![]() Talented musicians, composers, and arrangers, Miller and Donahue have performed individually and collectively in celebrated music and art festivals as well as preeminent cultural institutions around the globe. With its bold and striking visual style and its close connections to the most progressive thinking about film of its day, it's no wonder that A Page of Madness has become one of the most discussed and debated of Japanese films."-Chris Fujiwara, Ebertfest Since the vast majority of Japanese films from the silent era are lost, the existence of a film as unusual and important is a real stroke of luck. "Playing on a continual discordance between subjective and objective reality, using superimpositions, rapid and insistent visual patterns and overlapping fantasy sequences, A Page of Madness builds an atmosphere of astonishing intensity. Michael Atkinson - San Francisco Silent Film Festival There are, thank God, still mysteries to unearth in the forgotten closets of the world, and still unknown movie experiences that seem to have come out of nowhere.". The feeling of A Page of Madness is of being exposed to a secret cinema, a covert subconsciousness-caught-in-amber history of movies, happening beneath the culture we thought we knew, perhaps while we sleep. "Ultimately, it may be the best-that is, the most fascinating and the most terrifying-madhouse movie ever made and makes all other efforts at visualizing the subjective experience of mental and emotional disarray look childish and campy by comparison. ![]() After it's initial celebrated release the film was lost for over 45 years, and later found by the director himself, randomly unearthed in the basement of his warehouse in 1971. The director's interest in exploring the subject of subjective reality and mental illness stemmed from a visit to a mental hospital and a chance encounter with the reigning emperor Yoshihito, who, rumored to be mentally ill, was generally kept away from the public eye. The film's art direction was co-designed with members of the Japanese avant-garde movement called Shinkankakuha (which means "school of new perceptions"). A surrealist visual treat matched only by our adventurous improvisational musician’s willingness to follow the film where-ever it leads. Set in an insane asylum, it’s often difficult to tell if the viewer is seeing through the inmates’ or the caretakers’ eyes, or if a division between the two even exists. ![]() One of the rare Japanese silents to survive WWII, this film is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
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