In 2021, I had the honor of re-scoring Kingusa Teinosuke's silent film  masterpiece „ A Page Of Madness“ from 1926. In collaboration with the University of Bremen and the Film Symposium Bremen, this performance took place on May 8, 2021, at Kino City46 in Bremen.

The music was composed by David Esser, and the cello was played by Sebastian Erdmann

 

 

An old seaman takes a concierge job in a rural mental hospital to take care of his interned wife. Their daughter’s engagement announcement triggers scraps of memories and a vortex of thoughts within the mother – and worries about the prejudices of the family of the groom within the father. In his unsuccessful attempts to free his wife, he has to face the chief doctor and other inmates. When he assumes to recognise the future son-in-law in one of them, he himself begins to doubt his perception.

“A work that has advanced a step ahead of Dr. Caligari,” the film critics read already in 1926. The film was made by the Japanese avant-garde group Shinkankaku-ha, the school of new perception, and masterfully combines the script of Kawabata Yasunari (1968 Nobel Prize for Literature) with innovative camera technology and Eiko Minami’s dance talent. Lost for a long time, the film has been rediscovered in 1972 and only survived as a fragment. Nonetheless, it impressively illustrates the artist’s claim to combine modern narration and innovative play of forms and light and to overcome the boundaries between reality and folly.