A War of Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa's "Page of Madness" and the Japanese Avant-Garde of the 1920s

Abstract

For most English-speaking film scholars, the history of Japanese cinema is the history of its struggle with Hollywood: the Japanese at one moment eagerly copy the American commercial film and the next moment reject its corrupting alien influence in favor of purer, native models.' Kinugasa Teinosuke's 1926 film Page of Madness (Kuruta Ippeiji), so clearly indebted to the European avant-garde of the 1920s, ought to trouble this simplistic reduction, but rather than complicate the neatness of the Hollywood/native-Japanese opposition, most writers divorce the film from its cultural context and label it a curious and isolated experiment. Although Noiel Burch's important analysis of the film in To The Distant Observer does consider the relationship between Page of Madness and the Western avant-garde, it still resorts to a reductive view of Japanese culture. Burch maintains that avant-garde art had no significant place in Japanese culture before World War II because Western modes of representation were only first gaining a foothold then. And while Japanese filmmakers were assimilating the codes of Western representation, Western art witnessed a shift away from representation. In other words, modernism in the West was rejecting and criticizing the codes that the Japanese were only first learning. How could Japanese filmmakers assimilate Western realism and critique it at the same time? They could not, Burch concludes: [I]t would be foolish to expect that the process of assimilation of such an alien mode could go hand in hand with a practical critique of that mode, to presume, in short, that the major gestures of European film-art could be repeated on such a fragile basis.2 Though Burch acknowledges similarities between Page of Madness and European avant-garde films of the 1920s, he quickly dismisses them, arguing instead that Kinugasa's film, whether or not it was consciously influenced by European film, was ultimately determined by native factors.3 According to Burch, since modernism had no roots in Japan, it was only by being faithful to the traditions of the East that a Japanese filmmaker of the time could make a superficially Western avant-garde film such as Page of Madness. The real impetus for Kinugasa's rejection of the classical narrative film, Burch asserts, is not the European avant-garde, but the devices of traditional Japanese aesthetics. This approach is historically implausible. Burch's argument about the avantgarde is part of a very interesting attempt to show how Japan's transition from