Movie City Indie: Edward Yang, 1947-2007 [<i>Updated</i>]

« [LOOK] Ending Zabriskie Point (1970, ***) | Main | Transformers (2007, ** 1/2) »

July 01, 2007

Edward Yang, 1947-2007 [Updated]

PERFECTION. IT'S TAKEN FOR GRANTED BECAUSE IT SEEMS SO SIMPLE, SO EASY, SO NATURAL. 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 (A One And A Two), a tender masterpiece of the ways of the human heart. Family as lovingly detailed soap opera; in just under three hours, the Taiwanese master made a multigenerational epic worthy of a novel. And, strangely befitting his background in computer science, he knew precisely where to place the camera for the most dynamic effect, in shots both wide and close. Edward Yang died Friday, survived by his wife Kaili Peng and 6-year-old son Sean. His wife's statement: "He was an exceptional human being, one of the greatest modern filmmakers and we hope his legacy will stay on." Jonathan Rosenbaum passes along this information from Berenice Reynaud: Yang was diagnosed with colon cancer in July 2000, two months after Yi-Yi won best director at Cannes. He did not disclose an operation he had at the time. After forming an animation company called "Kailodoscope" a year later (a name that had been used for Kaili Pang's contributions to the score of Yi-Yi), Yang began work on the animated Wind Chaser. In 2005, the couple moved to Los Angeles to seek more medical attention after the cancer spread to his liver and lungs; his condition worsened at Thanksgiving. He continued to make daily drawings for Wind Chaser. "No memorial has been planned yet — Ed’s death happened unexpectedly."

ADDENDUM: Larry Gross observes, “I think Yang was one of the world's most radically gifted film makers of the last two decades. In his own work and as a practical matter in his career, he lived out a link between Chinese culture and the sophisticated practices of Western and Japanese cinemas that was indispensable to where the three Chinese cinemas, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and Mainland have gone. There would absolutely be no Ang Lee, for instance, without Ed Yang. And Ed Yang played the role for Hou Hsiao Hsien of the brilliant student who partially educated the master about developments in the West. (In modern literary history, Ezra Pound played a roughly comparable role in the "education" of the already-established William Butler Yeats, helping him among other factors to go from being a very good poet to a great one.)

Frederic Jameson's long essay on The Terroriser (1986) is one place to start in the assessment of Edward Yang. But there was a bunch of movies that never got released here,Mah Jong, A Confucian Confusion, were sophisticated black comedies about sexual-and-social issues in contemporary Taiwan that presaged the masterwork that was Yi-Yi ... A Brighter Summer's Day was his foray into Hou's favored genre of dealing with criminal youth gangs,.. I have never seen that one but those who have claim it as one of the great masterpieces of recent decades. One hoped after the international profile that Yi-Yi achieved at the ‘99 Cannes Festival that Yang would explode on the world wide scene, but obviously now that's not going to happen. Interestingly, if I’m not mistaken, one of the central characters in his first movie (coincidentally Chris Doyle's first Chinese work as a DP) That Day at the Beach, succumbs to cancer at a terribly young age. A huge huge loss to world cinema.”

Here's the Criterion page for Yi-Yi; several lovely images at the jump, as well as the trailer and a seven-minute excerpt from the film. A 2000 paper, "Remapping Taiwan: Histories and Cultures in the Context of Globalization," by Yingjin Zhang, discusses Yang in the context of the Jameson piece Gross cites; you can download a PDF here.