shinkankaku School Film),
printed on 28 June, even included a description of the ending. Chugai shogyo shinpo, 28 June 1926, 7. "Shinju" was Kisaragi's pen name as a critic.
8. Gendaigeki are films set in the modern (post-1868) period and are differentiated from jidaigeki 12. Qkuya Yoshiyuki, "Kurutta ichipeiji kan" (Views on A Page of Madness), Chukyo kinema 2.9
or period films. Shinpa is the "new school" of Jap<[Link] theater that introduced modern (September 1926): 27. A full English translation is included in appendix A.
stories into the theatrical repertoire in the late 1800s. These plays were often conven- 13. See Sato Yukio's comments about Inoue Masao in "Kurutta ichipeiji gappyokai sokkiroku,"
tionally melodramatic, focusing on the sufferings of women who, due to fate or social 62.
circumstance, could not fulfill their romantic desires. Shinpa theater had a profound in- 14. Sato Tadao, Nihon eiga no kyoshotachi (Masters of Japanese Cinema) (Tokyo: Gakuyo Shobo,
fluence on early gendaigeki films. 1979), 37.

2 3
 Chapter 1 What Is This Film?

cinema or is it a conventional narrative expression of traditional melo- they fulfill various desires. The story of a masterpiece emerging out of no-
dramatic emotionality? The question may strike those outside of Japan as where, in a marginal nation far from the center of modernism, is such a nar-
odd given how difficult the film is to understand on a first or even second rative, one that has been appropriated by those desiring a stronger national
viewing. If one defines avant-garde cinema as the conscious attempt to lead cinema (finding, for instance, that Japanese film became the independent
the field in combating, undermining, or finding new alternatives to domi- equal of European film in the 1920s, long before Kurosawa Akira's Rashomon
nant, usually commercial codes of film, the most important of which is [1950]) or a history of origins (some see A Page of Madness as the beginning
narrative, then surely A Page of Madness is nothing but avant-garde? The of a Japanese experimental film tradition that is otherwise thought to have
degree to which even professional film critics and historians have erred in begun in the 1950s) or even a text allegorizing the complications of Japanese
relating basic plot points must attest to how hard it is to access the version modernity in the capitalist world system. We must be careful of how our
of the story available through the screenplay. Yet when scholars have used desires shape our vision of this film, for they can commit a violence against
this very real experience to argue, for instance, as James Peterson has done, the text, one that suppresses its alterity and the history of how and why it
that "this experimental style is Kinugasa's war or utter rebellion against film was constructed as an avant-garde work. A Page of Madness can thus stand as
language," 15 they risk mistaking their reading, or that of an ideal reader, for a lesson in the problems of reading a film from a different time and culture.
the reading of historical viewers, obfuscating the different ways the film Reception studies in general has warned us about equating our read-
was read and even the general struggles over the meaning of such a cinema ings with those of all viewers.18 Studies of spectator readings of films re-
if not its modernity at the time.16 They also risk reifying a film text that, mind us that a film text is not simply the images projected on a screen but
while it certainly looks experimental, is probably not the same work that also the meanings historical audiences took from them, frequently by using
was shown to audiences in 1926 since significant portions appear to be miss- texts (criticism, advertisements, or other films) separate from and not avail-
ing from the version we see today. As Jonathan E. Abel warns us, A Page of able within the film itself. In this light, it would be grossly premature to
Madness may have been the "site for imagining a radically different kind of call A Page of Madness avant-garde without even looking at these other texts
film, not a radically different kind of film itself." 17 and analyzing how contemporary viewers used them. For instance, benshi
It is because our reading of the film is so troubled that we must take (lecturers) were employed by the theaters to explain the film? 9 They used
care in using our experience to pass judgment on the text's status. First, as scripts provided by the distributor to explicate or narrate the film and make
we shall see, there are many narratives hovering about A Page of Madness sure that the narrative details, if not the melodramatic tone, were transmit-
that persist less because they are accurate-and some are not-than because ted 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 con-
temporary theater viewers would have encountered a decidedly narrative
15. James Peterson, "A War of Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa's Page of Madness and the Japanese experience, one that in certain respects varied little from conventional movie
Avant-Garde of the 1920s," Cinema Journal 29.1 (fall1989): 51.
fare. We must take benshi narration, plot summaries, and critical discourse
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 into account when analyzing A Page of Madness precisely because it is a work
"exercise" the mind and "cultivate the skills to narrate (and intervene with) more satisfy- whose very relationship with such texts became the subject of debate, the
ingly the present world system." His claim, for instance, that "By cracking open (in terms occasion for arguing over how film should create meaning and what role
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
spectatorship had to play in modern Japan. That should not preclude us
colonialism" can provide a possibly powerful template for interpreting the film, but it from closely analyzing the text itself because it always stood at the center of
must be evaluated through thoroughly historicizing the text and its history. Cazdyn gen-
erally 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 multifac- 18. For a useful overview of the issue of reception studies in film scholarship, see Janet Staiger,
eted history of this text. I hope to show how closely analyzing the film and its complex Interpreting Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
history provides a richer and more significant history of the very problems of modernity 19. Kinugasa's comment to Georges Sadoul that the film escaped benshi narration by playing at
Cazdyn rightly raises. See Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan foreign film theaters is either Kinugasa's or the translator's mistake (Kinugasa Teinosuke,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 204-15. · "Le cinema japonais vers 1920" (Japanese Cinema around 1920), Cahiers du cinema (Note-
17. Jonathan E. Abel, "Different from Difference: Revisiting Kurutta ichipeiji," Asian Cinema 12.2 books on Cinema) 166-67 [mai-juin 1965]: 46). All foreign film theaters had benshi, and
(fall-winter 2001): 72-96. benshi did narrate A Page of Madness.

4 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 solitcrry
work-in part by narratively foregrounding the violation of borders, the in-
fluence of perception (reading) on meaning, and the multiplicity of textual
modes.
In stressing the multivalence of A Page of Madness-its unconventional-
ity and its conventionality-my aim is not to engage in a hermeneutic de-
bunking 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 rea-
sons 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 defini-
tion 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 con-
temporary 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 con-
tradictory, 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 dif-
ferent ways it was read at the time and conclude by examining how the film
we can see now foregrounds, perhaps self-consciously, the maddening prob-
lems of interpretation, especially in relation to the issue of defining cinema
in 1920s Japan.

6
T
I
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} editing pro-
ceeded at a brisk pace and was completed in only about a week Consider-
ing 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? 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 edit-
ing 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 ren-
dered 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 announc-
ing 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.
37
Chapter 8 Editing and the Print

She flashes a smile, as if surprised. 14) They take down all the prizes on top of the chest (MCU)-
"First prize! First prize!" Everyone at the lottery gathers dissolve
around in a commotion. 15) They put the chest on the old man's back (LS)
16) The custodian happy with the chest on his back (CU)
Faces of the crowd full of envy. (They express considerable
emotion.) ·
THE STREET
The lottery girl rings the bell. More people gather round. The
1) People on the street stand around the custodian making a
men at the lottery all cooperate to lower the chest. One girl turns
fuss (high-angle camera movement)
and removes a label that reads "Extra First Prize" from a dancing
2) Camera movement of the chest and lanterns
dress. She hands the clothes to the custodian.
3) The custodian approaches and meets his daughter
The face of the custodian, laughing over and over. 4) Close up of the happy daughter and happy father. 4
A lottery girl puts the extra prizes into the chest of drawers.
The film
The custodian lifts the chest on his back and starts to walk. A 1) Dissolve to "Big Lottery" sign flashing on and off
large crowd follows him. 2) Dissolve to pan left of banners emblazoned with "Big Lottery"
The happy face of the daughter pointing to the chest. The cus- 3) Dissolve to high-angle pan left of the band drummers and
todian happily shows his daughter the dancing dress and other women preparing balls
prizes. 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
The shooting notes (15 May)
picking lots; double exposure in of the first-prize chest
THE BIG SALE (NIGHT SHOOTING) 6) Dissolve to pan left of other prizes: pots, etc.
1) Full shot of the lottery (the band, [indecipherable word]. One of
7) High-angle full shot of the lottery stage
the lottery clerks rings a bell to attract customers)-dissolve3 8) Dissolve to high-angle medium shot of the custodian making
2) The music band playing heartily (MCU)-dissolve his way laterally through the crowd
3) Hands of people exchanging lottery tickets (CU)-dissolve 9) Dissolve to high-angle medium close-up of his hand picking a
4) The first prize (chest of drawers) (CU)-dissolve ball
5) Sundry prizes (of different levels) (CU)-dissolve 10) Dissolve to high-angle, over-the-shoulder close-up of him
6) Group of people receiving their prizes (LS from behind) opening the piece of paper reading "First Prize"
7) Group of people receiving their prizes (FS from the front)- 11) Dissolve to frontal close-up of him laughing happily
dissolve 12) Close-up of bell ringing
8) The custodian exchanges his lottery ticket (CU)-dissolve 13) Medium long shot of people preparing to take out the prize
9) The custodian opens up the paper-First prize! (CU)- 14) High-angle extreme long shot of them taking out the chest
dissolve 15) Close-up of the custodian happy as the chest is tied to his back
10) The custodian hands it to a lottery clerk-dissolve 16) Dissolve to an extreme-high-angle-track right of the custo-
11) A bell ringing-dissolve dian in long shot walking with the chest through the crowd
12) The camera moves to find the first prize among the various 17) Dissolve to a track behind the chest with a close-up of the First
prizes (FS)-dissolve Prize sign
13) The custodian is overjoyed at having won the first prize (CU)- 18) High angle long shot of fair, lights; the custodian walks to-
dissolve ward 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.
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 4. The notes for the scenes at the lottery and on the street were written by different people and
complicated to have been done in camera, but the speed of the editing process and the thus exhibit different styles. Whoever wrote the notes for the lottery scene was the most
notations in the shooting notes suggest that some might have been done in that fashion. precise of all the note takers, recording the camera distance for almost every shot. The
second individual was much less exact.

38 39
Chapter 8 Editing and the Print
As we can see, the notes clearly reveal a process of decoupage progress- phy explains that some scenes were excised on the editing table. 5 Not only
ing from the script. The filming maintains the general narrative order, but Kawabata's but also Sawada's script and the shooting notes describe shots
analytically divides it into visual segments that establish the scene, identify and entire scenes that are not in the extant film, especially many that cen-
the goal (the prize), and then efficiently renders the narrative of the custO- ter on the relationship between the daughter and her fiance, including a
dian's good luck by visual means. This is partially a process of condensa- particularly long and melodramatic one in which the daughter overhears a
tion, as the shots actually taken were fewer than those suggested by the friend of the fiance revealing to him that her mother is insane (the shooting
original script. The scene in the extant film further condenses the action, as notes for this scene are included in appendix B). We can currently get only
certain shots seem not to have been used. Excess information, such as extra two glimpses the fiance: in a short scene about halfway through the film
emphasis on the prize after the bell rings or additional reaction shots, has that shows the two cavorting happily (fig. 5) and in another brief shot of him
been trimmed out. looking unhappy that is used when the daughter visits her father to visually
What is evident here is a decoupage that does not presume the repeated communicate the break in their relations. Were the other scenes cut out?
use of the same camera position. This can represent a mode of production There is evidence that scenes are missing from the current film. Mari-
that sometimes shoots in order, as well as one that refrains from narrating ann Lewinsky has found a partial benshi script that describes scenes missing
space through back-and-forth cuts between a small number of camera posi- 6
from our print. Two copies of the ken'etsu daihon (censorship script) were
tions, 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 theo-
ries 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 seque~ce, 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 Figure 5. The daughter and her fiance.
of opposites of Soviet montage, it evinces more than other scenes in the film
an awakening to the power of editing in postproduction. 5. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga eiga no seishun (My Youth in Film) (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1977),
A question that remains about the editing process, and one that raises 72.
fundamental issues about the print we see today, is whether any of the 6. See Mariann Lewinsky, Eine verriikte Seite: Stummfilm und filmische Avantgarde in Japan (A
Page of Madness: Silent Film and the Cinematic Avant-Garde in Japan) (Zurich: Chronos,
scenes shot were entirely cut from the film. In acknowledging the differ-
1997) or her interview with Jasper Sharp, "A Page of Madness," Midnight Eye, http://
ences between Kawabata's script and the film, Kinugasa in his autobiogra- [Link]/features/silentfilm_pt1.shtml.

40 41
Chapter 8 Editing and the Print

found among Kinugasa's papers, and these similarly describe scenes not This print shows none of the signs of incompleteness evident in other
visible in the current film? Beginning in 1925, when the Home Ministry took Japanese masterpieces, such as Diary of ChUji's Travels (Chuji tabi nikki, 1927,
over censorship from local agencies, producers were obliged to submit their dir. Ito Daisuke), that were found with scenes or reels missing. While it is a
films to censors accompanied by a script. This script had to be an accurate disjunctive film at times, narratively A Page of Madness does not appear to
representation of the content of the film, and a copy was kept in theaters bear the signs of randomly missing reels (the lack of speculation in the recent
showing the movie so that police inspectors could refer to it and make sure literature about missing scenes testifies to this). The most likely scenario is
the theater had not tampered with the print. With each page stamped by that the film was cut deliberately_ at some point after its initial release. Since
the authorities, unauthorized . modification of the censorship script was there is no record of the film being re-released or even screened between
forbidden. The legal requirement that the censorship script match the film 1928 and 1971}0 this may have been done by those preparing the film for the
provides strong proof that the absent scenes described in the A Page of Mad- 1970s re-release or by Kinugasa himself. Given his previous prevarications,
ness censorship script were shown in theaters. The final evidence that scenes there is the possibility that upon finding the film he reedited it and excised
were cut after the film was released is the fact that the existing print is over the more melodramatic scenes, which were criticized at the time and did not
500 meters shorter than it was when it was submitted for censorship in 1926, quite fit the film's established image as an avant-garde masterpiece. There
having been reduced from 2,142 to 1,617 meters. 8 At silent speed, that is about is little way to prove this charge, but such doubts reinforce the impression
twenty-five minutes of screen time or about one-fourth of the original length that A Page of Madness, if only on the level of the film print, is not one but
of the film. We must ask why there is this drastic change. many texts.
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 Shochiku 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 miss-
ing.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 kageri5 no
gotoku (Film Is Like a Mirage) (Tokyo: Soshisha, 2002), 98), although it is stamped with
Kinugasa's seal; the other, a printed copy produced by the Honjo Film Distribution Com-
pany, the film's distributor in the Kanto 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 10. After 1925, it was not the films that were censored as much as prints. Every one was viewed
meters), and the third on 21 September (2,135 meters). The slight difference in lengths is by censors and received a stamp on the celluloid itself. By law, any changes in a print
probably due to different leader lengths. A copy of the current print, housed in the Na- necessitated resubmitting it for censorship, and I have found no record of an alternate
tional Film Center, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is only 1,617 meters. version in prewar censorship records. I have also not encountered any written account of
9. Kinugasa, Waga eiga seishun, 81. a screening of the film in the postwar before 1971.

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