A Page of Madness (1926) or Kurutta Ippeiji is a silent film by Japanese film director Kinugasa Teinosuke. It was lost for fifty years until being rediscovered by Kinugasa in a shed in 1971. Every generation has turned out a handful of directors whose work has broken the mould to go far beyond the standards set by their contemporaries. One of the first of these was Teinosuke Kinugasa, who all the way back in the 1920s was busily familiarising himself with developments in European cinema. He became the first director in Japan to realise his ambition of treating cinema as a distinct art form in its own right, divorced from the commercial concerns of the new mass-audience medium.

Based on a treatment by the later 1968 Nobel Prize winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, A Page of Madness seems a far cry from the standard theatrically derived Kabuki adaptations produced at the time. It’s a simple story of a retired sailor who has taken a job as a janitor in an asylum to look after his insane wife; however a synopsis of the plot can’t begin to explain the power of the film, nor the audacity of its cinematic vision.

Location/Venue:   Trinity College Dublin, College Chapel on front square
Date – March 16^th
Time:  Early doors 6.00pm / 6.15pm start
Tickets – €14 / 10 Concessions Available

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Dracula is one of the first early horror sound-film classics, which became an icon for many future vampire, thriller, and gothic films. The transition from silent films to talkies brought about tremendous changes and challenges for the film industry which in turn determined the way Dracula was produced. Filmmakers in the early 1930s possessed limited creative choices for sound, and only after 1932 did most Hollywood productions begin to include abundant scores.

In this context, Dracula (Browning 1931) belongs to the transitional period between silent and sound films. Dracula’s original soundtrack consists of only a few sonic elements: dialogue and incidental sound effects. Music is used only at the beginning and in the middle (one diegetic scene) of the film; there is no underscoring. The reasons for the ‘emptiness’ of the soundtrack are partly technological, partly cultural.

However Dracula remains a significant cinematic event. The music for this presentation Dracula is an attempt to “revoice” this cinematic curiosity. To that end, this new contemporary score will be sensitive to the original sound design and through careful placement, will become part of a larger, contextual composition. This creative approach explores the potential convergence of film sound and music, and for creating additional meaning beyond what we merely see on the screen. Our intention is to amplify, through musical and sonic means, the atmosphere of melancholy and dread that pervades Browning’s adaptation of Stoker’s masterpiece.

This hypnotic portrait of Man United legend George Best trains multiple cameras on the revered footballer over the complete course of a match against Coventry City. Made at the height of Best’s fame and tabloid notoriety, Costard’s film focuses insistently on Best—warming up, looking restless and bored, waiting tactically to unleash his genius—rather than the on-pitch action to arrive at a sublime and revealing rumination on celebrity and a tantalizing glimpse of the man behind the myth.

“Football is working-class ballet. It’s an experience of enchantment. For an hour and a half, a different order of time unfolds and one submits oneself to it. A footballgame is a temporal rupture with the routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. At times, it’s like Spinoza on maximizing intensities of existence. At other times, it’s more like Beckett’s Godot, where nothing happens twice.”
Simon Critchley

Supported by the Goethe Institut