Kurutta Ipeji
Japan, 1926, 60 min
Yasunari Kawabata, Teinosuke Kinugasa
Kohei Sugiyama, Eiichi Tsuburaya
Masuo Inoue, Yoshie Nakagawa, Ayako Iijima, Hiroshi Nemoto, Misao Seki
George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607. FAX: 716-271-3970
Following last year's successful "collaboration" between Yo La Tengo and Jean Painlevé, indie pop-punk favorites Superchunk will unleash their passionate, guitar-driven sound during a performance of Teinosuke Kinugasa's little-seen avant-garde groundbreaker A Page of Madness. Bandleader Mac McCaughan and company have written a brand-new, original score to the film, a rediscovered 1926 silent beauty from Japan's formative years of cinema. The film takes us deep into the mind of an institutionalized woman and her husband, who takes a job as a hospital janitor in an effort to be closer to her. Full of surreal, spooky imagery, Kinugasa's cutting-edge style shows similarities with German expressionism and the French avant-garde, though it even predates Un Chien Andalou; he also exhibits a radical, frenetic montage technique that echoes the warped, racing and ungrounded imaginations of the characters. At once sad, tender and in-your-face disturbing, scenes from the past and present mix together at a mind-spinning pace, propelling the story without need for intertitles. Based out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Superchunk has been an indie-rock mainstay since the early '90s, creating a song catalog as bursting with fresh, manic energy as it is full of unpredictable melodic angles and supremely catchy hooks. Movie events don't get much more one-of-a-kind than this.
—Kurt Wolff
The Stand-In (1985), Nina Takes a Lover (1994), Dream for an Insomniac (1996), Dream with the Fishes (1997), Teknolust (2002) and Dopamine(2003) were not only screened at Festival but were also shot in San Francisco.