Friday, March 13 at 7:15pm
IN PERSON: Celebrated Filmmaker and Screenwriter
PAUL SCHRADER
Although it seemed like the most unlikely choice of Paul Schrader’s career – traveling to Japan to make a drama about the life of legendary Japanese author Yukio Mishima – the resulting film would prove to be both an illuminating portrait of Mishima, and Schrader’s most personal and powerful work. Schrader presents the life of the controversial Japanese novelist — both for his Nobel-worthy art and for his über-flamboyant life — in four symbolic Acts (Beauty, Art, Action, Harmony of Pen and Sword) and on three planes: b&w flashbacks to his previous life, seeing the lonely, sickly boy before he became the world-famous writer/actor/bodybuilder; highly colored and stylized dramatizations of sequences from his books The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses; and a documentary-style treatment of the last day of his life, leading up to his own theatrically-staged seppuku. With Ken Ogata in the title role; striking design by Eiko Ishioka (Coppola’s Dracula); and an iconic Philip Glass score that matched each visual style with its own musical motif (“Glass’s score virtually transforms the whole thing into opera. There is nothing quite like it.” – Time Out London), this is one of the most unusual and challenging films ever to have come from a mainstream studio (originally Warners, thanks to exec producers Francis Coppola and George Lucas, though Mishima’s widow prevented it from ever being shown in Japan). Over twenty years after Mishima first mesmerized CAC audiences, we are pleased to bring this brilliant movie back in a newly restored 35mm print.
USA/Japan, 1985, 121 min., color, b/w
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One of the crucial figures to emerge in the American New Wave of the 1970s, Paul Schrader first burst into filmgoers’ consciousness as the screenwriter of the landmark film Taxi Driver (1976). Two years later, he made his directorial debut with the searing drama Blue Collar (1978). In the ensuing years, whether as a writer-director (Affliction, Light Sleeper, American Gigolo, Hardcore, Auto Focus, Patty Hearst, The Walker), or screenwriter (Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Mosquito Coast), Paul Schrader has become one of American Cinema’s most distinctive and powerful voices.
