Teinosuke Kinugasa, Neosensualism and the Avant-Garde
Abstract
The article presents an analysis of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s film A page of madness (Kurutta ichipeiji, 1926) that is being compared by film historians to the masterpieces of European avantgarde of the inter war period. Although limiting oneself to simple analogies with French impressionism or German expressionism might appear misleading due to different cultural and historical contexts, Japanese critics eagerly wrote about the film as a visual symphony that is an extension of Marcel L’Herbier concept of the cinema, and compared the film to a poem received by the senses rather than rational reason. Loska, wishing to explain the special meaning of Kinugasa’s masterpiece, focuses on the circumstances in which it was created, especially on the historical and artistic context, particularly taking into the account the influence of the experiments of the “neo-sensualists”, that is a group of young writers and poets, among which were the script-writers of the film: Riichi Yokomitsu, Teppei Kataoka and Yasunari Kawabata. Loska also draws attention to a number of formal innovations visible at the level of style and the narrative, which allow the director to express the subjective states of the human mind.
Keywords:
Teinosuke Kinugasa, Japanese cinema, avant-garde cinemaReferences
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Authors
Krzysztof Loskakwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Jagiellonian University Poland
Profesor UJ, dyrektor Instytutu Sztuk Audiowizualnych UJ; zajmuje się filmem japońskim i kulturą współczesną; autor ponad stu publikacji naukowych, w tym jedenastu książek, m.in.: Dziedzictwo McLuhana. Między nowoczesnością a ponowoczesnością (2001), Hitchcock - autor wśród gatunków (2002), David Cronenberg: rozpad ciała, rozpad gatunku (2003, wspólnie z Andrzejem Pitrusem), Encyklopedia filmu science fiction (2004), Tożsamość i media. O filmach Atoma Egoyana (2006), Poetyka filmu japońskiego (2009), Kenji Mizoguchi i wyobraźnia melodramatyczna (2012), Nowy film japoński (2013).
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