The Magic Clock (L'Horloge magique) or The Story of the Little Girl Who Wanted to Be a Princess: Made in France by the imaginative Russian puppet animator Ladislas Starewicz, this is a charming fantasy about a clockmaker's daughter who falls in love with one of the medieval knights decorating a magnificent clock, and who enters his world in her dreams. Directed by Ladislas Starewicz. (1926, 46 mins, Silent with French intertitles and live English translation, Tinted, Print from W.K.E.) A Page of Madness Teinosuke Kinugasa was an artistic pioneer of the Japanese cinema; by the time his reputation hit international proportions in 1953 with Gate of Hell, however, the early Page of Madness was unknown, and 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). (See also December 9 for Kinugasa's Actress.)