presented in association with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Asian Art Museum, CAAM and MiDNiTES for MANiACS 

Musical accompaniment by Alloy Orchestra

Admission: $16 General/$14 SF Silent Film Festival and Cinematheque members
Tickets available here. Cinematheque members email us for your promotional code.

A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ichipeiji) focuses on a retired sailor, who volunteers to work odd jobs at the asylum where his wife has been confined since her attempt to drown their infant son many years before. Without intertitles, Page evokes a world as seen by the mentally disturbed—through shifting images and rapid editing—and creates a modernist tour-de-force as psychologically and aesthetically compelling as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Teinosuke Kinugasa was a former female impersonator who entered films in 1917 as an actor, turned to directing in 1922 and made some of the most formally brilliant Japanese films of the following decades. His best-known silent films are Kurutta Ippeji (1926), an old print of which was found by Kinugasa in his attic and re-released in the 1970s, and Crossroads (1928), the first Japanese film to be commercially released in Europe. In the 1950s and 60s Kinugasa made a number of period dramas noted for their sumptuous color and imaginative use of the wide screen; Gate of Hell (1953) was named best film at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival and won an Oscar for best foreign film.

Restoration by Lobster Films