Kanbar Award: Paul Schrader: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Description
The Kanbar Award acknowledges the crucial role that storytelling plays in the creation of great film and television. This year’s recipient—prolific screenwriter and director Paul Schrader—will host an evening at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, discussing his career and presenting one of his most acclaimed films, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
In his 45 years, Yukio Mishima lived several lives: outcast child; World War II service evader; prolific, Nobel-Prize-nominated author of over 40 novels, 18 plays and numerous short stories and essays; bodybuilder; actor; filmmaker; and head of his very own right-wing paramilitary squad dedicated to following the way of the samurai and restoring imperial Japan. His was a life lived large even as a narcissistic and nihilistic man who romanced death. The many layers of Mishima’s tumultuous life are captured in Paul Schrader’s masterwork, a drama co-written with his brother Leonard that embroiders the writer’s own work into his biography to stunning effect. No conventional biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters blends a recreation of Mishima’s (Ken Ogata) final day when the extent of his dedication to altering Japan’s political landscape and to bushido is made manifest; snippets of biography rendered in black and white that explore the psychology of one of postwar Japan’s most celebrated authors; and beautifully staged, luridly colored scenes from three key Mishima novels—Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses—that further explicate his psyche. John Bailey’s luminous cinematography and Philip Glass’s sweeping, pulsating score add further texture to this mesmerizing drama, a portrait of one exceptional artist made by another. —Pam Grady
Raised in a Calvinist household, Paul Schrader never watched a movie until he was in college, but made up for lost time by earning his M.A. at UCLA, becoming an American Film Institute Conservatory fellow in its inaugural 1969 class and becoming first a film critic and then screenwriter. Though the action thriller The Yakuza (1974), co-written with his brother Leonard, was his first produced screenplay, it was the script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), written when he was 26 and inspired by his sense of isolation at a low point in his life, that was his breakthrough. The film won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or and was the first of several collaborations between Schrader and Scorsese, a list that includes Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader made his directing debut in 1978 with Blue Collar, also co-written with his brother Leonard. As a writer/director, his films include Hardcore (1979), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light of Day (1987), Light Sleeper (1992),Touch (1997), Affliction (1997), Forever Mine (1999), The Walker (2007) and Dying of the Light (2014). His screenplays include Obsession (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), American Gigolo (1980), The Mosquito Coast (1976), City Hall (1996) and The Jesuit (2015). Among his directing projects are Cat People (1982), Patty Hearst (1988), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Auto Focus (2002), Adam Resurrected (2008) and The Canyons (2013).
Film Details
LanguageJapanese
Year1985
Runtime121
CountryUSA, Japan
DirectorPaul Schrader
ProducerTom Luddy, Mataichirô Yamamoto
WriterPaul Schrader, Leonard Schrader
EditorMichael Chandler, Tomoyo Oshima
CinematographerJohn Bailey
MusicPhilip Glass
CastKen Ogata, Masayuki Shionoya, Hiroshi Mikami