Cinema Muto

Kurutta Ippeiji: A Page of Madness

8 Kurutta Ippeiji: A Page of Madness This experimental silent film was thought lost for fifty years until the director Teinosuke“Kinugasa himself rediscovered it in his garden shed.” —Le Giornate del Cinema Muto catalogue An old man takes a job as a janitor at an asylum to be near his wife who failed to drown herself after drowning their infant son— tiny squalling bundle. This is Japan. The year 1926. His wife lies on the floor of her cell on her futon. Her kimono disordered— her hair a disgrace. Her arms rise from her sides as she sleeps, her hands open, begging for forgiveness. Or is she dreaming of the moment she let her baby go? In the next cell, a young woman dances day and night without stopping, leaving bare bloody footprints across the concrete floor. She is a goddess but only she knows it. If the old man asked her— she would give him back his son. 9 But the old man sees only a mad girl who once—he’s been told— danced the May Dance for Crown Prince Hirohito, then found she couldn’t stop. The old man unlocks his wife’s cell with a key he has stolen from the desk of the director, in his other hand are sweets. Their daughter, he tells her, their only daughter, has met a young man who’s asked her to marry, to move north with him to his home in far Hokkaido, that wild frontier island. When asked, their daughter told this young man her mother died giving birth to a stillborn baby brother. She understands clearly if he knew where her mother was— what she was— even a boy from Hokkaido would not take her home. Your daughter, says the old man. Remember you have a daughter. And the wife does— remembers the young hands that kept her from the river, from following the same arc as her baby. 10 If her daughter loved her, she would not have stopped her. Even now, years later, she can feel ten ugly bruises left by her daughter’s long strong fingers. Even now, years later, she still suffers with this living her selfish daughter gave her. Come, the old man tells his wife. Your children need you. Forgetting, at that moment, only one is still alive. He uses sweets to lure his wife from her cell, down the long stone hallway. If only she would come home, the old man keeps on thinking— our daughter could have children without moving to Hokkaido. Children to replace the one lost to the spring’s cold rushing water. He takes his wife’s pale hand and leads her past the dancer, who has paused for a moment to rearrange her hair in a mirror that is not there. They make it to the front door. He still has the candies and his wife —who, as a girl, was famous for her sweet tooth—clearly wants them. He won the sweets, he tells her, this morning at the street fair. This, he remarks, is our lucky day. 11 Outside, in the dark night, a dog is barking and his wife is frightened—she always has been frightened. Even before this place, even before her children began crying every night. She is crying now as she pulls her hand from her husband’s, runs back down the hall to her cell, throws herself, sobbing, into the cold nothing that awaits her. No daughter, nosey no good, to stop her now. The old man goes home, falls to the floor exhausted, sweets still in his hand. He hears a girl dance the May Dance in a warm spring far away and dreams, instead of candies, he won masks at the street fair— smooth white faces with smiling, wide red mouths. In his sleep, he hands the masks out to the mad ones as he mops slowly past their cells. One by one the mad put on new faces and become as they should have always been— smiling, happy. 12 They laugh gently, stepping freely from their cells— children come home at last to their mothers, fathers. His wife is smiling too. White world, red life, the goddess says, still dancing, and hands the wife a pillow that in an instant becomes a smiling baby. Or did I...