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Music playing above:
Excerpts from Phillip Johnston's score to Teinosuke Kinugasa's "Page of Madness" (1926), performed by
Joe Ruddick on piano, Mark Josefsberg on vibes, Dave Hofstra on bass, and Phillip Johnston on saxophone, AKA The Transparent Quartet.
On Sunday, June 22nd at 4PM, at the State Theatre, the Sydney Film Festival will present Teinosuke Kinugasa’s silent film Page of Madness, with a live performance of an original score by Phillip Johnston.
Kinugasa’s extraordinary 1926 silent masterpiece was believed lost for many years, until the director himself uncovered a print in his garden storeroom. The film is based on a short story by Nobel laureate Kawabata, in which a sailor takes a job in a lunatic asylum where his crazed wife is confined, hoping one day to free her. Kinusaga, using a torrent of images, convincingly creates a world of insanity and confinement. Despite similarities to German expressionist works like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (unseen in Japan at the time) and, in structure, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Kinugasa’s film is a true original – ‘one of the most radical and challenging Japanese movies ever seen’ (Time Out). JN
Page of Madness will be accompanied by a live performance of Phillip Johnston’s score, commissioned by Film Society of Lincoln Center, and first performed in 1998. Johnston who has composed scores for a number of contemporary movies as well as Faust (Murnau), Cops (Keaton) and The Unknown (Browning), will perform soprano and alto saxophones. He will be joined on stage by Chris Abrahams and Lloyd Swanton of The Necks, piano and bass respectively, and Daryl Pratt on vibraphone.
The State Theatre is at 49 Market Street in beautiful downtown Sydney.
See two sample excerpts from the film, with a live recording of the original score, below.
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Phillip Johnston is a New York musician and composer, now based in Sydney, Australia.
Visit Phillip Johnston's web site.
The Microscopic Septet on myspace.com
The Microscopic Septet will be touring the US & Europe in Oct/Nov 2008.
Visit the Microscopic Septet website.
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