A Page of Madness

Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926, with the Shinkankaku-ha. A man takes a janitor's job in an asylum to watch over his wife; their daughter arrives with a marriage question. Yasunari Kawabata is credited with the story; the scenario was a group job, with no intertitles, rapid cutting, dance, and painted sets. Kinema Junpo called it the first filmlike film born in Japan. Thought lost after a studio fire, it was found by Kinugasa in a rice barrel in his storehouse in 1971, about two-thirds complete, and BFI ran it on the rediscovery.