An artistic pioneer of the Japanese cinema, Teinosuke Kinugasa was the producer and director of the radically experimental silent films, A Page of Madness and Crossroads. By the time his reputation hit international proportions in 1953 with Gate of Hell, however, the early Page of Madness was unknown; it remained so until 1971, when Kinugasa found a copy of the film in his garden shed! The film tells the disturbing story of a seaman who becomes a janitor in an insane asylum in an attempt to free his wife, who has been incarcerated there since her attempted suicide. Kinugasa relies entirely on visual effects to tell his story; there are no intertitles, though the musical score added later was approved and synchronized by Kinugasa. Superimpositions, extreme camera angles and jarring close-ups combine with strange lighting and shadow effects to tell the hallucinatory tale from the janitor's point of view. Though the film evidences techniques of German expressionism and Russian montage, there is some debate as to whether Kinugasa could have seen these foreign films at that time (he later journeyed to Germany and to Russia, where he met Eisenstein).