1926 Japanese silent avant-garde film
Rating: 16/20
Plot: A man gets a janitor job at a sanitarium in order to help his crazy wife escape.
I don't watch nearly enough silent movies anymore. And I can't recall ever seeing a silent movie from Japan. This one is from the mind of Teinosuke Kinugasa, a former female impersonator and the director of Gate of Hell, a movie that I know I watched but must have forgotten to write about because I can't find it here. This film was originally shown, I've read, with narration. Watching it now, it's really difficult to figure out the backstory for these characters. There aren't any intertitles to help you out at all, and the storytelling isn't exactly what you'd call coherent. That doesn't make it any less enjoyable as Kinugasa throws in every trick from the 1920's cinematic book of tricks (not a real book), making this more like a tone poem than a narrative. You get very quick montages, something that gives the setting a manic and somehow claustrophobic vibe. There are quick cuts of dancing, terrible lightning effects, and shadows that add up to a chilling look at mental illness. There's multiple exposure used extensively and a lot of distorted faces or dancers that give this that otherworldly feel that you can really only get from 1920's horror movies or the works of Guy Maddin. Washed out backgrounds and silent murky fuzz certainly add to the overall texture, but it's hard to know what was part of the vision of the filmmaker and what improvements time made on a "lost" movie that apparently was just sitting around for about 50 years before its discovery. This one's all about the imagery, and the images are indelible ones. A trio of crazed motherfuckers, a dog and later the male lead with their profile in a halo of light, a dancer with an odd hat in front of a bloated barbershop poll. You piece together enough of a plot to make the logical parts of your brain happy enough, but it's the part of your brain that just likes to look at stuff that's going to be thrilled the most with what's going on here. It might get a little repetitive after a while, but this is still highly recommended for fans of experimental and/or silent movies.
Parts of this lost movie were still lost after the rest of it was first found. Apparently, an extended cut exists, but I watched a non-restored version. The music was provided by some 1970's avant-garde Japanese musicians.
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