Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
1985 · Paul Schrader · Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters on Sightlines
A gold pavilion burns on a stage that can rotate and split apart. The colour is one colour, laid on like lacquer, and you can feel the floorboards under the fire. Then Schrader cuts, and a man in a plain uniform is being driven through ordinary Tokyo traffic toward an army base, photographed the way you would photograph a news event. Same film, nearly the same minute. Almost everything Mishima has to say lives in the distance between those two pictures.
Schrader runs three kinds of image at once. The last day, 25 November 1970, in restrained observational colour. The life, from sickly boy to famous novelist, in expressive black and white. And three of Mishima's novels staged by Eiko Ishioka on sets that announce their own construction, drenched in single colour fields. Michael Chandler's cutting keeps all three braided, so that a passage from Runaway Horses arrives against Mishima's own march toward self-destruction, and by the fourth chapter you can no longer say which of the deaths on screen is the real one.
That indiscernibility has a name. Deleuze calls it the crystal-image: a moment where the actual thing and its mirror, its memory, its fiction, become impossible to tell apart, and the film refuses to settle which came first. It sounds abstract until you watch the fourth chapter, where the imagined deaths and the historical one stop being different orders of fact. Why bother with the term? Because without it the novel sequences look like decoration, illustrations of an author's themes bolted onto a biopic. The crystal says they are not illustrations. They are the other face of the same image, and the film's argument follows directly: the suicide was a sentence Mishima had already written, and the man cannot be read apart from his art.
Deleuze also distinguishes the sealed crystal from the cracked one. Mishima's fiction worlds are sealed. Several actors appear in more than one of them, so his stories turn out to be populated by refractions of himself, mirrors facing mirrors, no exit. The colour footage of the last day is the flaw in the stone. It is the only register where something happens once and cannot be re-staged, and John Bailey shoots it plainly, almost journalistically, for exactly that reason. This is Bazin's old contract being put to work: we half-believe the photographed record in a way we never believe the painted set, and Schrader borrows that belief to make the artifice next to it legible as artifice. The body is the crack.
Which brings up what Deleuze called the powers of the false. Not lying. The idea that a life, or a film, can make truth instead of reporting it, and that this is a creative power rather than a failure of honesty. His figure for it is the forger: someone whose identity is serial, who keeps becoming the next version of himself. Mishima is that almost programmatically. The frail aesthete child becomes the bodybuilder, the bodybuilder becomes the martial artist, the martial artist becomes the commander of a private militia in a tailored uniform. Ken Ogata's great decision is to play these as coexisting rather than as stages that cancel each other. Vanity and rigour sit in the same face and neither wins.
On the balcony at Ichigaya he addresses the garrison and calls for the restoration of imperial reverence. Deleuze has a term for the speech that tries to call into existence the community it addresses: fabulation, legending. And a companion observation, that modern political cinema works through the fact that the people are missing, that the collective the speaker needs does not yet exist and may never. The coup was an attempt. The harangue found no people. There is a bleak rhyme in the film's own fate: never properly released in Japan, blocked by family objection and the threat of reprisal, a film about a man addressing his country that his country was not permitted to see.
The black-and-white strand does something to biography that is easy to undervalue now. It is not flashback. There are no dated dissolves, no captioned years, no cradle-to-grave ladder. Deleuze's term is sheets of past: the past as regions you move through, coexisting, rather than a chain of former presents you visit. The grammar comes straight from Hiroshima mon amour, where literary voiceover braided across timeframes let past and present interpenetrate. The prismatic-biopic refusal comes from Citizen Kane. But Kane assembles a man out of testimony about him; Schrader's third strand is the man's own fiction, which no witness could have supplied.
The joins themselves are the invention. Deleuze calls a cut that links across a gap, rather than by continuity, the interstice, the AND rather than the THEN: meaning happens between the shots and belongs to neither. Before this film, a picture cutting among fiction, memory and present tense generally nursed you across with transitional devices. Schrader hands that job to two things. Colour code, keyed not to periods but to levels of reality. And Philip Glass, whose pulsing cyclical figures run underneath everything like a carrier wave, functioning almost as a fourth narrative voice and giving tableau-like images an inexorable forward drive. That is a genuine change to how a film can be built.
The rest of the style follows. Ishioka's colour fields absorb their scenes entirely, the way Deleuze says colour can stop describing a feeling and simply become it. Storaro had keyed timeframes to palettes in The Conformist; here palettes key ontology instead of chronology. The sets that split open ask to be deciphered rather than inhabited, which is what Deleuze means by an image becoming readable. And Ogata's contained, ritualised carriage, the Noh frontality that Kurosawa imported into cinema with Throne of Blood and that Ozu's tatami-level stillness taught Schrader to theorise as transcendental style, gives the film its gests: postures that expose a relation instead of advancing a plot. The bodybuilding is a gest. The folded uniform is a gest. The seppuku is the last one. Over all of it runs a voice drawn from Mishima's own writing, testimony rather than dialogue, the Bressonian device of Pickpocket turned from confession into legend.
What Mishima made available is the argued biography: a film that treats an artist's work as evidence rather than as biographical output, and that trusts an audience to hold three levels of reality at once without being told which is which. Its suppression meant the influence travelled sideways, by videotape and later by Criterion, rather than by release. Watch it again for one thing. Find the point where you stop keeping the three registers separate in your head. Then ask whether Mishima turned his death into a work of art, or whether this film did it for him. Schrader gives you everything you need to disagree with him.
Concepts in play
- hyalosign (the crystal-image) — The fourth chapter's convergence, where cross-cutting dissolves the boundary between the deaths Mishima imagined in his novels and the one he carried out at Ichigaya — a Runaway Horses passage rhyming with his own march toward self-immolation.
- the saturated crystal — Ishioka's enclosed soundstage worlds, with several performers recurring across more than one novel sequence, so that Mishima's fictions are populated by refractions of himself — mirrors with no outside.
- the cracked crystal — The restrained, documentary-like colour photography of 25 November 1970 — the drive, the seizure, the suicide — the one register where an act happens once and cannot be re-staged, set against the controlled world of the novel stages.
- puissances du faux — The film's essayistic refusal of biography's claim to transparent access: meaning arises from the juxtaposition of fiction and fact, with the novels treated as evidence about the life rather than as illustration of it.
- le faussaire — Ogata's Mishima carried across serial self-inventions — sickly aesthete child, bodybuilder and martial-arts aesthete, public intellectual, commander of the Tatenokai — played so the contradictions coexist rather than resolve.
- story-telling / legending — The balcony harangue at Ichigaya calling for the restoration of imperial reverence, and the four-chapter architecture ('Beauty', 'Art', 'Action', 'Harmony of Pen and Sword') by which Mishima narrates his own life as a completed work.
- the people are missing — The coup attempt: an address to a garrison that produces no rising, followed by suicide — and the film's own history of never receiving a proper theatrical release in Japan.
- sheets of past (order of time) — The black-and-white biographical strand, interwoven with present-tense action rather than presented as dated flashback — the temporal grammar inherited from Hiroshima mon amour's braiding of voiceover across timeframes.
- the interstice / the AND — Chandler's continual intercutting among three registers with no transitional smoothing, so that fiction, memory and present-tense action comment on one another across the gap between shots.
- affective colour — Ishioka's bold monochromatic fields — the burning gold of the pavilion, an intense rose-pink interior — in which the colour absorbs the scene and becomes its feeling, extending Storaro's colour-coded timeframes in The Conformist to code levels of reality instead of periods.
- the readable image — Sets that split open, rotate and reconfigure, announcing their own artifice and insisting we are inside Mishima's imagination rather than in a reconstructed reality — images to be deciphered rather than inhabited.
- the gest (attitude / posture) — Ogata's contained, ritualised intensity and the theatrical frontality descended from Throne of Blood's Noh-derived staging and Ozu's static tatami-height framing: bodybuilding, the uniform, the seppuku as postures that expose a relation rather than advance a plot.
- acte de parole — Voice-over narration drawn from Mishima's own writings and reflections, delivered across all three registers as testimony and self-legending rather than as dialogue — the Bressonian first-person device of Pickpocket that Schrader theorised in Transcendental Style in Film.