![A Page of Madness A Page of Madness film image; couple in Kabuki masks](https://images.viff.org/uploads/2024/03/PageofMadness.jpg?resize=600%2C337&gravity)
Get your tickets before May 31 at the early bird price of $18 (regular $25).
A janitor at an asylum tries to persuade his wife — an inmate — to escape with him, but she doesn’t want to go. This experimental horror film was conceived and directed by former kabuki female impersonator Teinsosuke Kinugasa, co-written with Nobel prize-winner Yasunari Kawabata, and performed by Kinugasa’s avant-garde experimental group. This silent film masterpiece explores multiple facets of mental health through a disorienting array of avant-garde and Expressionist techniques; it’s empathetic, yet raw and direct.
Performer, composer, and sound artist Anju Singh will deepen the experience of the film through a brand new live score. Never shying away from boundary pushing territory, the composition will use source sounds developed with composer Harlow MacFarlane, percussion, strings, synthesizers, electronics and world instruments that will echo the extremes, dissonances and nuances of mental health experience that the film portrays. This event will provide an environment to facilitate a cathartic and reflective sonic and film experience.
A Page of Madness remains one of the most radical and challenging Japanese movies…. Kinugasa deploys a battery of expressionist distortions and otherwise stylised images to plunge his audience into ’irrational’ experience…
Tony Rayns, Time Out Film Guide
Media Partner
Teinosuke Kinugasa
Masuo Inoue, Yoshie Nakagawa, Ayako Iijima, Hiroshi Nemoto, Misao Seki
Japan
1926
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Guest
![SOMNUS SOMNUS headshot](https://images.viff.org/uploads/2024/03/SOMNUS.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Anju Singh
Anju Singh is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, video and sound artist exploring texture through the use of extended/experimental techniques, electronics, musical and non-musical materials, and processing. Her works are process-based, bringing contrasting themes and concepts together. A core process in her practice is using methods of deconstruction and reanimation to repurpose and contextualize materials in new compositional environments.
Anju has presented across Canada, in Europe, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States in a variety of spaces including Fylkingen in Stockholm, Sweden; Send + Receive Festival in Winnipeg; Vancouver Jazz Festival; Polygon Gallery; New Forms Festival, and most recently in Copenhagen, Denmark. Anju’s sound and video work has been commissioned and presented by Canadian League of Composers, re:Naissance Opera, and Vancouver New Music.
Anju’s music and composing journey has brought her into the world of film scoring, most recently with the score she composed for director Jessie Anthony’s documentary film OSWÉ: GE Our Land, Our River, Our Way, a film exploring the lack of clean drinking water available for Six Nations of the Grand River.
Credits
Screenwriter
Yasunari Kawabata, Minoru Inuzuka, Banko Sawada, Teinosuke Kinugasa
Cinematography
Kohei Sugiyama
Editor
Umeko Numazaki
Art Director
Kasaku Hayashi, Chiyo Ozaki
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