Here’s another somewhat pretentious Johnny-come-lately review of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters but fortunately there is this little nugget of a footnote to Mishima’s life. JapanMishima: A Life in Four ChaptersPaul Schraderphilosophical cinemaphilosophical literatureYukio Mishima
Paul Schrader and Alan Poul discuss the trials and tribulations in the making of Mishima: A life in four chapters. For copyright reasons, one is not contemporaneously privy to what Paul and Alan are viewing (much like Herzog’s commentary tracks). As a curtain-raiser one should listen to Benjamin Noggle’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters — Criterion Retrospective.…
Though it’s going on 40 years since Performance was made (1968, released in 1970) it is still the most modern of films with “adult themes” (philosophical and otherwise) from an age when films weren’t primarily made for fuckwits. The themes of social, sexual and gender identity make the fuss being made about these issues now seem so tired…
I’ve been thinking a lot about my instinctive predilection for writers whose life and work bleed into each other, an attraction I felt long before I was fully aware of their biographical details. The first was Kafka; the second Rolfe; the third Musil; the fourth Mishima and the fifth, Toole. I’ve come to the conclusion that these philosophical novelists…
One of my favourite philosophically orientated novelists is Mishima. I can’t attest to the reliability of this bio-sketch but it’s a start. There is not much scholarly literature on Mishima but here is an appreciation in, of all places, the British Journal of Psychiatry. Paul Schrader made a superb attempt at expressing Mishima’s thinking (insofar as…
manwithoutqualities 