Early Japanese Film making
There were historical differences between
the Japanese and Western film industries.
The Japanese were about a decade behind the technological advances made in Europe and the US. Silents continued to the late 1930s.
There was no real tradition of popular novels but there was a strong tradition of highly stylized theater.
Silent Japanese films used benshi, professional narrators. This left directors free to invent an extremely abstract vocabulary of film.
The illustration comes from the 1926 silent film "A Page of Madness" by Teinosuke Kinugasa. He was a member of the "New Perceptions" school of Japanese literature and cinema. They wanted to create experiences that were less tied to naturalism. This was partly the result of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 that literally shook Tokyo and figuratively shook Japanese perceptions of the world. You can see the full film at