SYNOPSIS
Lost until 1971, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 avant-garde masterpiece Kurutta Ippeji provides a fascinating, if unique, glimpse of Japanese silent film. Made by the artistic pioneer whose Gate of Hell (1953) would later help to bring his country’s cinema to the attention of the West, the film relates the story of a seaman who takes a job as janitor in a mental asylum in order to free his wife, incarcerated after a suicide attempt that succeeded only in drowning their baby son. Using no intertitles to relay his disturbing tale, Kinugasa relies soley on visual invention and expressionistic camera angles, unearthly lighting enhanced by sets that were painted silver, penetrating close-ups, and superimpostions. This startling work of radical invention easily rivals the most advanced avant-garde practices of the West, although these could not have been known to Kinugasa at the time.