Review of A Page of Madness (1926)
Seen in 2026.
Seen in a cinema with live piano accompaniment but no intertitles or benshi narration.
When a woman goes insane, her husband the sailor leaves the ocean, feeling guilty for being away from home for too long. He gets a job as an orderly at the asylum, planning to break her out of there, but she won’t have it. Meanwhile, their daughter is old enough to marry.
I’m glad I read up on the plot before seeing this film, because I would not have been able to piece together the plot from the image alone. Supposedly, only about two thirds of the material in the original cut have survived. A benshi would have helped present the fragmentary recut, but the visuals are certainly interesting. The opening in particular has some forward-looking editing. It’s not a grand farewell like Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). Instead, it’s the beginning of commercially successful Japanese cinema.