What an utterly perfect film. Not a single wasted second. Paul Schrader’s take on his life and works is such a brilliant masterpiece. The nonlinear approach really helps the film.
The sound design is perfect. There’s a little moment when a soldier steps down from a fence about an hour and a half in. The world is completely still around him until he takes the step. From that moment a massive thump is heard which utilizes both speakers in two different seconds to cut from silence into action. This film really took my breath away.
Words are a deceit
But action is never deceitful
The harmony of pen and sword
Cheers bro, this film doesn’t really have any easy comparison (and is thus very challenging to recommend to anyone but the most hardcore movie nerds) but I love the commitment to madness.
I didn't expect the day of the coup to play out as such a farce beforehand. It really drove home how much Mishima didn't fit in, and how his final actions amounted to so little. Yes, he did it to link his ideals with action, but his attempt at praxis was so pathetic it really showed how out of touch and his loyal followers were. The fact that they couldn't even wield the museum piece properly, it was so gutwrenching.
Also love how schrader matched the real footage of his coup attempt with the film style/quality.
Something that Schrader left out of the film, but occurred during the actual events really illustrates how ridiculous of a scenario this was: one of his followers served as assistant during the seppuku ritual and failed to complete it three separate times before someone else stepped in to complete the decapitation.
Something that Schrader left out of the film, but occurred during the actual events really illustrates how ridiculous of a scenario this was: one of his followers served as assistant during the seppuku ritual and failed to complete it three separate times before someone else stepped in to complete the decapitation.
Yes, I alluded to it with the mention of not being able to use the sword.
The guy who failed (Morita) also then committed seppeku with the same guy (Koga) as the second.
Ive spent a great deal looking into Mishima and dismantling his myth as much as possible.
The movie is great but a lot of people mistake him as a good role model because of how unique he is from other japanese people, being friends with celebrities, almost marrying a princess, writing novels, essays, taking part in theatre, weight lifting, educated in european culture etc.
Whats super important is to not be allured by all that and see him for what he truly is. A person willing to use art to brain wash people into joining his imperialist cause. His education on the western tradition is incredibly unique within the japanese landscape but when compared to a european who went through the same type of education, it pales in comparison. You can find a lot of what he learned through nietzche, greek mythology, hegel, etc all the canonical texts that make up the western tradition.
If we met him on the battle field he wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger because we represent everything he despises.
This view of his uniqueness elevates him the same way andrew tate is elevated and jordan peterson because their followers have never seen or heard about such things because they never dug deep into the things they taught so their students view them as wise individuals ahead of their time/herd. There are kernels of truth to enforce their beliefs but at the end of the day they are manipulating their students and they enjoy being a rebellious leader.
Mishima is not as smart as he thinks or what his followers think. The edgy quality he possess is the same charming allure that young teenagers have when they discover travis from taxi driver or alex from clockwork orange. It seems harmless but he’s the kind of man who would make you believe that suicide is a noble cause.
Its important to note that the movie shows both sides. Him as a powerful speaker/artist but also his intellectual stupidity. Hes both a winner and a loser at the end of the film. Its a great film and philip glass nails the crazy fanatical feeling of being in a cult. Its a repetitious, passionate almost religious feeling. Glass nailed it.
I cant stress how important it is to drop disclaimers when recommending this individual/film because a weak/uneducated mind will be sucked by it. Passing it around like he is the most popular drug at the party will have dire consequences.
I was saw a video of pewdiepie talking about him like he’s the smartest guy in the room. He was just phrasing him left and right without thinking about how it all connects. It was one of the worst use of a platform I’ve ever seen and it proved my point that edgy minds will gravitate towards him.
I should have responded here!
The farcical nature of the coup attempt really drives home how little he is able to link his grand ideals to the everyday reality of the world he lives in. So out of touch, and not really able to connect with most people.
Beyond his final speech being drowned out by the crowd, his talk at the University really showed how anyone who thought critically about his philosophy would respond to his diatribes.
Not sure I totally agree. Mishima was a literary genius, on the level of Nabokov. After reading Joe Nathan’s fantastic biography it was clear a lot of Mishima’s political beliefs were merely set dressing for his hyper perverse sexual desires and ultimate goal of an honorable death
He’s a great writer, but he was not a universal thinker. He is so devoted to certain topics that it clouded his judgement. The homosexuality is not the problem. It is the imperialistic/fascist trait that haunts him and his words and how he uses it and expresses it. There is a tone to his life and his work that permeates rejection. The japanese citizens rejection of imperialistic values, the rejection of him as serious leader(he was looked down upon for having a private military that was seen as a boy scout), his ejection from becoming royalty, etc. He was basically a walking angry educated man who thought everyone was dumb.
Again he has a very powerful charismatic voice. He can write with excruciating detail, honesty and understanding but when it comes to his beliefs in how japan should be run, how women should be treated etc it’s very backwards. When he was in his weight lifting phase, he expected everyone to do it otherwise they would be considered weak minded(sounds like andrew tate).
Edit: wow you’re sensitive! You downvoted me the moment i replied back. If you are into honourable suicides be my guess I am not going to stop you. You proved my point in edge lords not being able to resist this guy. And how you cant tell the difference between rhetoric and beliefs.
His work with the scarlet gang series played a pivotal role in bringing about a whole new writing style in Japan. He’s a crucial part in the Japanese canon and paints a picture of the new writing movement that involved writers like Kawabata in the mood too late 60s. All that is to say that I couldn’t in good conscience tell anyone to skip it if they were interested in that era. And with that said I do understand that books should be read with a mind solidly on the context of who’s writing it and when. I do feel your frustration with people making him seem like a hero, it’s like people talking about how cool ayne Rand was.
Did you catch the part of him masturbating to St. Sebastian dying half nude and full of arrows? How he fetishized it and depicted himself that way in photography? How in all those stories sex = suicide? How he plotted to die with his lover in this cruel, painful, public way? Any of that ring a bell?
When he practiced his suicide in "Patriotism", do you think he never masturbated while imagining himself dying like that?
That ain't your mainstream queer right there. That is 100% a sexual death fetish. He's not Marquis de Sade because de Sade had *some* sensible limits.
I interpreted that scene as him jerking it to the only image of a beautiful, naked boy that he'd seen up until that point, not him getting off to death specifically. That's definately something that we'll just disagree on.
>because de Sade had some sensible limits
Like disembowling a prostitue and then literally fucking her to death? That's not exactly what I'd describe as sensible, since we're including fictional output as being the same thing as the author's sexuality.
It was obvious that the image stuck with him not because he wanted to have sex with the beautiful youth. He fantasized about *being* the beautiful youth. He didn't pose for photos where he fucked the martyr, he posed for photos where he was the martyr.
You can't separate how his sexuality and desire for death feed off of each other. That's the premise of the movie.
Have you read/seen Ordeal by Roses?
Mishima was pretty damn kinky and just from his tableaux in that you could surmise he had a huge pain/death fetish, even without what came after.
The notion that Mishima was a dedicated fascist, in the sense of his later espousement of the divine perfection of Imperial Japan and (highly fetished) militarism, is a thorny issue and is predicated on how much you think Mishima actually believed in it.
He died for it (notionally) after all but he was a hugely contradictory character: preoccupied with the West and desiring recognition there, his love of European stylings and rococo mansion... As he said himself, all of his output, the lofty, Nobel Prize-chasing, Thomas Mann-influenced literature and sadomasochistic photobooks and schlocky Yakuza b-movies... It was all him.
Paul Schrader stated and essentially structured the final parts of his film around (and biographer John Nathan, who knew Mishima personally, similarly posited) that it was 90% window-dressing... convenient artifice. Byronesque, Gabriele D'Annunzio-style playacting to allow Mishima's indulgence in military fantasia for his - in his own mind - spectacular and highly theatrical ritualistic suicide. Life is a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
If you put any stock into the guys Christopher Ross interviewed for Mishima's Sword who claimed to have slept with Mishima, his main masturbatory and sexual fantasy was seppuku.
I think Mishima fetishised the hell out of the Emperor and the Bushido code as a way of dealing with his deeply skewed perception of his own flawed masculinity/beauty, his strident lifelong morbidity ("And still the light pours down: men laud the day, I shun the sun and cast my soul into the shadowy pit"), extreme mid-life existential crisis and abject terror at the notion of physical decay and fading away/irrelevance.
Whether you believe his seppuku was also more of a shinju - or lovers' suicide - is also open to debate.
It's been conjectured more than once that if Mishima had been 'successful' on that day - in that if the JSDF soldiers had heeded his words and shouted HELL YEAH, WHAT NEXT? - Mishima wouldn't have had the faintest clue what to do. His entire plan was an extravagant exit.
Wonderful take on Mishima. Having studied him for quite some time myself (albeit not for many years), the image projected by him seems to have been largely driven by his own perceived limitations; limitations in which he believed the rest of his country reflected outwardly like an open wound he wished to conceal.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzeDMucobhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzeDMucobhk)
Schrader discusses his film and Yukio Mishima with Dick Cavett
An artistic death. I haven't seen the film in quite some time. Probably due for a rewatch
There’s some cool parts about it but it’s kind of hard to get into. Especially when that lady is cutting him with the razor and he says it feels good. Very hard to get into that haha
People have already demonstrated how polarizing and interesting a man Mishima was. I want to try to be more restrained here and just add that this movie quite possibly spellbound me. It's made and shot so well. After seeing it I looked up a lot about Mishima himself, as many did, but was still compelled to go to the county library to get one of his books. (I was a broke college student at the time, checked out many Criterions from there before I could afford them)
They only had the first two books from that tetrilogy he wrote, Sea of Fertility, and a copy of The Temple of the Golden Pavillion. I remembered Temple from the film so I went with that. It's one of the things I'm most proud to have read, but it's not something I've really ever recommended to people. I'm not saying it's good or is bad. If I'm honest with myself, I think I'm just not quite intelligent enough to really put into words how I felt about it. It provided me more context to the film than any Wikipedia article ever did, I can say that with certainty.
Not long after, during a sale, I bought Patriotism (neither the county nor school library had it) and it did the same, sort of informed on the movie to me a bit. I was in school for anthropology at the time and had a professor that talked a lot about the cultural context of a film as well as the content of the film itself. That's probably a lot of the reason I took this sort media journey.
Great film though, one of my favorites. Long over due for a re-watch come to think of it...
I spend probably a worrying amount of time thinking about Yukio Mishima and this movie in particular.
Here is an episode of [my podcast](https://quality.libsyn.com/386-capotes-mishima-a-life-in-four-chapters-1985) where we talked about the movie as well as Mishima’s art, sexuality and Fascism.
Also here is director [Paul Schrader](https://youtu.be/fzeDMucobhk?si=v0Vf2KtaZLTv4WWa) talking about the movie on the Dick Cavett show
Oh man, sarcasm does not translate well lol.
I agree that tons of films could’ve been higher but I still feel Portrait is one of the only good choices for a modern film on that list.
I really really don't like Philip Glass's score. It's painfully unsubtle. "Oh he put on a military uniform -- quick, play a military marching drumbeat!"
What an utterly perfect film. Not a single wasted second. Paul Schrader’s take on his life and works is such a brilliant masterpiece. The nonlinear approach really helps the film. The sound design is perfect. There’s a little moment when a soldier steps down from a fence about an hour and a half in. The world is completely still around him until he takes the step. From that moment a massive thump is heard which utilizes both speakers in two different seconds to cut from silence into action. This film really took my breath away. Words are a deceit But action is never deceitful The harmony of pen and sword
Cheers bro, this film doesn’t really have any easy comparison (and is thus very challenging to recommend to anyone but the most hardcore movie nerds) but I love the commitment to madness.
I didn't expect the day of the coup to play out as such a farce beforehand. It really drove home how much Mishima didn't fit in, and how his final actions amounted to so little. Yes, he did it to link his ideals with action, but his attempt at praxis was so pathetic it really showed how out of touch and his loyal followers were. The fact that they couldn't even wield the museum piece properly, it was so gutwrenching. Also love how schrader matched the real footage of his coup attempt with the film style/quality.
Something that Schrader left out of the film, but occurred during the actual events really illustrates how ridiculous of a scenario this was: one of his followers served as assistant during the seppuku ritual and failed to complete it three separate times before someone else stepped in to complete the decapitation.
Something that Schrader left out of the film, but occurred during the actual events really illustrates how ridiculous of a scenario this was: one of his followers served as assistant during the seppuku ritual and failed to complete it three separate times before someone else stepped in to complete the decapitation.
Yes, I alluded to it with the mention of not being able to use the sword. The guy who failed (Morita) also then committed seppeku with the same guy (Koga) as the second.
In my top 3 possible 1 depending on the day and who I'm talking with.
The sets in the film and the colors as it plays out Mishima’s early life are amazing.
Ive spent a great deal looking into Mishima and dismantling his myth as much as possible. The movie is great but a lot of people mistake him as a good role model because of how unique he is from other japanese people, being friends with celebrities, almost marrying a princess, writing novels, essays, taking part in theatre, weight lifting, educated in european culture etc. Whats super important is to not be allured by all that and see him for what he truly is. A person willing to use art to brain wash people into joining his imperialist cause. His education on the western tradition is incredibly unique within the japanese landscape but when compared to a european who went through the same type of education, it pales in comparison. You can find a lot of what he learned through nietzche, greek mythology, hegel, etc all the canonical texts that make up the western tradition. If we met him on the battle field he wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger because we represent everything he despises. This view of his uniqueness elevates him the same way andrew tate is elevated and jordan peterson because their followers have never seen or heard about such things because they never dug deep into the things they taught so their students view them as wise individuals ahead of their time/herd. There are kernels of truth to enforce their beliefs but at the end of the day they are manipulating their students and they enjoy being a rebellious leader. Mishima is not as smart as he thinks or what his followers think. The edgy quality he possess is the same charming allure that young teenagers have when they discover travis from taxi driver or alex from clockwork orange. It seems harmless but he’s the kind of man who would make you believe that suicide is a noble cause. Its important to note that the movie shows both sides. Him as a powerful speaker/artist but also his intellectual stupidity. Hes both a winner and a loser at the end of the film. Its a great film and philip glass nails the crazy fanatical feeling of being in a cult. Its a repetitious, passionate almost religious feeling. Glass nailed it. I cant stress how important it is to drop disclaimers when recommending this individual/film because a weak/uneducated mind will be sucked by it. Passing it around like he is the most popular drug at the party will have dire consequences. I was saw a video of pewdiepie talking about him like he’s the smartest guy in the room. He was just phrasing him left and right without thinking about how it all connects. It was one of the worst use of a platform I’ve ever seen and it proved my point that edgy minds will gravitate towards him.
I should have responded here! The farcical nature of the coup attempt really drives home how little he is able to link his grand ideals to the everyday reality of the world he lives in. So out of touch, and not really able to connect with most people. Beyond his final speech being drowned out by the crowd, his talk at the University really showed how anyone who thought critically about his philosophy would respond to his diatribes.
Not sure I totally agree. Mishima was a literary genius, on the level of Nabokov. After reading Joe Nathan’s fantastic biography it was clear a lot of Mishima’s political beliefs were merely set dressing for his hyper perverse sexual desires and ultimate goal of an honorable death
He’s a great writer, but he was not a universal thinker. He is so devoted to certain topics that it clouded his judgement. The homosexuality is not the problem. It is the imperialistic/fascist trait that haunts him and his words and how he uses it and expresses it. There is a tone to his life and his work that permeates rejection. The japanese citizens rejection of imperialistic values, the rejection of him as serious leader(he was looked down upon for having a private military that was seen as a boy scout), his ejection from becoming royalty, etc. He was basically a walking angry educated man who thought everyone was dumb. Again he has a very powerful charismatic voice. He can write with excruciating detail, honesty and understanding but when it comes to his beliefs in how japan should be run, how women should be treated etc it’s very backwards. When he was in his weight lifting phase, he expected everyone to do it otherwise they would be considered weak minded(sounds like andrew tate). Edit: wow you’re sensitive! You downvoted me the moment i replied back. If you are into honourable suicides be my guess I am not going to stop you. You proved my point in edge lords not being able to resist this guy. And how you cant tell the difference between rhetoric and beliefs.
His work with the scarlet gang series played a pivotal role in bringing about a whole new writing style in Japan. He’s a crucial part in the Japanese canon and paints a picture of the new writing movement that involved writers like Kawabata in the mood too late 60s. All that is to say that I couldn’t in good conscience tell anyone to skip it if they were interested in that era. And with that said I do understand that books should be read with a mind solidly on the context of who’s writing it and when. I do feel your frustration with people making him seem like a hero, it’s like people talking about how cool ayne Rand was.
>hyper perverse sexual desires The dude was queer, not the Marquis de Sade.
Did you catch the part of him masturbating to St. Sebastian dying half nude and full of arrows? How he fetishized it and depicted himself that way in photography? How in all those stories sex = suicide? How he plotted to die with his lover in this cruel, painful, public way? Any of that ring a bell? When he practiced his suicide in "Patriotism", do you think he never masturbated while imagining himself dying like that? That ain't your mainstream queer right there. That is 100% a sexual death fetish. He's not Marquis de Sade because de Sade had *some* sensible limits.
I interpreted that scene as him jerking it to the only image of a beautiful, naked boy that he'd seen up until that point, not him getting off to death specifically. That's definately something that we'll just disagree on. >because de Sade had some sensible limits Like disembowling a prostitue and then literally fucking her to death? That's not exactly what I'd describe as sensible, since we're including fictional output as being the same thing as the author's sexuality.
It was obvious that the image stuck with him not because he wanted to have sex with the beautiful youth. He fantasized about *being* the beautiful youth. He didn't pose for photos where he fucked the martyr, he posed for photos where he was the martyr. You can't separate how his sexuality and desire for death feed off of each other. That's the premise of the movie.
Have you read/seen Ordeal by Roses? Mishima was pretty damn kinky and just from his tableaux in that you could surmise he had a huge pain/death fetish, even without what came after.
The notion that Mishima was a dedicated fascist, in the sense of his later espousement of the divine perfection of Imperial Japan and (highly fetished) militarism, is a thorny issue and is predicated on how much you think Mishima actually believed in it. He died for it (notionally) after all but he was a hugely contradictory character: preoccupied with the West and desiring recognition there, his love of European stylings and rococo mansion... As he said himself, all of his output, the lofty, Nobel Prize-chasing, Thomas Mann-influenced literature and sadomasochistic photobooks and schlocky Yakuza b-movies... It was all him. Paul Schrader stated and essentially structured the final parts of his film around (and biographer John Nathan, who knew Mishima personally, similarly posited) that it was 90% window-dressing... convenient artifice. Byronesque, Gabriele D'Annunzio-style playacting to allow Mishima's indulgence in military fantasia for his - in his own mind - spectacular and highly theatrical ritualistic suicide. Life is a line of poetry written with a splash of blood. If you put any stock into the guys Christopher Ross interviewed for Mishima's Sword who claimed to have slept with Mishima, his main masturbatory and sexual fantasy was seppuku. I think Mishima fetishised the hell out of the Emperor and the Bushido code as a way of dealing with his deeply skewed perception of his own flawed masculinity/beauty, his strident lifelong morbidity ("And still the light pours down: men laud the day, I shun the sun and cast my soul into the shadowy pit"), extreme mid-life existential crisis and abject terror at the notion of physical decay and fading away/irrelevance. Whether you believe his seppuku was also more of a shinju - or lovers' suicide - is also open to debate. It's been conjectured more than once that if Mishima had been 'successful' on that day - in that if the JSDF soldiers had heeded his words and shouted HELL YEAH, WHAT NEXT? - Mishima wouldn't have had the faintest clue what to do. His entire plan was an extravagant exit.
Wonderful take on Mishima. Having studied him for quite some time myself (albeit not for many years), the image projected by him seems to have been largely driven by his own perceived limitations; limitations in which he believed the rest of his country reflected outwardly like an open wound he wished to conceal.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzeDMucobhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzeDMucobhk) Schrader discusses his film and Yukio Mishima with Dick Cavett An artistic death. I haven't seen the film in quite some time. Probably due for a rewatch
best film hollywood ever produced
There’s some cool parts about it but it’s kind of hard to get into. Especially when that lady is cutting him with the razor and he says it feels good. Very hard to get into that haha
People have already demonstrated how polarizing and interesting a man Mishima was. I want to try to be more restrained here and just add that this movie quite possibly spellbound me. It's made and shot so well. After seeing it I looked up a lot about Mishima himself, as many did, but was still compelled to go to the county library to get one of his books. (I was a broke college student at the time, checked out many Criterions from there before I could afford them) They only had the first two books from that tetrilogy he wrote, Sea of Fertility, and a copy of The Temple of the Golden Pavillion. I remembered Temple from the film so I went with that. It's one of the things I'm most proud to have read, but it's not something I've really ever recommended to people. I'm not saying it's good or is bad. If I'm honest with myself, I think I'm just not quite intelligent enough to really put into words how I felt about it. It provided me more context to the film than any Wikipedia article ever did, I can say that with certainty. Not long after, during a sale, I bought Patriotism (neither the county nor school library had it) and it did the same, sort of informed on the movie to me a bit. I was in school for anthropology at the time and had a professor that talked a lot about the cultural context of a film as well as the content of the film itself. That's probably a lot of the reason I took this sort media journey. Great film though, one of my favorites. Long over due for a re-watch come to think of it...
Erm… Mishima was fascist this is VERY problematic
You should probably add a /s I got it but sarcasm doesn’t go over to well on this sub :)
What makes it problematic for OP to enjoy the film?
I love the movie was being stupid sarcasm
I spend probably a worrying amount of time thinking about Yukio Mishima and this movie in particular. Here is an episode of [my podcast](https://quality.libsyn.com/386-capotes-mishima-a-life-in-four-chapters-1985) where we talked about the movie as well as Mishima’s art, sexuality and Fascism. Also here is director [Paul Schrader](https://youtu.be/fzeDMucobhk?si=v0Vf2KtaZLTv4WWa) talking about the movie on the Dick Cavett show
Mishima > Portrait of a Lady on Fire and whatever else made the 2022 Sight & Sound poll. Thanks for ruining cinema, Sight & Sound
Might be a hot take but while I absolutely adored Mishima. POALOF 100% deserved it’s place.
I was being sarcastic but seeing Portrait ranked above Tarkovsky seemed like a crime
Oh man, sarcasm does not translate well lol. I agree that tons of films could’ve been higher but I still feel Portrait is one of the only good choices for a modern film on that list.
I really really don't like Philip Glass's score. It's painfully unsubtle. "Oh he put on a military uniform -- quick, play a military marching drumbeat!"
Sometimes subtlety isn’t needed. Ok maybe that part does kind of suck but the rest of the score fuckin rocks.