Found Safe And Sound

A Page of Madness, Fri., Oct. 22, 8 p.m., $20, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 267-519-3214, filmadelphia.org.

by Shaun Brady

Neal Santos MAD MAN: Local composer Gene Coleman has set a new original score to the 1927 Japanese silent film A Page of Madness.

While the Philadelphia Film Festival performance of a new score for the Japanese silent-film oddity A Page of Madness is a world première, some Philadelphians may remember being present for a very similar event a few years back, when composer/bass clarinetist Gene Coleman and his American/Japanese Ensemble N_JP provided a largely improvised soundtrack for the film at International House on Halloween 2006.

But nearly every detail has changed this time out. I-House's rechristened Ibrahim Theater has since been renovated; Coleman has collaborated with shakuhachi master Akikazu Nakamura on a much more detailed score; and the wretched VHS dub that was screened then, rendering the already oblique film nearly incomprehensible, has been replaced with a beautifully restored print from the George Eastman House.

"It's debatable whether you can even call that ridiculously awful VHS tape a representation of the film at all," Coleman laughs. "It was so distorted, like watching a snowstorm. So I don't see a lot of relatable points between what will be two completely different experiences."

Starkly pointing up the film's changed circumstances, the print and score will proceed from their Philly première to a performance at MoMA's International Festival of Film Preservation. There are hopes that the 1927 film's far-too-long-overdue DVD debut (it has never been available in any home video format in the U.S.) will follow.

The story of a sailor who works as a janitor in an insane asylum in order to keep an eye on his wife, committed there after the murder of their child, gilds its tragic storyline with a cavalcade of cinematic effects, experimental techniques that wouldn't come into vogue for decades.

"The use of abstraction within this film is just so incredible," Coleman says. "Not only could I strongly imagine certain musical textures or forms going with the imagery, I was also fascinated with the film as a historical artifact. So early on, it was deploying these cinematic devices which didn't become widely used until the sixties. There are parts of the film that look like something Stan Brakhage would have done."

An interest in the visual arts has long run in tandem with Coleman's career as an improviser and composer. With various ensembles, he has performed scores for other films, such as the Soviet silent Aelita, Queen of Mars. In addition, his work has frequently been inspired by architecture and been accompanied by films he has made of structures from around the world. He's been fascinated by A Page of Madness since encountering it at a Chicago screening more than a decade ago.

The film has that effect on people; obscure and difficult, it casts its spell over viewers, accruing a small but dedicated cult over the years. Other musicians have composed their own scores, from indie-rockers Superchunk to Phillip Johnston of eclectic jazzers The Microscopic Septet, each of whom have wildly different takes — a hallmark of reaction to the film since its creation.

"There's a lot of controversy with the film between people who want to view it as this experimental masterpiece, and other people who see it as almost a maudlin period melodrama," Coleman says. "Having watched the film many times, it's clear to me that it really does embrace both of those realities. But at the time when [Teinosuke] Kinugasa made the film, I have no idea what he was thinking. ... There was no Brakhage or New Wave cinema or anything like that to contextualize what he was doing. I think someone watching the film for the first time might get really captivated by the visuals and not be able to follow the narrative, so they walk away from it going, 'Wow, that had some really awesome abstract weird shit in it.' It would be easy to summarize it like that and not really get to the part about how they were actually trying to tie all these things together."

The film's history has been almost as convoluted and fantastic as its kaleidoscopic narrative. A Page of Madness was long thought even by its creator to have been destroyed during World War II, only for a print to turn up in the director's garden shed decades later. Kinugasa re-released the film in 1971 with a newly created score, which added another twist to the story when Coleman found out about it recently.

"There are pieces of that soundtrack that are very similar to things that I had imagined when I started to think about this project," Coleman says. "But the most amazing thing was when I showed this to my collaborator in Japan, Akikazu Nakamura, and within the first minute we were watching it he said, 'Ah, that's my teacher.'" It turns out that the shakuhachi featured in this version was played by the renowned Katsuya Yokoyama, Nakmura's mentor.

Throughout its existence, Coleman's Ensemble N_JP has been dedicated to the blending of seeming opposites — East and West, composition and improvisation, and perhaps most vitally, the traditional and the experimental. While the lineup constantly varies, the ensemble's one constant is its intriguing mix of Japanese practitioners of traditional instruments like the shakuhachi and the koto with a variety of Western instruments, employing both in very nontraditional fashion. The composer sees a parallel idea within the narrative of the film itself, which he says can be read in part as a critique of "Western influence on Japanese society in the 1920s.

"I don't think the film ever tries to overtly demonize anything that you would call 'Western,'" he continues, "but it certainly presents situations within the film that would allow one to think about that relationship. The doctors in the hospital all wear white lab coats and clearly have taken on this mantle of western scientific and medical practice, while all the inmates in their cells are dressed more in what you would call traditional Japanese clothing. So there are these elements commingling, and I think it becomes interesting to create a musical text which also plays with some of those ideas of Japanese and Western elements running alongside each other."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

A Page of Madness, Fri., Oct. 22, 8 p.m., $20, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 267-519-3214, filmadelphia.org.