Newcastle record label Signals presents Teinosuke Kinugasa's disquieting 1926 Japanese silent horror, a landmark of avant-garde cinema.

Written and produced in collaboration with the experimental artists' collective Shinkankakuha (新感覚派, "New Sensationalists"), the film follows a janitor who takes a job at a psychiatric hospital to remain close to his wife, a patient confined within its walls.

Influenced by German Expressionism yet unmistakably its own, Kinugasa tells the story through a blizzard of rapid editing, restless camerawork and fragmented, dreamlike narrative, blurring the boundaries between memory, fantasy and reality.

Nearly a century later, its hallucinatory imagery still feels startlingly modern. Contemporary audiences may recognise precursors to the psychological unease of Ring and the visceral body horror of Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

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Accompanying the screening will be an original live electronic score performed by North East DJ and producer Lewis Griffin, co-founder of the long running techno night Municipal. Responding to the film’s fractured imagery and dreamlike intensity through glacial textures and precise, hypnagogic electronics.

https://signalsmmx.bandcamp.com/