A Page of Madness

Acted by an avant-garde theatre group, conceived and directed by one-time kabuki female impersonator Kinugasa, A Page of Madness remains one of the most radical and challenging Japanese movies ever seen here. An old sailor works as a janitor in an asylum to stay close to his insane wife and to help her to escape, except that she doesn't want to go... Kinugasa deploys a battery of expressionist distortions and otherwise stylised images to plunge his audience into 'irrational' experience, always withdrawing to a 'saner' perspective, and then undercutting that with another visual or dramatic shock. This version has music added by Kinugasa when he rediscovered the print in 1970.