Cinema+

Standing on the threshold of yet another technological revolution, in an age when watching films together in a cinema no longer seems the only option — or even the main one — we decided to look back and mark the centenary of two outstanding films made on the eve of one of the last century’s major technical turns: the coming of sound. We also wanted to present them roughly as audiences would have seen them in 1926, allowing for a certain cultural distance. From the many titles released that year we chose Friedrich Murnau’s Faust and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness. A hundred years on, the screening practice of live music and live commentary, once ordinary for silent-era audiences, is a unique event for us — and a chance to think once again about the benefits and costs of technological progress. Today, when new tools are pushing people out not only of the cinema but also out of the filmmaking process itself, such an “expanded” screening feels like a therapeutic return to the point of origin, to the childhood of world cinema, from which the future may look less frightening.

Murnau’s Faust is one of the most striking examples of German Expressionism — ahead of its time, as the saying goes, and undervalued by its contemporaries. Murnau admired and studied Rembrandt; the 17th-century painter became a source of inspiration for the 20th-century filmmaker, and it shows in almost every frame. The painterly image plays, literally and metaphorically, on the struggle of light and dark; Gretchen and Faust’s tragic fate still tears at the viewer’s heart a century later. In this film, Murnau devised and used many original techniques: double exposure, light, smoke, film stock, sets, miniatures, camera movement — including a flight over a model landscape that is all but an ancestor of today’s aerial shot — all in the service of a dense, convincing mysticism. We will show this remarkable film accompanied by an electronic music trio — Denis Ringo, Ksyusha Buraya, and Andrei Figa — assembled especially for Message to Man to bolster the forces of light on screen.

Mikhail Zheleznikov

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s name is not so widely known, yet A Page of Madness has long stood in the annals of both Japanese and world cinema. There is a paradox in that, for the film’s history is full of strange (mis)fortunes. Every copy burned in the Second World War; a single one turned up in 1971 in jars of rice. Made in Japan, it entered the canon of the film avant-garde. Based on a story by Yasunari Kawabata, it went through a whole run of scripts — and in the final cut there is not one intertitle. Announced as a melodrama, it has often been taken as an instance of “pure cinema.” Among such double lives one thing is sure: however A Page of Madness was billed, in the 1920s it was shown with the traditional accompaniment of a commentator, the benshi, who looked for a balance between narrative obviousness and visual abstraction. Message to Man’s screening, with the actress Tomomi Orita and the koto player Elena Skvortsova, aims at that original sound.

Maria Gribova