(Kurutta Ippeiji, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Japan 1926, 59 min., 35mm)
A brilliant avant-garde exploration of the helplessness felt by a mentally ill person’s loved ones, this film tells of a man who works as a janitor in the insane asylum where his wife is a patient. Using a battery of expressionistic visual devices, Kinugasa shifts between lyric “sanity” and visual shock, building the story around the janitor’s attempt to help his wife to escape — except she wants to remain in her ‘home.’ An undisputed masterpiece of Japanese cinema, this film was considered lost for many years until a single nitrate copy was discovered by the director in 1970, from which this print derives.
35mm print from the George Eastman Museum collection.
Introduction by Aaron Gerow, author of A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan.
Presented in cooperation with On Film at the University of Rochester.
Upcoming Events in this Series
Film Screenings | A Kiss for Cinderella (16mm)
Silent Tuesdays Director Herbert Brenon and star Betty Bronson reunite after Peter Pan for another adaptation of a J.M. Barrie play. Jane (Bronson) is a house slave who dreams of a Prince Charming and is nicknamed Cinderella by an artist whose studio she cleans because she always talks of the wonderful things that will one day befall her.
Film Screenings | Hamlet (35mm)
Silent Tuesdays Many silent filmmakers turned to Shakespeare for source material, transforming the Bard’s verbal poetry and drama into visual equivalents, but none more unusually than this project spearheaded by the legendary Danish actress Asta Nielsen.