Patriotism (1966)

Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death (憂國, Yūkoku) is a 1966 Japanese short film directed by Yukio Mishima. It is based on Mishima's short story Patriotism, published in 1960.
Patriotism is a silent, thirty-minute black-and-white film with long expository intertitles elaborating on the story and its historical background. It contains visual references to Noh theatre, as Mishima admired the traditional style and wrote several plays in the genre. Set in a single room, it is composed of static wide shots and lingering close-ups, most of which obscure Mishima's eyes. It is arresting visually: with cinematographer Watanabe Kimio, Mishima achieves an extremely sharp contrast of black and white, emblazoned by the ensuing copious amounts of blood, and the whiteness of the Noh stage and Reiko's ceremonial kimono, respectively.
The hanging painting that displays "Wholesome sincerity" also acts as a major visual element of the film's visual style, determining angle, lighting, actor positions. Like the entire film itself, it remains mute but steady, fixed in its resolve. It serves to remind the viewer of the devotion between Reiko and the Lieutenant and also their devotion to their nation and to the ritual hara-kiri.
The film is about the death of militarism in postwar Japan and seeks to contrast the suicide of the 1936 officers to Mishima's postwar interpretation. It can be seen as a foreshadowing of his own ill-fated suicide. Ritual suicide is explored in many of Mishima's works. Following Mishima's death aesthetics, the excruciating gory shots of death make the point, so that an overwhelming sense of life, beauty, discipline, love, and death come together.

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