Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

I have not read any Mishima but thought this interesting-looking film, directed by Paul Schrader, scored by Philip Glass, would introduce me. The film alternates between three sequences. The first, in "naturalistic" colors, shows Mishima and his cadets making their way to the Army Headquarters, where he harangues the assembled regiment on selling out to the capitalists instead of upholding the ancient samurai code of honor, before he proves his own honor by committing seppuku. The second, in black and white, flashes back to Mishima's childhood. The third, in "symbolic" colors, shows segments from three of his works "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," "Kyoko's House" and "Runaway Horses." The film is further subdivided into four thematic chapters: "Beauty," "Art," "Action," and "Harmony between Pen and Sword." All this is heavy machinery for telling a version of the life of this writer.

The heavy-handedness is made watchable by a number of things. Ken Ogata, who plays Mishima, is truly charismatic and makes me believe in the writer's power to inspire loyalty to death. The score by Glass is beautiful and evocative. He uses a string quartet for the black and white sequence, a string orchestra and synthesizers for the fictional dramatizations, and a full symphonic orchestra for the docudrama. The flashback scenes are also quietly taut with human drama. In one, Mishima's sick grandmother prevents the boy from visiting his mother by asking him to rub her legs. In another, he balances himself on a stile and wrestles a playground champ to the ground. I wish there were more of such scenes, instead of the highly stylized re-creations of his works, which come off to me as one-dimensional.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more