Tim Bur­ton grew up watch­ing Japan­ese mon­ster movies in Bur­bank, which must explain a good deal about his artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty. It seems to be for that rea­son, in any case, that the new Kon­bi­ni “Vidéo Club” episode above takes him first to the Asian cin­e­ma sec­tion of JM Vidéo, one of Paris’ last two DVD rental shops. Ear­ly and repeat­ed expo­sure to such kai­ju clas­sics as Hon­da Ishirō’s Godzil­la and The War of the Gar­gan­tuas may have instilled him with an affec­tion for poor Eng­lish dub­bing, but it did­n’t rob him of his abil­i­ty to appre­ci­ate more refined (if equal­ly vis­cer­al) exam­ples of Japan­ese film like Shindō Kane­to’s Oni­ba­ba and Kuroneko.

Bur­ton describes those pic­tures as dream­like, a qual­i­ty he goes on to praise in oth­er selec­tions from a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent eras and cul­tures. Even cinephiles who don’t share his par­tic­u­lar taste in view­ing mate­r­i­al — bound on one end, it seems, by The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc and The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, and on the oth­er by I Was a Teenage Were­wolf and The Brain That Would­n’t Die, with the likes of Jason and the Arg­onauts and The Fly in between — have to admit that this indi­cates a deep under­stand­ing of cin­e­ma itself.

It may be the art form whose expe­ri­ence is most sim­i­lar to dream­ing, but only occa­sion­al­ly through­out its his­to­ry have par­tic­u­lar films attained the sta­tus of the tru­ly oneir­ic. One sus­pects that Bur­ton knows them all.

In fact, one of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry’s most notable addi­tions to the canon of the dream­like won the Palme d’Or with Bur­ton’s involve­ment. This video includes his brief rem­i­nis­cences of being on the jury at the 2010 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, where Apichat­pong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boon­mee Who Can Recall His Past Lives took the top prize. That same year saw the release of Bur­ton’s own Alice in Won­der­land, which he describes as “the most chaot­ic movie I’ve ever made.” In 2019, he direct­ed his sec­ond live-action Dis­ney adap­ta­tion Dum­bo, which, though hard­ly a pas­sion project, was­n’t with­out its auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal res­o­nances: “At that point, I kind of felt like Dum­bo,” he admits, “a weird crea­ture trapped at Dis­ney.” Per­haps that long on-and-off cor­po­rate asso­ci­a­tion final­ly hav­ing come to an end, or so he sug­gests, means he’ll now be freer than ever to draw from the depths of his own cin­e­mat­ic sub­con­scious­ness.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Tim Bur­ton: A Look Inside His Visu­al Imag­i­na­tion

Watch Vin­cent, Tim Burton’s Ani­mat­ed Trib­ute to Vin­cent Price & Edgar Allan Poe (1982)

Tim Burton’s Hansel and Gre­tel Shot on 16mm Film with Ama­teur Japan­ese Actors (1983)

David Cro­nen­berg Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

Christo­pher Nolan Vis­its a Paris Video Store & Talks with Cil­lian Mur­phy About the Films That Influ­enced Him

Watch The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, the Influ­en­tial Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Hor­ror Film (1920)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It’s a sad fact that the vast major­i­ty of silent movies in Japan have been lost thanks to human care­less­ness, earth­quakes and the grim effi­cien­cy of the Unit­ed States Air Force. The first films of huge­ly impor­tant fig­ures like Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Yasu­jiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Shimizu have sim­ply van­ished. So we should con­sid­er our­selves for­tu­nate that Teinosuke Kin­u­gasa’s Kuret­ta Ippei — a 1926 film known in the States as A Page of Mad­ness – has some­how man­aged to sur­vive the vagaries of fate. Kin­u­gasa sought to make a Euro­pean-style exper­i­men­tal movie in Japan and, in the process, he made one of the great land­marks of silent cin­e­ma. You can watch it above.

Born in 1896, Kin­u­gasa start­ed his adult life work­ing as an onna­ga­ta, an actor who spe­cial­izes in play­ing female roles. In 1926, after work­ing for a few years behind the cam­era under pio­neer­ing direc­tor Shozo Maki­no, Kin­u­gasa bought a film cam­era and set up a lab in his house in order to cre­ate his own inde­pen­dent­ly financed movies. He then approached mem­bers of the Shinkankaku (new impres­sion­ists) lit­er­ary group to help him come up with a sto­ry. Author Yasunari Kawa­ba­ta wrote a treat­ment that would even­tu­al­ly become the basis for A Page of Mad­ness.

Though the syn­op­sis of the plot doesn’t real­ly do jus­tice to the movie — a retired sailor who works at an insane asy­lum to care for his wife who tried to kill their child — the visu­al audac­i­ty of Page is still star­tling today. The open­ing sequence rhyth­mi­cal­ly cuts between shots of a tor­ren­tial down­pour and gush­ing water before dis­solv­ing into a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ri­ly odd scene of a young woman in a rhom­boid head­dress danc­ing in front of a mas­sive spin­ning ball. The woman is, of course, an inmate at the asy­lum dressed in rags. As her dance becomes more and more fren­zied, the film cuts faster and faster, using super­im­po­si­tions, spin­ning cam­eras and just about every oth­er trick in the book.

While Kin­u­gasa was clear­ly influ­enced by The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, which also visu­al­izes the inner world of the insane, the movie is also rem­i­nis­cent of the works of French avant-garde film­mak­ers like Abel Gance, Russ­ian mon­tage mas­ters like Sergei Eisen­stein and, in par­tic­u­lar, the sub­jec­tive cam­er­a­work of F. W. Mur­nau in Der Let­zte Mann. Kin­u­gasa incor­po­rat­ed all of these influ­ences seam­less­ly, cre­at­ing an exhil­a­rat­ing, dis­turb­ing and ulti­mate­ly sad tour de force of film­mak­ing. The great Japan­ese film crit­ic Aki­ra Iwasa­ki called the movie “the first film-like film born in Japan.”

When A Page of Mad­ness was released, it played at a the­ater in Tokyo that spe­cial­ized in for­eign movies. Page was indeed pret­ty for­eign com­pared to most oth­er Japan­ese films at the time. The movie was regard­ed, film schol­ar Aaron Gerow notes, as “one of the few Japan­ese works to be treat­ed as the ‘equal’ of for­eign motion pic­tures in a cul­ture that still looked down on domes­tic pro­duc­tions.” Yet it didn’t change the course of Japan­ese cin­e­ma, and it was thought of as a curios­i­ty at a time when most films in Japan were kabu­ki adap­ta­tions and samu­rai sto­ries.

Page dis­ap­peared not long after its release and, for over 50 years, was thought lost until Kin­u­gasa found it in his own store­house in 1971. Dur­ing that time Kin­u­gasa received a Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his splashy samu­rai spec­ta­cle The Gate of Hell (1953) and Kawa­ba­ta, who wrote the treat­ment, got a Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture for writ­ing books like Snow Coun­try about a lovelorn geisha.

You can find A Page of Mad­ness on our list of Free Silent Films, which is part of our col­lec­tion,  4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Gold­en Age of Japan­ese Cin­e­ma: Kuro­sawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi & Beyond

Essen­tial Japan­ese Cin­e­ma: A Jour­ney Through 50 of Japan’s Beau­ti­ful, Often Bizarre Films

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Free Online 64 Ani­ma­tions That Launched the Japan­ese Ani­me Tra­di­tion

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

It seems not to be doc­u­ment­ed whether the San­ta Ana winds were blow­ing when Maya Deren and Alexan­der Hack­en­schmied shot Mesh­es of the After­noon. But every­thing about the film itself sug­gests that they must have been, so vivid does its atmos­phere of lux­u­ri­ant­ly arid para­noia remain these 62 years lat­er. Despite its run­time of less than fif­teen min­utes and the obvi­ous­ly mod­est means of its pro­duc­tion, it’s long been can­on­ized as not just a stan­dard intro­duc­tion to exper­i­men­tal­ism in film stud­ies class­es, but also a crit­i­cal favorite. In fact, it placed in the last Sight and Sound crit­ics poll of the best films of all time at a respectable #16, above Abbas Kiarostami’s Close‑Up and below John Ford’s The Searchers.

Mesh­es of the After­noon ranks at #62 on the direc­tors poll, a spot that sounds low until you con­sid­er that it’s shared with the likes of Late Spring, Some Like It Hot, Sátán­tangó, Blade Run­ner, and Lawrence of Ara­bia. Still, it’s a bit sur­pris­ing that it did­n’t come in high­er, giv­en the obvi­ous influ­ence both direct and indi­rect of its ear­ly Los Ange­les-noir sur­re­al­ism on so many sub­se­quent major motion pic­tures.

“Had Cal­i­forn­ian sun­light ever looked as sug­ges­tive or sin­is­ter before the sharply etched dream world of Mesh­es of the After­noon?” asks Ian Christie in his short accom­pa­ny­ing essay at the British Film Insti­tute’s site. “Cer­tain­ly, it soon would, in Bil­ly Wilder’s Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and many lat­er films noirs” — not to men­tion the “many tra­di­tions over eight decades” it has inspired since.

Those include the oeu­vre of the late David Lynch, which con­sti­tutes a tra­di­tion unto itself, but even the most casu­al film­go­er could hard­ly watch Mesh­es of the After­noon with­out feel­ing deep res­o­nances between it and a great many of the non-exper­i­men­tal movies they’ve seen since. The sto­ry, such as one can deci­pher it, has to do with a woman alone at home, haunt­ed by a glimpse of a hood­ed fig­ure with a mir­ror for a face and unable to tell whether she’s on the inside or out­side of a dream. By the end, she is dead, but on which plane of real­i­ty? There are, of course, no answers, just as there is no dia­logue, explana­to­ry or oth­er­wise. But Deren and Hack­en­schmied knew they did­n’t need it, being ful­ly aware that they were work­ing in a medi­um where every­thing impor­tant can be con­veyed visu­al­ly — and, ide­al­ly, expe­ri­enced by view­ers just as if they were dream­ing it them­selves.

The film will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 1,639 Film Crit­ics & 480 Direc­tors: See the Results of the Once-a-Decade Sight and Sound Poll

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.