Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

A newly restored, director's cut of Paul Schrader's ambitious, radically stylised film about Japanese writer Yukio Mishima: poet, playwright, novelist, militarist, aesthete, homosexual, whose passion to merge life with art led to symbolic insurrection and ritualistic suicide in 1970. Intercut with an account of Mishima's last day on earth – shot in docudrama style, with a driving, romantic score by Philip Glass – Schrader presents black and white scenes from the author's life and self-contained, studio dramatisations of four contrasting stories from the author's works, encapsulating his characteristic themes of purity, beauty, mortality and annihilation.

Print source: Courtesy of Paul Schrader