In Yang's hands, restricted viewpoints showed much

Wu Nien-jen (left) and Jonathan Chang in ''Yi Yi.'' (Winstar Cinema via AP)

The restricted viewpoint: a carefully selected angle of vision, from which as much is hidden as revealed. Aching for a better look at what we are deliberately prevented from seeing, we must strive all the harder to complete the picture on our own. Contemporary international cinema, from Taiwan to Iran to Romania, has been defined by an insistence on limiting viewers' perspective. For Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, who died last year, the restricted viewpoint applies not only to the style of his films, but to his body of work as a whole. Of his brilliant corpus of films, only one - 2000's magisterial "Yi Yi" - is available on DVD.

A Harvard Film Archive retrospective of Yang's films, including excerpts from his unfinished last film, "The Wind," will go a long way toward filling in those gaps. Filling in the films themselves, however, will remain the work of those in attendance.

After "Yi Yi," which brought Yang more acclaim, and more American fans, than any of his previous films, the director retreated into seclusion in Los Angeles. (He'd been educated in the United States.) Rumors spread of an animated film he was planning to direct, but years passed with nothing tangible to show for it. When Yang died in June 2007 of colon cancer, it became clear that what had seemed an unusually long hiatus had actually been the director's pulling a curtain around his own private life - offering a restricted viewpoint on his own illness and eventual death, even to friends and intimates.

"He kept his illness very private, so I wasn't really aware of it until the end," says director Wu Nien-jen, who wrote Yang's "That Day, on the Beach," and starred in "Yi Yi." "The Wind" was left orphaned, an uncompleted work jealously guarded by Yang's widow and family.

The HFA series - which will include both of Wu's directorial features, "A Borrowed Life" and "Buddha Bless America," and a six-minute excerpt from "The Wind," as well as all of Yang's completed films - will go a long way toward deepening our understanding of Yang. Beginning as a low-key, incisive interpreter of Taiwan's lurching strides toward modernity in superb films like "Taipei Story" and "The Terrorizer," Yang stretched his canvases to epic size, seeking to dramatize his nation's struggles. Wrestling with Taiwan's unexpected prosperity, the entirety of his work could be seen as an attempted response to Confucius's question (quoted in 1994's "A Confucian Confusion"): "What happens after they are made rich?"

Almost never shown in the United States, 1991's "A Brighter Summer Day" may not even be the best of Yang's films, but it is among the foremost masterpieces of the 1990s - a dazzling meditation on Taiwan's past through the lens of 1960s high-school students and small-time gangsters, and their love of the rock 'n' roll music created in a far-away land. The Americanization of Taiwan becomes the explicit subject of Yang's last three films, with characters watching the Bulls play the Knicks and getting after-work drinks at a Taipei Friday's. "A Confucian Confusion," from 1994, is structured like a daytime soap, its roundelay of scheming lovers and loving schemers tempered by Yang's newfound taste for gentle comedy. The director's distaste for big business, and the loose ethics of the money culture, is palpable, but so is his sympathy for his confused characters. The murk grows even hazier in 1996's uneven "Mahjong," where small-time grifters and foreigners on the make bump up against the invisible outlines of a society restlessly transforming itself into something entirely new.

Both films feel like test runs for Yang's last and greatest film, "Yi Yi," which synthesizes the comedy and tragedy of his '90s work into a single unified whole. Wu was cast in "Yi Yi" despite his own concerns about inexperience in front of the camera. "Yang told me, 'I don't want you to act,' " Wu remembers. " 'I just want you to be yourself: your normal repressed and a little sad self.' "

Wu's pair of films, while not nearly as assured as Yang's, are similarly restrained. In 1994's "A Borrowed Life," based on the life of Wu's father, acts of violence and chaos, which are numerous, mostly take place offscreen, or just out of sight. Like the family watching their patriarch's lingering death through a heavy curtain, we are often prevented from drinking in too much horror. "I don't use that kind of perspective or angle," notes Wu, "because it would look too much like Hollywood movies, and become boring."

"A Borrowed Life" expands beyond autobiography to take in an entire lost epoch in Taiwan's past. "This story is not just about my father, but about a whole generation of Taiwanese who were like orphans of history," says Wu.

Nowhere is the dilemma of the restricted viewpoint in closer focus than the six minutes that is all that currently exists of "The Wind." It's less an excerpt than a trailer, or more specifically a teaser for potential investors. "The Wind" would have made an unusual diversion in Yang's career for a number of reasons, being an animated film, set in the distant past, concerned with martial arts. The drawing for "The Wind" is lush and detailed, its deep-focus precision calling up comparisons to 19th-century Japanese painter Hiroshige as much as animation master Hayao Miyazaki.

In the short, Yang clowns around in his office with Jackie Chan, and a rapid-fire gallery of animated characters pose for the cameras, before the screen once more fades to black.

"The Wind" would likely have marked the start of a new phase in Yang's career, one that returned to the sense of lived history in "A Brighter Summer Day" and sought to drag it into the cinematic mainstream. Death closed a door on Edward Yang, and we are left with little more than another restricted perspective, only able to imagine what took place behind closed doors, and what might have been.