José B. Capino

Jane Marie Gaines

Aaron Gerow

Nayoung Aimee Kwon

Takushi Odagiri

Moonim Baek

Zhen Zhang

Yiman Wang

Nadine Chan

Thomas A. C. Barker

Nikki J. Y. Lee

Reframing Production, Circulation, and Consumption of Film in Asia

Theorizing Colonial Cinema

Theorizing Colonial Cinema is a millennial retrospective on the entangled intimacy between film and colonialism from film's global inception to contemporary legacies in and of Asia. The volume engages new perspectives by asking how prior discussions on film form, theory, history, and ideology may be challenged by centering the colonial question rather than relegating it to the periphery. To that end, contributors begin by excavating little-known archives and perspectives from the colonies as a departure from a prevailing focus on Europe's imperial histories and archives about the colonies. The collection pinpoints various forms of devaluation and misrecognition both in and beyond the region that continue to relegate local voices to the margins. This pathbreaking study on global film history advances prior scholarship by bringing together an array of established and new interdisciplinary voices from film studies, Asian studies, and postcolonial studies to consider how the present is continually haunted by the colonial past.

Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1926 film A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji) is celebrated as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema. It was an independently produced, experimental, avant-garde work from Japan whose brilliant use of cinematic technique was equal to if not superior to that of contemporary European cinema. Those studying Japan, focusing on the central involvement of such writers as Yokomitsu Riichi and the Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, have seen it as a pillar of the close relationship in the Taisho era between film and artistic modernism, as well as a marker of the uniqueness of prewar Japanese film culture. But is this film really what it seems to be? Aaron Gerow brings meticulous research to the film’s production, distribution, exhibition, and reception and closely analyzes the film’s shooting script and shooting notes, which were recently made available. He draws a new picture of this complex work, revealing a film divided between experiment and convention, modernism and melodrama, the image and the word, cinema and literature, conflicts that play out in the story and structure of the film and its context. A Page of Madness, a film fundamentally about differing perceptions and conflicting worlds, was received at the time in different versions and with varying interpretations, and ironically, the film that exists today is not in fact the one originally released. Including a detailed analysis of the film and translations of contemporary reviews and shooting notes for scenes missing from the current print, Gerow’s book offers provocative insight into the fascinating film A Page of Madness was—and still is—and into the struggles over this work that tried to articulate the place of cinema in Japanese society and modernity.

Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan

A Page of Madness

Combining a detailed account of the situation in Japanese film and criticism with unique close analyses of Kitano's films from Violent Cop to Takeshis, the author relates the director to issues of contemporary cinema, Japanese national identity, and globalism.

Kitano Takeshi

Aaron Gerow

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