FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

FYI: Jodie Fos­ter has just rolled out a new online course on film­mak­ing over on Mas­ter­Class. In 18 video lessons, the two-time Oscar-win­ner guides “you through every step of the film­mak­ing process, from sto­ry­board­ing to cast­ing and cam­era cov­er­age.” Accord­ing to Mas­ter­Class, the course comes with “a down­load­able work­book of les­son recaps and access to exclu­sive sup­ple­men­tal mate­ri­als from Jodie’s archive.” Stu­dents will have “the chance to upload videos to receive feed­back from peers and poten­tial­ly Jodie her­self!” You can enroll in Fos­ter’s new class (which runs $90) here. You can also pay $180 to get an annu­al pass to all of Mas­ter­Class’ cours­es–which includes oth­er film­mak­ing class­es by Ken Burns, Mar­tin Scors­ese, Spike Lee, Wern­er Her­zog and more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Teach­es His First Online Course on Film­mak­ing: Fea­tures 30 Video Lessons

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

Colum­bia U. Launch­es a Free Mul­ti­me­dia Glos­sary for Study­ing Cin­e­ma & Film­mak­ing

It’s a sad fact that the vast major­i­ty of silent movies in Japan have been lost thanks to human care­less­ness, earth­quakes and the grim effi­cien­cy of the Unit­ed States Air Force. The first films of huge­ly impor­tant fig­ures like Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Yasu­jiro Ozu, and Hiroshi Shimizu have sim­ply van­ished. So we should con­sid­er our­selves for­tu­nate that Teinosuke Kin­u­gasa’s Kuret­ta Ippei — a 1926 film known in the States as A Page of Mad­ness – has some­how man­aged to sur­vive the vagaries of fate. Kin­u­gasa sought to make a Euro­pean-style exper­i­men­tal movie in Japan and, in the process, he made one of the great land­marks of silent cin­e­ma. You can watch it above.

Born in 1896, Kin­u­gasa start­ed his adult life work­ing as an onna­ga­ta, an actor who spe­cial­izes in play­ing female roles. In 1926, after work­ing for a few years behind the cam­era under pio­neer­ing direc­tor Shozo Maki­no, Kin­u­gasa bought a film cam­era and set up a lab in his house in order to cre­ate his own inde­pen­dent­ly financed movies. He then approached mem­bers of the Shinkankaku (new impres­sion­ists) lit­er­ary group to help him come up with a sto­ry. Author Yasunari Kawa­ba­ta wrote a treat­ment that would even­tu­al­ly become the basis for A Page of Mad­ness.

Though the syn­op­sis of the plot doesn’t real­ly do jus­tice to the movie — a retired sailor who works at an insane asy­lum to care after his wife who tried to kill their child — the visu­al audac­i­ty of Page is still star­tling today. The open­ing sequence rhyth­mi­cal­ly cuts between shots of a tor­ren­tial down­pour and gush­ing water before dis­solv­ing into a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ri­ly odd scene of a young woman in a rhom­boid head­dress danc­ing in front of a mas­sive spin­ning ball. The woman is, of course, an inmate at the asy­lum dressed in rags. As her dance becomes more and more fren­zied, the film cuts faster and faster, using super­im­po­si­tions, spin­ning cam­eras and just about every oth­er trick in the book.

While Kin­u­gasa was clear­ly influ­enced by The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, which also visu­al­izes the inner world of the insane, the movie is also rem­i­nis­cent of the works of French avant-garde film­mak­ers like Abel Gance, Russ­ian mon­tage mas­ters like Sergei Eisen­stein and, in par­tic­u­lar, the sub­jec­tive cam­er­a­work of F. W. Mur­nau in Der Let­zte Mann. Kin­u­gasa incor­po­rat­ed all of these influ­ences seam­less­ly, cre­at­ing an exhil­a­rat­ing, dis­turb­ing and ulti­mate­ly sad tour de force of film­mak­ing. The great Japan­ese film crit­ic Aki­ra Iwasa­ki called the movie “the first film-like film born in Japan.”

When A Page of Mad­ness was released, it played at a the­ater in Tokyo that spe­cial­ized in for­eign movies. Page was indeed pret­ty for­eign com­pared to most oth­er Japan­ese films at the time. The movie was regard­ed, film schol­ar Aaron Gerow notes, as “one of the few Japan­ese works to be treat­ed as the ‘equal’ of for­eign motion pic­tures in a cul­ture that still looked down on domes­tic pro­duc­tions.” Yet it didn’t change the course of Japan­ese cin­e­ma, and it was thought of as a curios­i­ty at a time when most films in Japan were kabu­ki adap­ta­tions and samu­rai sto­ries.

Page dis­ap­peared not long after its release and, for over 50 years, was thought lost until Kin­u­gasa found it in his own store­house in 1971. Dur­ing that time Kin­u­gasa received a Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his splashy samu­rai spec­ta­cle The Gate of Hell (1953) and Kawa­ba­ta, who wrote the treat­ment, got a Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture for writ­ing books like Snow Coun­try about a lovelorn geisha.

You can find A Page of Mad­ness on our list of Free Silent Films, which is part of our col­lec­tion,  4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s 100 Favorite Movies

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

If any­one tries to claim that mod­ern day movies have too many spe­cial effects remind them of this. Films have always used spe­cial effects to trick the audi­ence, and we’re just using new vari­a­tions of tools from a cen­tu­ry ago. In fact, right from the begin­ning, cre­ators like Georges Méliès were push­ing the bound­aries of cel­lu­loid and 24 frames per sec­ond like the show­men and magi­cians they were.

By the time we get to the silent come­di­ans as seen in our above video, tech­nol­o­gy had advanced along with the pure phys­i­cal com­e­dy of the stars. Yes, they were amaz­ing and nim­ble ath­letes, but they weren’t stu­pid. Cam­era trick­ery helped them look super­hu­man.

The first exam­ple shows Harold Lloyd’s icon­ic stunt from 1923’s Safe­ty Last!, where he hung over the streets of Los Ange­les from a clock face. Only he wasn’t real­ly. Using forced per­spec­tive, a con­struct­ed build­ing edi­fice, and a safe mat­tress a few feet below shows how Lloyd faced no dan­ger at all. Edit­ing, too, cre­ates so much of the effect, as we have seen how high the clock is com­pared to the ground in pre­vi­ous shots. The angle on the streets below and in the dis­tance real­ly sell the scene com­pared to just shoot­ing sky.

In fact, this forced per­spec­tive is still used in mod­ern films: Peter Jack­son used it a lot in The Lord of the Rings to give the impres­sion that Gan­dalf was twice as tall as Hob­bit Fro­do sim­ply by con­struct­ing the sets small­er.

And when back­grounds are basic like sand dunes, even the low bud­get film­mak­er can achieve some amaz­ing effects with no mon­ey, just a bunch of cool minia­tures:

Then again, Jack­ie Chan one-upped Lloyd for real in his 1983 film Project A, when he dan­gles from a three-sto­ry clock hand only to crash through two canopies onto the ground below. It’s a stunt so nice, they show you it twice!

The oth­er favorite trick of the silent films was mat­te paint­ing. As long as the cam­era doesn’t move, a piece of glass with a pho­to-real­is­tic paint­ing on it can seam­less­ly fit into the action.

In Char­lie Chaplin’s 1936 Mod­ern Times, that allows the come­di­an to skate very close to a three floor drop with­out even being in dan­ger. (Tech­ni­cal­ly, the cam­era *does* move in this shot, but it’s a short pan which wouldn’t affect the illu­sion.)

This old-school method has gone away, though up through the ‘80s great mat­te paint­ing artists were work­ing on films like the Star Wars tril­o­gy and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now a dig­i­tal mat­te artist works in three dimen­sions, not two, with end­less finesse and tweak­ing at their dis­pos­al, like in Game of Thrones:

The mat­te is the basis, real­ly, of all mod­ern dig­i­tal effects. Wher­ev­er there is a green screen, you’re see­ing the evo­lu­tion of the mat­te. You prob­a­bly have an app on your phone that does some­thing sim­i­lar, and can mag­i­cal­ly trans­port you to where you real­ly want to be…just like film.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts–and Keaton’s 5 Rules of Com­ic Sto­ry­telling

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

“Though hard­ly a cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­piece,” film crit­ic Andre Soares writes, “or even a good film,” Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer will for­ev­er bear the dis­tinc­tion of “the first time in a fea­ture film that syn­chro­nized sound and voic­es could be heard in musi­cal num­bers and talk­ing seg­ments.” What usu­al­ly goes unre­marked in film his­to­ry is that Indi­an cin­e­ma was nev­er far behind its U.S. coun­ter­part. The country’s first fea­ture sound film appeared just four years after The Jazz Singer. Now lost, the love sto­ry Alam Ara debuted in March of 1931 and ini­ti­at­ed a ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion with its sev­er­al songs, includ­ing the first major fil­mi music hit.

The movie was so pop­u­lar, one his­to­ri­an notes, “police aid had to be sum­moned to con­trol the crowds.” Its direc­tor Ardeshir Irani was inspired by anoth­er ear­ly Hol­ly­wood part-talkie musi­cal, 1929’s Show Boat, which, like his film, used the Movi­etone sys­tem to record sound, rather than the Vita­phone sys­tem used in The Jazz Singer. Movi­etone, or Fox Movi­etone, as it came to be known after William Fox bought the patents in 1926, was also respon­si­ble for anoth­er ear­ly film devel­op­ment, the sound news­reel, a tech­nol­o­gy that made its way to India almost as soon as it debuted in the U.S.

The first sound news­reel, show­ing footage of Charles Lindbergh’s tak­ing off in the “Spir­it of St. Louis,” debuted in 1927 in New York. In Novem­ber 1929, Fox opened the first exclu­sive news­reel the­ater on Broad­way, and in Jan­u­ary of that same year, a Movi­etone cam­era cap­tured the street scenes of Bom­bay (now Mum­bai) that you see above, over 13 min­utes of footage com­plete with live audio record­ing of bustling crowds, busy ven­dors and laun­dry work­ers, honk­ing auto­mo­biles, and clip-clop­ping hors­es.

This incred­i­ble doc­u­ment pre­serves the sights and sounds of a sig­nif­i­cant Indi­an slice of life from 90 years ago, and shows how ear­ly the tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing sound films arrived on the sub­con­ti­nent. When Ardeshir Irani began film­ing his ground­break­ing musi­cal the fol­low­ing year, he would use exact­ly this same tech­nol­o­gy, shoot­ing all of the dia­logue and music live, on a closed set late at night to avoid unwant­ed noise like the street sounds you hear above.

Learn more of the Fox Movi­etone news­reel sto­ry here, and here, learn how Indi­an cin­e­ma began in Mum­bai in 1899 when Indi­an pho­tog­ra­phers, writ­ers, the­ater impre­sar­ios, and entre­pre­neurs like Irani took the new tech­nol­o­gy and used it to build a cul­tur­al empire of their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

India on Film, 1899–1947: An Archive of 90 His­toric Films Now Online

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 film star­ring Harold Lloyd, fea­tures one of the most icon­ic scenes from the silent film era. Writes Roger Ebert, the scene above is “by gen­er­al agree­ment the most famous shot in silent com­e­dy: a man in a straw hat and round horn-rim glass­es, hang­ing from the minute hand of a clock 12 sto­ries above the city street. Strange, that this shot occurs in a film few peo­ple have ever seen. Harold Lloy­d’s Safe­ty Last (1923), like all of his films, was pre­served by the come­di­an but rarely shown.” All of that might be about to change. Along with a num­ber of oth­er clas­sic works, Safe­ty Last went into the pub­lic domain this week. So now every­one can watch the film, when­ev­er they please. Watch a com­plete ver­sion on YouTube here. Restored ver­sions of the film can be pur­chased through Cri­te­ri­on.

Safe­ty Last will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Avalanche of Nov­els, Films and Oth­er Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Pub­lic Domain: Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, William Car­los Williams, Buster Keaton & More

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius