The first article resulting from my research on Kinugasa Teinosuke's experimental silent film masterpiece, A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji, 1926), which culminated in my book A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (University of Michigan, 2008). This piece focuses on the reception of the film when it was released. If for long the image of the film was of a modernist, avant-garde film, I show that there were different receptions of the film at the time, varying from seeing it as experimental to critiques that it was too conventional. I see in the debates on the film a struggle over the different possibilities cinema had at the time, especially after the Pure Film Movement of the 1910s. If that Movement essentially privileged the image to the extent it essentially functioned as a language with clear meaning, some critiques of A Page of Madness conceived of a moving image that resisted codification itself.