He has found, at long last, the mathematical formula of love. In Frenkel’s film, the mathematician faces a quandary familiar to theoretical scientists. The 1966 movie was suppressed for almost 40 years after Mishima’s suicide in 1970, but was brought out on DVD by the Criterion Collection in 2008. His answer is a ritual disemboweling in a suicide pact with his wife, joining their love forever in death.

Mishima’s plot revolved around a question of honor his main character is an Army lieutenant torn between loyalty to his emperor or to friends staging a coup d’état. He also stars in it - as a mathematician. And, like Mishima’s, it has only two characters, a man in the throes of an existential dilemma and the woman he loves.įrenkel wrote, directed and produced the film, along with French filmmaker Reine Graves. It is short, silent and acted on a set made to resemble a Noh theater stage. The film is an homage to Yukio Mishima and follows closely the form and style of the only film directed by the Japanese writer, Yukoku, or The Rite of Love and Death. The campus-based Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, one of two original co-sponsors of the screening, withdrew its support on Sunday in response to criticism from people who had seen the movie’s trailer and found it “disturbing, offensive and/or insulting to women,” according to a letter posted online by MSRI Director Robert Bryant. 1) at the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley.Įven before the screening, it has touched a nerve on campus. Rites of Love and Math, which opened at the Max Linder theater in Paris in April, will have its North American premiere tomorrow night (Wednesday, Dec. Frenkel has come out with a 26-minute feature film that aims to achieve that goal - but with drama, intrigue, love, sex and a tattoo. He tells his classes in multivariable calculus that one of his goals is to unlock the subject’s inherent beauty for them, the truth revealed by a mathematical formula.Īnd now, the culture itself is his audience. Berkeley math professor Edward Frenkel, whose new film “Rites of Love and Math” centers on a formula and a tattoo.

Edward frenkel rites of love and math