a brighter summer day Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The Taiwanese-born filmmaker Edward Yang, who passed away this past June at the age of 59, stood on the verge of possibly revitalizing cinema. In 2002, Sight & Sound magazine -- disappointed with the results of its every-ten-years poll of the all-time great films, conducted a new poll consisting exclusively of films made in the past 25 years, from 1978 to 2002. The entire top ten was made up of older films from the 1970s and 1980s, except for Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990), Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) and Yang's Yi Yi (2000). Yang's film was the only one from the 21st century to make the list, and since it was the only one of Yang's films to receive theatrical distribution in the West, that means that it's the only one that a majority of the voters had ever seen.

Yang completed only seven feature films and one short "segment" in his all-too brief career, and I've only managed to see two of them. Yi Yi topped my list of the year's best films the year I saw it -- and stands a good chance to do the same on my upcoming best-of-the-decade list. I also managed to see A Brighter Summer Day (1991), in its full four-hour version, thanks to a website called www.superhappyfun.com that sells a DVD-R dupe of an old laserdisc for only $16. The picture is scratched and the subtitles leave a bit to be desired, but this film is even more complex and intriguing than Yi Yi. Set over the course of most of a year in 1961, A Brighter Summer Day deals with a subculture of Mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan after the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949. A printed introduction explains that their children are now living in a state of uncertainty and have taken to forming street gangs for a sense of safety and control.

These things always seem to come in sets, don't they? Just last week, ABC film critic Joel Siegel passed away from colon cancer. Director Edward Yang, born in Shanghai and raised in Taiwan, and little known to American audiences in spite of an impressive body of work, has also died recently from complications of colon cancer.

Like Variety's Anne Thompson, I'm not as familiar with Yang's work as I'd like to be; there are times when it seems that no matter how many fests I attend, how many foreign films and docs and indie dramas I see, I can never catch up and see them all, and it takes a death to make me realize that I've not seen or appreciated enough of this person's life work. I see a lot of Asian cinema, and still I'm almost completely unfamiliar with Yang's films -- something I intend to correct at the first opportunity.

Senses of Cinema has a solid write-up by Saul Austerlitz on the director and his body of work in their Great Directors section. Two of Yang's better known works are Yi Yi (his last completed feature -- Yang was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after winning the award Best Director at Cannes in 2000 for the film), and A Brighter Summer Day.

Austerlitz writes about Yang, "His films express the confusion, anxiety, and sheer beauty of societal transformation. Yang also equates the macrocosmic and microcosmic, making the lives of his characters stand in for the greater, less visible processes of social change. Along with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Yang is one of the most visible faces of the Taiwanese New Wave, possibly the most brilliant filmmaking movement in the world today."

Here's a roundup of some other write-ups on Yang and his work; as a whole, they give a nice perspective on the man and his films:

Mahola Dargis, New York Times: "Mr. Yang directed seven features that in their visual style and preoccupations - including the impact of modernization on the Taiwanese middle class - argue for his status as an auteur."

Green Cine Daily: "His movies focused on Taiwan, but they were not primarily about Taiwan. They were about humankind."

The Guardian -- 2001 interview by Duncan Campbell: "Like the small boy with the camera in A One and a Two, Yang seems now to be in the perfect position to use film to show people the parts of their lives that they normally miss."

Godfrey Cheshire, The Village Voice: " ... one of modern cinema's most fascinating careers passed largely unseen by American cinephiles."

Ray Pride for Movie City Indie: "I don't like to use the word "humanist," but that is one of the lesser things you could say of Edward Yang's Yi-Yi ..."