A Page of Madness

Breathing new life into silent cinema, The Silent Light—Michael Formanski (guitar, electronics) and Matt Hardy (drums)—crafts live scores inspired by black metal, doom metal, and experimental sound, reframing classic films through overwhelming sonic intensity.

TOPOS presents the duo’s live soundtrack to Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 silent masterpiece A Page of Madness. An unsettling story of a family torn apart by violence and mental illness, Kinugasa’s feverish and visually radical film—renowned for its superimpositions, stark lighting, close-ups, quick pans, distorted perspectives, and dreamlike sequences—remains one of the defining works of avant-garde silent cinema.

Unlike many silent films, surviving prints of A Page of Madness contain no intertitles, and contemporary audiences no longer experience the live benshi narration that originally accompanied screenings in 1926. That absence opens a space for sound itself to take on a narrative role. The Silent Light’s vigorous and muscular score operates not as accompaniment, but as a destabilizing and distinctly contemporary psychological force—moving alongside the film like a spectral presence haunting both the onscreen world and the theater itself.

As image and sound collide in parallel dissonance, subjective and objective realities begin to unravel. What emerges is both brutal and deeply sensitive: A disquieting and exhilarating meditation on madness, memory, and perception.

Join us before the performance for a reception in Evelyn's café starting at 5PM.