An unexplored legacy of art and romance
"Do you know what I want to do when I grow up?" asks Yang-Yang, the precocious artist-in-training in Edward Yang's 2000 masterpiece, "Yi Yi." "I want to tell people things they don't know. Show them stuff they haven't seen. It'll be so much fun."
As nearly the last words spoken in what would be Yang's last film, spoken by the director's namesake and stand-in, the address stands as an adequate summation of the Taiwanese master's ambitions. Never a household name in the United States, with "Yi Yi" the only one of his films to receive theatrical distribution, Yang was nonetheless one of the great filmmakers of the last quarter-century. With his death, on June 29, from colon cancer, at 59, Yang's career came to an unexpectedly abrupt end .
Born in Shanghai in 1947, Yang fled to Taiwan with his family when he was 2, and the scarred body of his adopted country ("that unknown place," in the words of a character in "A Brighter Summer Day," 1991) became his canvas . Yang was a late bloomer , having come to the United States to study engineering before a chance encounter with Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (a film as unlike his own work as any in cinematic history) awoke his artistic desires. Moving back to Taiwan, Yang found work as a scriptwriter and for-hire director before eventually making his own movies.
Yang was an essential figure in the celebrated Taiwanese New Wave, a group of filmmakers that included Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang . Like his compatriots, Yang was a film-festival deity, celebrated in the pages of cine aste publications, but nearly unknown otherwise . The built-in art-house preference for European films doomed Yang's work to invisibility . "Yi Yi" won Yang the best director prize at Cannes in 2000, and a host of awards from US critics' groups, but failed to provide the momentum necessary to bring the director's other work to US audiences, and to date, none of his other films are available on DVD in the United States.
Unlike Hou and Tsai, Yang's films were deceptively simple -- doomed romances, social comedies, and left-field thrillers. Utilizing familiar genres, Yang sought to take snapshots of a glacier, capturing creeping social change onscreen. His early films -- "That Day, on the Beach" (1983), "Taipei Story" (1985), and "Terrorizer" (1986) -- depict Taiwan as a staging ground for a collective grappling with the demands of modernity, with the personal representing the political, and romance standing in for history as the locus of the struggle. Yang's instincts as a Balzacian realist, painting gigantic canvases of urban transformation, wrestled with his innate pessimism about the efficacy of change. "You want me to change? " the doomed love object of "A Brighter Summer Day" shouts at her not-quite boyfriend. "I'm like the world. The world will never change."
A four-hour epic, "A Brighter Summer Day" was the first of Yang's masterpieces, and one of the great films of the 1990s. It's a teenage romance that dramatizes the collision of traditional and modern via the arrival of American rock 'n' roll in 1960 Taiwan. It also functions as a prequel of sorts to Yang's earlier films, documenting the first rumbles of the earthquake of modernity.
Teenage aggression and romanticism collide repeatedly in "A Brighter Summer Day," with death and transcendence meted out in identical doses, and the struggles of hope-barren adolescents becoming representative of the growing pains of Taiwan itself. Music is the currency of the realm, its call to arms , and its death knell. Rock 'n' roll offers a glimpse of another world -- a world where muddled, swirling emotion can be translated into clean, crisp, perfect song. It also offers an image of the Taiwan to come, where American popular culture has succeeded Chinese and Japanese invaders as the colonizing force.
By the time of "Yi Yi," Western culture has thoroughly transformed Taiwan, rendering it unrecognizable. The rhythms of daily life, however, continue. The film's Jians, like the family of "A Brighter Summer Day," muddle through a tumultuous year marked by disorder and dysfunction, and capped by death. Lovers are split apart, families are separated, business partners become rivals, and Taipei becomes a hothouse, breeding a particularly contemporary brand of anomie. "Yi Yi," like all great works of art, contains multitudes; it is a three-hour film that magically appears to summarize what it feels like to be alive today, whether in Taipei or Toulouse or Toledo. Having begun with the peculiar particularities of "that unknown place," Yang ended as a global filmmaker unparalleled .
Art, in Yang's estimation, was no benign force, good for bland uplift, the cultural equivalent of a heaping plate of broccoli. His films are peppered with individuals who worship art for its life-giving qualities, but their embrace often comes at the expense of a certain knife's-edge sharpness. "Movies give us twice what we get from daily life," a teenage boy named Fatty confidently announces in "Yi Yi," arguing that the vicarious experience of watching movies blesses those of us lucky enough to live in their midst with three times as much life. In this argument, Fatty echoes Honey, a sailor in "A Brighter Summer Day," who while serving a stint in prison read "War and Peace" and discovered the pleasures of literature. "I found people in the past were just like us in our street gangs. . . . If I could write, I'd write a novel for people like me to read in the future."
Art changes Fatty and Honey -- renders them harder or softer, more romantic or more cynical. Yang's art-lovers are often punished for their love, becoming killers or corpses, or rendered bitter by art's empty promises. Yang's last film leaves us with Yang-Yang, who enjoys taking photographs of the backs of people's heads, telling them, "You can't see it, so I'm helping you." Yang, like his namesake, sought to show us all the backs of our heads -- our comfortingly familiar and yet invisible surroundings. Edward Yang is gone now, but his humane, empathetic, questing, historically astute films remain, as brilliant as ever -- and still in search of a proper American home. 