Lost until 1971, Kinugasa's peerless A Page of Madness is a truly aberrant film. A bizarre blending of German expressionist and Soviet montage styles, it has no precedent in Japan's silent period. Set entirely inside an insane asylum, this disturbing film follows the attempts of an elderly seaman, now working as a janitor in the asylum, to release his wife who had been committed since her attempted suicide. Kinugasa relies entirely on visuals to tell his story-there are no intertitles. Hallucinations abound, fantasies fluidly intermingle as the film looks at the bewilderment inside bedlam. Kinugasa accomplishes this through great visual invention, deploying superimpositions, jarring camera angles, distorted lighting, penetrating close-ups and other cinematic devices. How he conjured such remarkable innovation is still a mystery. The obvious references, such as Battleship Potemkin and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, had not been exhibited in Japan. Nevertheless, A Page of Madness rushes forward with the visual intensity of a fugal state.-Steve Seid