Kurutta ippêji [A Page of Madness] (1926)
(Criterion Streaming, December 2022) If you want to go way, way back in Japanese horror movies, it’s hard to do better than 1926’s A Page of Madness—so far back, in fact, that the film was lost for 45 years and only resurfaced in 1971. But no matter how old the film is, writer-director Teinosuke Kinugasa (working with creators such as the later Nobel laureate for Literature Yasunari Kawabata) delivers something eerie and effective. This is far less about plot (indeed, there aren’t that many title cards—make sure you’ve got Wikipedia open to make sense of it) as much as it’s about surreal images, fractured chronology, and themes of mental illness. It’s quite a thing, even though admiration may not translate into simple liking. Still—A Page of Madness is an early work of cinema that, despite obvious technical limitations, anticipates far more complex filmmaking that would only become more common decades later.