‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult films are very bad. Others are very, very good. Some make an awful lot of money at the box office. Others make no money at all. Some are considered quality films. Others are exploitation.’ From 1988 to 2000 Moviedrome was presented by Alex Cox and then Mark Cousins. Across that time, more than 200 features were shown, and generations of movie fans and filmmakers would be informed and inspired by the selection, alongside the wit and wisdom of the introductions that preceded each screening. Moviedrome was a portal into the world of weird and wonderful cinema. This two-month season features some of the most notable titles screened and wherever possible they are preceded by the original televised introduction.
Nick Freand Jones, season curator and producer of Moviedrome
Alex Cox: Mishima is in Japanese. It is not, however, a Japanese film. The distinction was made very clear at the Cannes Film Festival, where the celebrated Japanese director Oshima said: ‘I was told that this was a controversial film. It is not controversial. It is merely bad.’
The movie was shot in Japan with American money and directed by Paul Schrader – creator of such tortured protagonists as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Nastassja Kinski in Cat People. It is the story of the last day in the life of the Japanese playwright and novelist Yukio Mishima, seen in parallel from the perspective of three of his stories.
Mishima’s death took place in 1970, and was hugely controversial. He was a right-wing adept of bushido, the rigorous samurai code; unlike the cowboy samurai of Kurosawa, he was desperately loyal to the Emperor. He spent his time writing and drilling the cadets of his own private army, called the Shield Society. He was disliked by the accommodating establishment which arose in Tokyo after the Second World War; he was also gay. On 25 November 1970 he raided the Eastern Army Headquarters in Tokyo, tied up and harangued a general of whom he disapproved and committed suicide via the traditional form of seppuku. Mishima is thus in many ways a touchy subject in Japan, and it’s hardly surprising certain people got upset when a foreigner decided to make a film about him.
Apparently Mishima’s heirs were able to exercise certain controls over the content of the film: hence its complicated structure and relative restraint around the sexual theme. Mishima illustrates a problem with the biopic: it’s always a mistake when there are heirs around, worse when the character in question is still living. When Bob Fosse made Star 80, he wanted Harry Dean Stanton to play Hugh Hefner, the pipe-smoking, black-sock-wearing proprietor of Playboy. Hefner, however, had final approval of the actor who was to play him and decided that Cliff Robertson would be a more appropriate thespian. In the same way, Mishima suffers from a slightly reverential approach to its subject – much like the film The Doors, whose director apparently really believed the old bullshit story about Jim Morrison being the reincarnation of an old Indian mystic. Sure he was. And he’s still alive too, working as a carpenter in San Diego, along with Mishima and Elvis.
That said, there is much to praise in Mishima. It has outstanding music by Philip Glass, and it’s a very unusual film, about a character unknown outside literary circles. It provides a glimpse into a culture which still regards the military arts as the highest form of study, although over the last 50 years it’s managed to apply them to the world of manufacturing and international commerce, with incredible results. It’s also a culture that does not regard suicide as failure, but rather an acceptable and decent culmination to a satisfactory life. Hence Kurosawa’s own attempt at suicide in the seventies. Hence, also, his brother’s death: his brother was a silent-film narrator; he killed himself when the talkies arrived.
The big question for me with Mishima was, can the director speak Japanese or not? The answer is yes – but when they started shooting he directed in English via three interpreters, because he could speak Japanese, but not think in it.
Alex Cox’s original introduction for Moviedrome. Also published in Moviedrome: The Guide 2 (BBC, 1993). With thanks to moviedromer.tumblr.com
‘I came to Mishima,’ Paul Schrader has said, ‘because he was the type of character I might have invented if he had not existed.’ In a sense, he has invented him already, and Mishima merely embodies the last in a long line of Mishima prototypes: heroes driven to destruction by their thirst for redemption; narcissists compelled to shatter the wall of mirrors that separates them from reality; fantasists eager to substantiate themselves by constantly recreating themselves. Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is probably Mishima’s most direct antecedent – with his diary, his guns, his tortured sexuality and his attempt at self-affirmation in a political acte gratuit. But Schrader has become the poet laureate of the type: the crazed outsider who doesn’t shun the system so much as long to create a finer, purer, nobler one – one created, in fact, in his own image. Schrader has given a strange Calvinist complexion to the old American individualist, and given us a live-wire, ‘hot’ version of the modern, affectless, alienated hero.
Mishima is, if nothing else, a singular case of cultural projection, osmosis and wish fulfilment. It is convincingly Japanese in language, detail, cultural and filmic reference, yet never for a moment does it seem anything but Western in thought and stylistic attack. (The question of whose projection it is might be the most fascinating aspect of the film: Schrader working his way in towards an alien mind and culture, or Mishima working his way out towards one.) Nothing, at any rate, could be further from Schrader’s admiration for the refinement and simplicity, the Zen attributes, of Ozu’s cinema (‘Because of Ozu’s normal emphasis on unity rather than disunity … he is not really the advocate of either the old or the young, but the advocate of traditional Oneness’: Transcendental Style in Film) than this multi-dimensional assault on both reality and the psychology of his central character. In this, cutting between a dramatised recreation of Mishima’s coup at Eastern Army Headquarters, black-and-white episodes from his early life, and highly stylised excerpts from three of his novels, Schrader has obliged his subject. He has carried out that work of demolition and transformation which Mishima hoped would be the effect of his writing, breaking down the primary reality of ‘Words, which could change the world, and the world, which has nothing to do with words.’
Richard Combs, Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1985
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Director: Paul Schrader
©: M Film Company
Production Companies: American Zoetrope, Lucasfilm Ltd., Filmlink International
Executive Producers/Presented by: George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola
Producers: Mata Yamamoto, Tom Luddy
Line Producer: Yosuke Mizuno
Associate Producers: Leonard Schrader, Chieko Schrader, Alan Mark Poul
Production Accountants: Kaname Hayase, Hiroko Uchida, Kuzuko Nishikawa, Kuniko Sato, Jean Autrey
Production Co-ordinator: Hiroki Tomohara
Production Manager: Atsushi Takayama
US Production Manager: Whitney Green
Location Co-ordinator: Susumu Ejima
Executive Production Assistant: Akiko Hitomi
Production Assistants: Kenichi Horii, Takao Shibaki, Keiko Sakurai
Action Director: Kanzo Uni
1st Assistant Director: Koichi Nakajima
2nd Assistant Directors: Takayoshi Bunai, Yasuo Matsumoto, Hisashi Toma
Script Supervisor: Chiyo Miyakoshi
Casting: Nobuaki Murooka
Screenplay: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader
Japanese Scriptwriter: Chieko Schrader
Based on novels by: Yukio Mishima
Script Research: Akiko Hitomi
Script Consultant: Jun Shiragi
Director of Photography: John Bailey
Camera Operator: Toyomichi Kurita
1st Assistant Camera: Yuichi Tamura
2nd Assistant Camera: Kazuhiro Nozaki
Key Grip: Jim Finnerty
Gaffer: Kazuo Shimomura
Still Photographers: Yoshinori Ishizuki, Kitaro Miyazawa
Edited by: Michael Chandler
Editor (Tokyo): Tomoyo Oshima
Assistant Editors: Jennifer Weyman-Cockle, Kathleen Korth
Production Designer: Eiko Ishioka
Executive Art Director: Kazuo Takenaka
Art Department: Yoshiyuki Ishida, Shunichiro Shoda, Kyoko Heya, Yasushi Ono, Yasue Ito
Set Decorator: Kyoji Sasaki
Set Artist: Akira Mizuno
Historical Art Consultant: Kappei Uehara
Property Master: Yoichi Minagawa
Construction Co-ordinator: Kazuo Suzuki
Costume Designer: Etsuko Yagyu
Wardrobe Assistants: Toshiaki Manki, Katsumi Harada
Make-up Artists: Yasuhiro Kawaguchi, Masayuki Okubi, Noriyo Ida
Title Design: Christopher Werner
Title Animation: Bruce Walters
Title Calligraphy: Sharon Nakazato
Opticals: Modern Film Effects
Negative Cutting: D. Bassett & Associates, Tome Minami
Filmed in: Panavision
Prints by: Technicolor
Original Music Composed/Arranged by: Philip Glass
Solo Violin/Concert Master: Elliot Rosoff
Music Conducted by: Michael Riesman
Music Produced by: Kurt Munkacsi
Music Recording Engineer: Dan Dryden
Sound Designer: Leslie Shatz
Production Recordist: Shotaro Yoshida
Boom Persons: Masashi Kikuchi, Soichi Inoue
Re-recording Mixers: Leslie Shatz, Tom Johnson
Sound Editors: Tom Bellfort, Jerry Ross, Giorgio Venturoli
Bodybuilding Instructor: Mitsuo Endo
Unit Publicist: Fusako Kawasaki
Narrator: Roy Scheider
Cast
November 25, 1970
Ken Ogata (Yukio Mishima)
Masayuki Shionoya (Morita)
Junkichi Orimoto (General Mashita)
Hiroshi Mikami, Junya Fukuda, Shigeto Tachihara (cadets)
flashback
Naoko Otani (mother)
Go Riju (Mishima, age 18-19)
Masato Aizawa (Mishima, age 9-14)
Yuki Nagahara (Mishima, age 5)
Kyuzo Kobayashi (literary friend)
Yuki Kitazume (dancing friend)
Haruko Kato (grandmother)
Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Yasosuke Bando (Mizoguchi)
Hisako Manda (Mariko)
Naomi Oki (1st girl)
Miki Takakura (2nd girl)
Imari Tsuji (madam)
Kôichi Satô (Kashiwagi)
Kyoko’s House
Kenji Sawada (Osamu)
Sachiko Hidari (Osamu’s mother)
Reisen Lee (Kiyomi)
Setsuko Karasuma (Mitsuko)
Tadanori Yokoo (Natsuo)
Yasuaki Kurata (Takei)
Mitsuru Hirata (thug)
Runaway Horses
Toshiyuki Nagashima (Isao)
Hiroshi Katsuno (Lieutenant Hori )
Naoya Makoto (Kendo instructor)
Hiroki Ida (Izutsu)
Jun Negami (Kurahara)
Ryo Ikebe (interrogator)
other cast
Toshio Hosokawa (‘Rokumeikan’ producer)
Hideo Fukuhara (military doctor)
Yosuke Mizuno (‘Yukoku’ producer)
Eimei Ezumi (Ichigaya aide-de-camp)
Minoru Hodaka (Ichigaya colonel)
Shoichiro Sakata (Isao’s classmate)
Alan Mark Poul (American reporter)
Ren Ebata, Yasuhiro Arai, Fumio Mizushima (reporters)
Shinji Miura (pavilion acolyte)
Yuichi Saito (student)
Sachiko Akagi (thug’s girlfriend)
Tsutomu Harda (Romeo)
Mami Okamoto (Juliet)
Atsushi Takayama (interrogation policeman)
Kimiko Ito (grandmother’s nurse)
Kojiro Oka (1st MP)
Tatsuya Hiragaki (1st actor)
Shinichi Nosaka (policeman)
USA-Japan 1985©
120 mins
Digital 4K
Moviedrome transmission date: 8 September 1991
With thanks to
Sue Deeks, Simon Chilcott, Carl Davies, Josephine Haining and Andrew Abbott
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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