July
5
Movie Directors: RIP Edward Yang
Critic John Anderson knows a lot more about director Edward Yang than I do. Here's his appreciation of the man and his films:
“The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away,” Edward Yang once said. One might answer that in his epic, expansive movies, Edward blasted apathy to bits and turned complacency to rubble.It was less of a bang than a whimper that accompanied the news of Edward’s death last week: Only 59, he was defeated by complications of the colon cancer he’d been fighting for the last seven years. His death was a shock, naturally. But the fact he’d been sick, and so few seemed to know, seemed no surprise at all.
The world should, and will, remember Edward as a filmmaker equally influenced by the spare aesthetic of Antonioni and the teeming, novelistic inventions of Joyce; the humanity of a Jean Renoir, and the rigorous perspective of a Claude Chabrol. But those fortunate enough to have known him personally probably recall, much more immediately, a gentle, self-conscious soul, who greeted you with hands in a prayerful Buddhist salute, even while his mind was scrambling along the precipices of new technologies, globalization, worldwide avarice, Japanese anime, the delicate architecture of his own cinema and a world that played discordant counterpoint to the divine harmonies he heard in his head. And which were reproduced so adroitly on screen.
Born in Shanghai, Edward always seemed at least half American – he’d earned his degrees here, worked in Seattle for years and, when he died, was living in Beverly Hills. Although Taipei was his city, the way Delft was Vermeer’s, Edward’s films always betrayed the kinship he found between his two countries – histories umbilically connected to immigration and checkered by a lack of racial unity; countries both blessed and haunted by the variegated ethnic backgrounds of their peoples. He threw us clues: “Yi Yi” had a McDonald’s; in “Taipei Story,” Edward’s star, Hou Hsiao-hsien, wore a Yankees cap.
Significantly, Edward found in both Taiwan and the U.S. confounding streaks of anti-intellectualism, and an institutionalized allergy to creativity and culture that made his own life so conflicted. He was compelled, he said in 2002, to be “a good Chinese son” and pursue a career in engineering, even though his instinct was for art. That he ultimately found his footing – abetted by the cinema of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and William Holden -- is something we can only be grateful for.
With seven feature-length films to his credit, Edward may have the highest ratio of influence and stature per screen minute of any director since Jean Vigo. It is impossible, though, to watch either of his two unqualified masterpieces – “A Brighter Summer Day” of 1991, or his final work, the incomparable “Yi Yi” – without receiving the entirety of human experience, the joy, the woe, the inescapable weight of cosmic solitude and an ineffable sense of hope. There have certainly been filmmakers with filmographies larger than Edward Yang’s, but very, very few as eloquent, or inescapable.
I am feeling very guilty that I have not seen more of this man's work, and will remedy that as soon as I can.
UPDATE:DVD Spindoctor knows where to get Yi Yi.
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Same here. I'm wondering where to purchase them because I barely found sources on-line for a "A Brighter Summer Day" and "Yi Yi."
Posted by: T.Holly | July 06, 2007 at 08:47 AM
There's a Criterion Collection DVD of "Yi Yi." It's on Netflix.
Posted by: David C. | July 06, 2007 at 11:30 AM
Thanks David,
http://cgi.ebay.com/A-Brighter-Summer-Day-Edward-Yang-DVD_W0QQitemZ110146259243QQihZ001QQcategoryZ617QQcmdZViewItem
says, "This DVD is the only way to see this great classic film now." That's too bad. I wonder if a retrospective is in the works.
Posted by: T.Holly | July 06, 2007 at 12:53 PM