With the Criterion Collection's release of the shocking short Patriotism (Yukoku), Yukio Mishima is immortalized on DVD.
By Rowena Aquino
Few short films come immediately to my mind whose images are explicit attempts to simultaneously navigate the harrowing and absorbing. There's perhaps Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un chien andalou (1929) and Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955). And then there's Patriotism (1966). The Criterion Collection's recent DVD release of the film will help to open eyes to a unique moment of sixties Japanese cinema and literature.
The Noh stage
Criterion, history, cinema. That's become the standard formula for anyone reviewing one of their DVD releases. In this particular case, it becomes an understatement. Patriotism holds the distinction of being the only film directed, produced, and acted by the famed postwar Japanese writer Mishima Yukio (1925-1970).
Some critics and scholars add "fascist" or "imperialist" to his name. Certainly, Mishima's actions in addition to his prolific career as a writer, playwright and theatre director, and sometime film actor are read as a testament to an extreme right-wing ideology. Patriotism, based on a short story he wrote in 1961, seemingly leaves little doubt about his position on the Japanese military, nationhood, and loyalty.
The story is based on an actual event in Japanese history. On 26th February 1936, a group of military officers of the Imperial Way faction staged a coup and killed ministers and imperial officials to make way for a more purified imperial ruling and resolve the nation's impasses at the level of the social, political, military and economic. But by the 29th, the rebellion had been quelled following martial law and most of the Imperial Way faction members were arrested -- although some committed seppuku, the ritual suicide by disembowelment.
This historical background frames Mishima's story about Lieutenant Takeyama Shinji -- played by Mishima himself. Despite being a member of the faction that staged the coup, Shinji was excluded from the plot because the members knew of his love for his wife, Reiko. He opts for loyalty to his comrades rather than to the Imperial order to stop the rebellion (an irony that puts however small a chink in Mishima's so-called staunch imperialism, if you want to look at it that way). On the morning when he is to carry out the order of killing his fellow military officers, he kills himself. Out of loyalty to her husband and their love, the wife also decides to commit suicide.
Criterion nicely provides the short story in the booklet accompanying the DVD as a comparison. I recommend reading the story prior to viewing the film, although both should be taken more as complements rather than adaptations of each other. The film provides a contrast to the rich detail of objects found in the story. In fact, one of the major decisions Mishima made is to set the "rite of love and death" (the film's sub-title) on the Noh stage. But it's nonetheless arresting visually: with cinematographer Watanabe Kimio, Mishima achieves an extremely sharp contrast of black and white, emblazoned by the ensuing copious amounts of blood, and the whiteness of the Noh stage and Reiko's ceremonial kimono, respectively.
Canvas of blood and white. Having only one set of costumes for each of the lead actors required that the crew & cast get love and death right the first time.
Mishima also decided to focus on gesture and action instead of dialogue. Patriotism is a silent film, with intertitles written on scrolls that provide plot information and mirror the five chapter blocks of the story.
Japanese titles and their English version, both written by Mishima himself. The Criterion edition provides the Japanese and English versions of the film.
As the sub-title suggests, the film's centerpieces are chapters three and four: the couple's final love-making, and the lieutenant's suicide. (Incidentally, the twinning of eroticism, sex, and death was very much a Surrealist preoccupation, recalling in particular the work of André Masson and Buñuel, among others.) Those familiar with Mishima's story – or his entire body of work, in fact -- know how deeply he expresses the spiritual in physical terms, and how the very moments prior to death give everything a new patina of meaning and urgency. So there's a double consummation of love at work here, as well as a double consummation of loyalty. Given the concentrated running time of 27 minutes, the impact is incredible. On the one hand, Criterion exaggerates the graphicness of the sex in the film on the outer sleevenote, perhaps to entice buyers. It's an abstract montage of faces, arms, and torsos in sometimes extreme close-up, recalling slightly Teshigahara. On the other hand, describing Takeyama's seppuku "graphic" is putting it mildly. In each its own way, the story and the film paint the process of seppuku. Both are excruciating. Following Mishima's death aesthetics, the excruciating pain is the point, so that an overwhelming sense of life, beauty, discipline, love, and death come together.
If there's a third character in the film, it's definitely the hanging scroll of the characters "Wholesome Sincerity" (others interpret it as "Loyalty") on the Noh stage that overlooks all the action. The hanging scroll is arguably an essential element of the film's visual style, determining angle, lighting, actor positions. And like the entire film itself, it remains mute but steady, fixed in its resolve. Another supporting character would have to be the soundtrack. As if taking a cue from Un chien andalou, Mishima decided to set his images to "Liebestod" (literally, "love/death"), from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. The match between image- and sound-tracks is startlingly apt.
The DVD provides valuable extras to grapple with the film and its on- and off-screen protagonist. Excerpts of interviews with Mishima, an audio interview with Mishima speaking rather fluent English (all from 1966), and Mishima's own account of the production in the booklet provide some fascinating details about the hows and whys of Mishima's motivation for the book and film, the two-day production constraints, and collaboration for the film. The making-of documentary composed of interviews of members of the film crew, though lethargic in pace at times, also serves the practical objective of rectifying the absence of production credits in the film.
Mishima interview excerpts
Yet all seem to provide more interesting questions than answers to Mishima's art and life, always an enigma when the artist in question explicitly and violently strive to bring the two together. Of course, the culmination of Mishima's merging of life and art that I've delayed in discussing was his public "performance" of his own death by seppuku in November 1970 at a military base (in the attempt to encourage the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to stage a military coup, referencing the February 1936 incident).
As I've said, that Mishima made only one film makes Patriotism unique. That he chose Patriotism among the numerous plays, short stories, and novels he wrote may seem to most more inevitable than anything else. Read it as a cinematic dress rehearsal of his suicide if it pleases you. Just watch it, since we now can. Between 1970 and 2005, the film was unavailable due to the handling of the writer's estate: Mishima's widow ordered all prints destroyed after his death (though with some coaxing, thankfully, she conceded to keeping a negative). Criterion must be applauded (for the umpteenth time) for issuing this little-seen film outside of Japan, and introducing even to hard-core cinephiles this piercing visualization of Mishima's literary output.
Patriotism was released by the Criterion Collection on July 1, 2008. Released the same day was Paul Schrader's 1985 documentary Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. For Rowena Aquino's review of Schrader's view on Yukio Mishima, click here.