A Page of Madness

He wanted to show off, you mean.

Which brings us to his first massive swing in 1926, Kuruda Ichipeji, or A Page of Madness.

Oh, a massive swing indeed, and a massive undeniable miss.

I categorically reject that.

For A Page of Madness, he teams up with a fledgling writer named Yasunori Kawabata.

Who, it should be noted for the listener, eventually wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 60s.

He wasn't exactly a slouch, even if he was young at the time.

Because this is the part you always conveniently gloss over when you're canonizing the bloke.

You'll find links, as ever, in the show notes.

My local cinema, the magnificent Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford, is showing 1926 Japanese psychological horror A Page of Madness with a live score by Hugo Max, and that's on Wednesday the 7th of October.

This also seems like an opportune moment to trail the fact that the subject of the next regular episode of this show will be Lev Kuleshov's startling 1926 Gothic Western, By the Law.

I don't have a release date for that yet, not least because I haven't recorded it.

We have an early disaster film in the Johnstown Flood.

We have an avant-garde experimental psycho thriller from Japan, A Page of Madness, and we have the epic Beau Jest, as well as the comedy The General from Buster Keaton.

So we have a variety of genres and a variety of music that will be performed live with the films.

That's what I want to get into next, because I think what's really interesting and fits particularly into this conversation is that all of the music, like you alluded to, is being performed live in the theater by musicians as the film is playing.