EDWARD YANG 1947--2007

Fatty: "Life is a mixture of sad and happy things. Movies are lifelike. That's why we love them."
Ting-ting: “Then who needs movies. Just stay home and live life.”
Fatty: “We live three times as long since man invented movies.”
Yi Yi

Edward Yang died at age 59. He made just seven films, not including a short segment he made for a Taiwanese film known as Expectations. BFP saw only three, two were masterpieces, and one was just excellent. His movies are rich and beautiful tapestries with indelibly etched men and women presented with compassion and humor. In each of the three films BFP saw—The Terrorizer, A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi--one of the main characters kills someone, Yang makes us feel their anguish. It’s not that we identify with them and are thus implicated in their action, it’s that we understand their powerlessness.

With Yi Yi, his last film, made in 2000, Yang had at last received significant international recognition, winning The National Film Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture. Now we can surmise why there was no subsequent movie: he was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2000. Nine years earlier, Yang directed A Brighter Summer Day, as ironic a title as any film ever released. Few have seen it, even among film cognoscenti, but those who have know its power to make epic the lives of ordinary people, primarily adolescents. Like Yi Yi it gives us the great pleasure of feeling we are watching a novel as the vivid sprawl of characters, the precise sense of place unfold before our eyes. With these two masterpieces, Yang joined an exclusive club of directors who created great novels for the screen including Renoir (The Rules of the Game), Welles (The Magnificent Ambersons), Carne (Children of Paradise), Ichikawa (The Makioka Sisters), Bergman (Fanny and Alexander), and Giordana (The Best of Youth). Yang is the only member to have two films represented.

Yang often holds his shots long and keeps his camera stationery, with the characters frequently going out of view, as if the camera’s sitting in the movie theater with us. Like Ozu’s “pillow shots,” we are placed in a meditative, thoughtful role, given an opportunity to take it all in. With these images Yang also, like Antonioni, asks us to consider the idea of an all-enveloping outside environment impacting on the lives of the characters. The still camera keeps us from getting too close to the characters, who always appear to be part of the homes, streets, social institutions they live in. But, paradoxically, and in no small part because of the writing, acting and directing, we always sympathize with all the characters. The geometric division of space by camera placement accents characters alone in spare spaces to reinforce a sense of their being closed in, trapped, powerless. It also creates rich and arresting visuals: Consider the shot from Yi Yi where the woman, Sherry, caught crying past midnight in the window of her hotel room amid an incredible reflection of massive well-lit skyscrapers and waves of cars--impersonal urban power--makes the viewer aware of how the materialist life she desired and succeeded in creating for herself destroyed her chance to live with the one man she ever loved.

The shot below, also from Yi Yi employs the same style: A woman reflected in a night city-scape.



Initially BFP intended to summarize both The Terrorizer and A Brighter Summer Day, but then recognized this would be extremely unfair to Mr. Yang. All BFP can do is fervently hope that both films will be quickly released by Criterion in pristine prints so that each and every cinephile can at last appreciate this man’s genius. What follows is a brief blurb-style description of these movies, hoping to capture BFP’s view of their essence.

Heavily influenced by Antonioni in its dramaturgy and in its visuals, The Terrorizer (1986) is a pungent, tragic study of the effect random events have on our lives. Besides mocking the idea that we are masters of our fate, Yang presents Taiwan as awash in personal betrayal and corporate sterility. BFP would like too tell you more, but this is a movie that demands concentration and in the end resists quick synopsis.


Although A Brighter Summer Day (1991) runs four hours, most two hour films feel longer. It begins with a title card explaining that teens in 1949 Taiwan emanated from families who left Mainland China, but maintained the hope that they would someday soon return. Thus their life on the island did not allow for permanent commitments—everything was on hold. This insecurity left their children hungry for a stable supportive group that could provide them with identity. Teenage gangs, the focus of the movie, fill the void. We realize soon enough the irony of this: these gangs reflect the militaristic, chauvinist, corrupt, misogynist Mao & Chiang Kai-Shek government’s that oppress their parents. The gangs, like the governments, do not provide security, support or stability. Indeed the film chronicles a ceaseless cycle of betrayal, deceit and murder in a violence obsessed youth culture whose only respite is American rock n roll. (Come to think of it, this doesn’t sound all that different from The Sopranos)

Along the way we meet the lead character’s family: the hard pressed mother working long hours, the father, a confident civil servant protective of his son. By the end, he is a timid, paranoid man destroyed by an interrogation about his Communist friends by the police which results in his losing his job.

Yang’s great theme is how the institutions we created, both political and economic, have gotten way out of our control, making us powerless (In case you haven’t noticed, BFP has been using this word throughout this entry.). Yi Yi, for all its warmth and compassion features a business betrayal a protagonist is powerless to stop as well as a sexual betrayal setting off an inchoate rage leading to murder.

BFP would like to conclude this celebration by citing the eloquent, incisive comments made by two fine writers on film:

Tony Rayns describes The Terrorizer in a Time Out London http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/79098/the-terroriser.html blurb:“Yang's masterly film keeps numerous plot strands going in parallel, finds a high level of interest and suspense in all of them, and dovetails them together into a composite picture plausible enough to make you cry and shocking enough to leave you gasping. The characters span the full urban spectrum. …Yang reaches high, and his aim is true. “ This description applies to A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi as well.

Saul Austerlitz, in a career profile of Edward Yang for Senses of Cinema http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/yang.html, July 2002 writes of Yi Yi: “Earlier in the film, Yang-Yang [the 8 year old] gives his uncle, A-Di, a picture of the back of his head, telling him, ‘You can't see it, so I'm helping you.’ Yang-Yang, as the artist, reveals the blind spots of others, and shows them what they heretofore have been unable to see. Edward Yang also engages in a similar task in Yi Yi, and showing his audience the Jian family coming together is a revelation of just how far apart they have grown, and how great the need is for artists to show us what we are too blind to see about our own lives.”