Mishima – Lost in the Desire for Life and Death
The interest in moving pictures brought Emil Memon to Mishima, or rather Mishima guided him to his first live-action film, Mishima Film. On the subject, it's worth saying at least the following: It takes place in New York City. The prolific author, Mishima, arrives from Tokyo to promote his new book. He has conversations, monologues, and searches for meaning and love. Memon began planning the film before 2004; he wrote the screenplay, created the storyboard, and invited one of his friends, film director and video maker Pawel Wojtasik, an excellent director of photography in his own right, to collaborate on the film. Then came the task of selecting the actresses: Yuko Torihara as Yukio Mishima, Yurika Ohno as his assistant, and Lucie Tripon as the journalist. For the film, Memon cast women, embroiled in a romantic relationship, in all of the roles – that of Mishima, his assistant, and the journalist. If this seems rather unusual and provocative from the standpoint of Western theatre, where only men were allowed on stage for most of its history, the Japanese traditional theatre, kabuki, one of the predecessors of performance art, had it the other way around. At first, in the early 17th century, when it was called onna-kabuki, it was performed solely by women. In Memon's drawings and paintings, which were created before the start of the shooting and are an integral part of the film project, the situation is reversed: we see the beautifully sculpted body of Yukio Mishima, strong and fragile, vulnerable and erotic. Here, Memon used Eikoh Hosoe's photographs published in Ordeal by Roses. According to various sources, Mishima strived for physical perfection and liked to narcissistically pose for photo cameras and film cameras; he hired the best photographers in the business, posing covered in roses, dressed in a samurai kimono, or pierced by arrows like Saint Sebastian, both soldier and martyr. That was in fact what he wanted to become, forming his own army of young boys and later committing a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment called seppuku at the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japan Self-Defence Forces. In front of a group of soldiers and cameras.  He failed to become a hero in his native Japan, but rather a taboo subject among nationalists and a source of shame. Memories of him soon faded. In Europe, French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, author of numerous historical and biographical novels, wrote Mishima: A Vision of the Void (Mishima, ou La vision du vide,1980), an essay about his obsession with death. In 1985, American director Paul Schrader made a biopic about his life and work called Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which was never screened in Japan. When creating his screenplay, Memon in a way relied more on drawing than writing. For example, he vividly described the filming process and the scenes – projecting static or moving images onto Mishima's body or showing his future artwork – images combining the image of Mishima with classical or modern masterpieces as the background. Through the medium of Mishima's monologues and dialogues, Emil Memon also talks about an apocalyptic ecological dystopia, as well as about his own artistic preferences and references, ranging from Thomas Mann, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. The exhibition offers the first opportunity to see Memon's complex film project in a gallery setting. (Source: Barbara Borčić, Emil Memon: Mishima Film A Killer Show, exhibition publication, GalerijaGallery, Ljubljana, 2019.)