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  • A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan
  • Dennis Washburn (bio)
A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan. By Aaron Gerow. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008. x, 130 pages. $50.00, cloth; $22.00, paper.

A surviving print of Kurutta ichipeiji (A page of madness, 1926) was discovered in 1971 by the film's own director, Kinugasa Teinosuke. Its critical reception provides a fascinating example of how easily the history of cinema may be distorted. The film, re-edited by Kinugasa, was subsequently distributed through the global, pre-VCR network of cineaste art houses, film festivals, and college screenings—an environment markedly different from the one that existed at the time of the film's production. Decoupled from its historical context, Kurutta ichipeiji was hailed as an avant-garde work of genius comparable in its artistic daring to examples of German expressionism, such as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or of surrealism, such as Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou. Perhaps more important, it was viewed as something of an outlier in the development of film art in the 1920s, and, as such, was treated as an anomaly or puzzle that could be used to support a variety of contestable conclusions about the history of cinema—everything from the apparently exceptional character of Japanese modernism (compared to European strains of the movement) to the supposedly inevitable triumph of naturalism as the dominant mode of film narrative.

Recent English-language scholarship by Jonathan Abel and William Gardner (among others)1 has done much to help recover the circumstances [End Page 368] surrounding the film's production and reception at the end of the Taisho period. Aaron Gerow has built upon and extended this recent work with a more extensive historical account of Kurutta ichipeiji. By examining how institutional practices simultaneously delimited and enabled the radical aesthetics of the film, Gerow provides a complex, nuanced reading that helps explain what was genuinely experimental about it. Pointing to the film's ambivalent politics in particular, he stresses that it "is in many ways about the complication of boundaries" (p. 86); and this overarching theme proves fruitful in explicating not only the history of Kurutta ichipeiji, but also the complex poetics of the film's narrative, which unfolds as a consequence of interactions between the space of the setting, a psychiatric hospital, and the disorienting subjectivities of the characters.

The divided sensibility of the film, created by the presence of both conventional and unconventional elements, is the focus of the early chapters, which present a brief overview of what the author refers to as the culture of combination that characterized late Taisho Japan. By the 1920s most Japanese artists and intellectuals sensed that their society was no longer modernizing and had already achieved modernity. This feeling was liberating, but it came at a price. The establishment of an expansionist empire, the emergence of a mass consumerist culture, with more widely distributed income, and the occurrence of deeply unsettling events, such as the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, helped create a peculiar, contradictory atmosphere of confidence and anxiety, which in turn fostered tremendous experimentation and popularization in the arts, especially cinema. There was in relative terms a sense of openness to mingling older modes of performance arts with newer ones, domestic aesthetic manifestos with foreign ideas.

Many literary artists thought that films held great potential for achieving immediacy in expression and for challenging older narrative conventions. In the case of Kurutta ichipeiji, the collaboration between filmmakers and writers from the modernist movement called Shinkankaku (the author takes "new impressionism" as the meaning of Shinkankaku because this term was also applied to French cinema at the time) was crucial to the conception of the film. The Shinkankaku group was at the height of its influence in the mid-1920s and in many ways exemplified the culture of combination. The group's chief theorist, Yokomitsu Riichi, recognized almost all movements within modernism—including Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, cubism, and expressionism—as properly belonging to Shinkankaku; and this eclecticism, combined with the group's larger ostensible political (antiproletarian) and aesthetic (an objectivist form...

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