By Brian Hu
APA remembers the late film director Edward Yang, whose eight works masterfully narrated Taiwan's international coming-of-age.
The tremendously gifted and tragically overlooked director Edward Yang passed away on June 29, 2007. Yang had been in increasingly poor health since being diagnosed with colon cancer seven years ago, and in the day after his death, it was disappointing to read fellow Taiwan new waver Chang Yi lament the fact that in his final days, few filmmaker friends from Taiwan came to visit Yang in his California home. In the final decade of his illustrious directing career, Yang's links with the Taiwanese film industry and market became more symbolic than anything else. Few young Taiwanese growing up in the 1990s had seen his films, even though his final epic, Yi Yi picked up the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 and won prestigious best picture honors from the National Society of Film Critics in the United States. When he died, only one of Yang's feature films was commercially available on DVD in the country where Yang called his home for several decades.
It was sobering then that after his death, heartfelt words of praise emerged from both sides of the Pacific. Taiwan's United Daily News provided extensive coverage of his death, with emotional words coming from luminaries like Sylvia Chang, Hsiao Yeh, and Peggy Chiao, all of whom were instrumental in the development of the 1980s' Taiwan New Cinema, of which Yang, along with fellow director Hou Hsiao-hsien, was at the forefront. At the same time, American critics like Manohla Dargis, Godfrey Cheshire, David Bordwell, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dave Kehr, and others paid their tributes, in print and online. The coverage was unprecedented for a relatively obscure filmmaker in the United States.
Aside from the universal praise of Yang's aesthetic contributions to world cinema, two common elements came out in these tributes. First is Yang's status as a "Taiwanese" filmmaker; naturally, the Taiwanese press (always hungry to claim its native sons' achievements abroad) emphasized this, but surprisingly, so did a newspaper in Shanghai, where Yang was born.
The second is the legend of how Yang was an emotionally-unfulfilled computer engineer in Seattle in the 1970s, when a chance screening of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God inspired him to quit his job and become a film director. For these writers, this moment becomes the "primal scene" from which Yang's enormous artistic sense sprouted and escaped the confinement of capitalism and filial piety to kick-start one of the world's most incredible art movements of the past 30 years.
A point many miss is that the "birth moment" of Yang's career occurred not in Taiwan, but after a decade of living in the United States, where he worked and went to school. Thus from the very start, Yang was not simply a "Taiwanese filmmaker," but a global Taiwanese. His films certainly reflect the cosmopolitanism of Taiwanese people, as well as the cosmopolitan role of Taiwan in a transnational world. Amongst his memorable characters are a mixed-race Chinese (the "White Chick" from The Terrorizers), Taiwanese Americans (Shirley in Yi Yi), expats living in Taipei (Mahjong), border-crossing Japanese businessmen (Ota in Yi Yi), and a crew of Taiwanese gangsters obsessed with samurai novels and Elvis Presley (A Brighter Summer Day).
As a Taiwanese American born in the U.S., I recognized the cosmopolitanism of Yang's Taipei, even if I didn't identify with the local specificities. Forever ingrained in my memory is the sequence in Yi Yi, where the same scene of couples crossing a street is played out in Taipei and Japan, a moment that manages to transcend time, space, generations, and nationality with such unexpected simplicity and naturalness that I can only call it a cinematic miracle. It was one of many moments in Yi Yi that made the film for me, my "primal" moment in figuring out who I was and what I wanted to do. And it was one of the many such moments in Yang's oeuvre that convinced me that Yang is the rare film genius who teaches us something about our lives and about cinema with each work.
One such moment: the aching conclusion of Taipei Story, Yang's first masterpiece. Another: the dreamily scattered narrative strands in The Terrorizers that in the final moments explode an arty urban melodrama-cum-thriller into a multi-faced prism of life in a city moving too fast for its own good. Or: the scene in Confucian Confusion when a young woman is brutally criticized as being too beautiful to be honest.
But these moments need not be tragic. There is, for instance, a rare moment of female sexual desire in Taiwanese cinema: a montage of a man's glisteningly muscles in Yang's debut, "Expectations," part of the omnibus film In Our Time. Or the sounds of 1950s rock 'n roll in A Brighter Summer Day, a moment exemplary of Yang's reoccurring celebration of musical expression. And of course, there is the final speech in Yi Yi, a moment with so much wisdom that I seem to learn something new every time I hear it. Unfortunately, that would be the final scene of Yang's filmography, though I can think of no more perfect, more inspiring ending.
The back cover of Criterion's DVD for Yi Yi calls Edward Yang "Asian cinema's best-kept secret." Like Ousmane Sembene, another relatively undiscovered film master who sadly passed away just weeks before, Yang had fans around the world; there weren't a whole lot of them (which isn't surprising, given how hard his films are to access), but his fans were always eager to speak his virtues. Yang was often called reclusive, difficult, and stubborn when it came to film distribution and DVD. While I've never met him, I'd venture to guess that, given the kind of characters he portrayed -- an outsider who brings music to alienated urbanites, an idiosyncratic novelist who dreams up manic philosophical narratives to share with his contemporaries, a young photographer who dares to show us what we can't otherwise see -- there'd be no more fitting tribute to Edward Yang than for the world (and certainly not just Taiwan) to simply see his films. A quote often attributed to Yang goes, "If you want to make films, don't watch films, watch life." But if you want to understand Taiwan's place in a globalized world or glimpse the state of contemporary cinema, his films aren't a bad place to start.
Edward Yang (1947-2007)
Published: Friday, July 13, 2007
