The controversial Japanese novelist’s lone foray behind the camera produced this 27-minute short film (for 30 years thought destroyed after the author’s suicide) that is infinitely more interesting as psychological insight into Mishima’s personal obsessions than it is as filmmaking. Shot as a silent film scored to Wagner, it is based on Mishima’s short story about a military general who commits seppuku after a failed uprising, which makes it a chilling foreshadow of the author’s actual death. The film’s twin poles of love and death are visualized with an extended, but ultimately chaste lovemaking sequence between the general (played by Mishima) and his wife and an extended, graphically gruesome depiction of their dual suicides—complete with spilling  intestines and spurting arteries. As was obvious with his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, in which he notes his “heart’s leaning toward Death and Night and Blood,” it’s not hard to see where Mishima’s true obsession lies. (DVD)