Teinosuke Kinugasa's "A Page of Madness" ("Kurutta Ichipeiji," 1926) was long thought lost. Only some 75 years later did the discovery of the missing negative allow the picture to be finally viewed by the present generation. At the same time there emerged a critical need to evaluate it because it seemed a somewhat strange entertainment.
Nominally scripted by Yasunari Kawabata, directed by Kinugasa, a shimpa drama specialist formerly an onnagata (female role specialist), it seemed stylistically advanced. It was composed of well over 800 shots, many more and often much shorter than those of the average film (estimated at between five and seven seconds during this period), with some scenes only a few frames in length.
These sketched the story of a man who takes the job of janitor in an insane asylum in order to be near his wife whose madness he feels responsible for. The asylum was vividly rendered but conventional narrative was so ignored that the picture was said to be impossible to understand. It was thus early agreed that here was an avant-garde film, one from outside the industry, made by a group of youngsters (the average age of staff and cast was 25) who created a personal and poetic film, with Kinugasa as an early auteur.