A Page of Madness / Portrait of a Young Man (Blu-ray)

Both an attempt at redefining narrative conventions and a harkening back to traditional, Japanese melodrama, A Page of Madness (1926) can be seen as a negotiation of cinematic potentials at a time of historic change and theoretical division in the art form. Based on a treatment written by 1968 Nobel Prize winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, the story, as laid out in the script, is simple. A retired sailor (Masao Inoue) becomes a custodian at a mental hospital to be closer to his estranged wife (Yoshie Nakagawa), one of the patients at the facility. Their daughter (Ayako Iijima) is soon to be married, but the fathers fear and pain surrounding his wifes mental state along with the reasons for her captivity threaten the future happiness of the family.

Portrait of a Young Man was filmed sporadically over the span of six years (1925-1931) in Bermuda, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and British Columbia. The director, producer, and photographer was Henwar Rodakiewicz, then only in his mid-twenties. He had no real concept for how the overall film would turn out as there were very few precedents in existence at the time and relied only upon his personal intuition and keen eye for cinematic nuance. The film is broken up into three movements, a structural analogy to a musical symphony, but also suggestive of the overall visual content: movement and how to capture it. In the service of this study, and within each movement, Rodakiewicz employs various techniques, including slow motion (the twisting spirals of smoke shot at 64 FPS), geometry (water flowing in contrasting directions in contiguous shots), repetition, exposure (shadows are deep and dark), abstraction, and rhythm. As with A Page of Madness, the work pushes a step beyond naturalism, guiding the viewer into a place of pure expression. The end result is, as the title suggests, a meditative study of Rodakiewicz in his youth.