criterionforum.org

Well, I never ran across the laser disc versions -- did they really have burnt-in dual subbing (just like the VCDs)?

Yes, because they were transferred from a Hong Kong print, which generally had burnt-in dual subtitles until 1997 (it's possible that Hong Kong laserdiscs of films like this were also required to have dual-subtitles regardless of the print source, but I'm not sure about that).

zedz wrote:This reminds me that Honey's incongruous sailor suit is a stroke of genius, reinforcing the sense that he really does belong to a completely different world, like he's stepped out of a Jacques Demy film or something.

It certainly underlines his romantic fatalism. Honey strikes me as much more of a 'movie' character than the other people in the film but this works in the film's favour as it suggests his larger than life persona and the way the burden of expectations from others based on the reputation he has acquired seems to be weighing him down and pushing him towards an inevitable end.

Much as Shangdong has to die in the reprisal attack, and the way this all seems to be setting up the way Xiao Si'r's life is forever going to be defined by the actions he commits at the end of the film?

It makes me think that the film is a lot about the way possibilities (of a relationship, of academic and musical success, or success in work) are inexorably diminished by the weight of the expectations of the outside world, whether you are dealt the fate you 'deserve' or not.

Ming and Si'r's diffuse relationship at the infirmary:

One thing that this capture does not show is that the camera starts off on the characters then as they move off to the left of the screen, there is a particularly insistent pan right to the reflections in the door for their conversation, after which the camera pans back to the left to follow the pair walking down the stairs. I think although initially strange this beautifully shows the director's insistence on distancing the audience from the couple - the camera could just as easily have panned to the left with the characters to show their conversation classically, but it acts willfully in a contrary fashion as if to underscore the problems of connection between Si'r and Ming.



This capture, although it is quite difficult to see, is another example of what zedz mentioned earlier about Yang's technique of shooting reflections. zedz is right in saying that it is more muted in A Brighter Summer Day than in a film like Yi Yi, but in the above capture while the two men talk in a darkened room the women are reflected in the door clearing the table from the party.

zedz wrote:
In the long version, this shot plays out before the (white on black) credits roll.

While I think the longer version will be obviously the one to watch first, I do sort of like the way that the mother's silent grief plays out to the soundtrack of the radio announcing the names of the new school graduates for that year as well as the credits rolling unperturbed over the powerful moment. It seems to reinforce the 'uncaring world carries on as individuals suffer' sense of brutal cutting short of lives and possibilities, adding extra poignancy to that final shot as even the film seems to be interrupting the mother's grief with a written list of names to counterpoint the spoken one.

I'll be very interested to see whether the tone of the ending is differently affected when that final shot is allowed to play without the credits intruding.

zedz wrote:This actually prompts me to think a little more about A Brighter Summer Day’s naming practice. The majority of characters in that film are known only by nicknames, and in a couple of places we learn that Xiao Si’r’s real name is Zhang Zhen (eerily close to the name of the actor portraying him). So can anybody shed some light on what Xiao Si’r means, or what its status is? Even though his brother is called Lao Er by everybody, including family, in the early scene at Shandong’s we learn that ‘Lao Er’ is, apparently, slang for ‘Prick’. So is this an unfortunate nickname or an unfortunate coincidence? Is there some kind of subtle intonation gag that we’re missing here?

Not sure about the Si'r part but here are some definitions for the other parts: from wikipedia (the forms of address section) Xiao means young and Lao old, and the slang of Lao Er from Urban Dictionary, which also helps to place S'ir's older brother as the second oldest child of the family after the eldest sister.

MAHJONG

Or - Edward Yang: Advanced Studies.

Yang's vicious satire of modern Taiwan's criminal underworld and business overworld (can you spot the difference?) is one of his most ambitious and audacious films, but it's also one of his most flawed. It's flawed in a very specific way, however, so once you can get over that particular bump it's much easier to appreciate its real achievement. Hence I'll dispense with the bad news first.

The bad news is called Nick Erickson. He's the last-minute replacement actor (for David Thewlis) who plays the key role of the English architect Markus and he's awful. If imdb is to be believed, this was his first film in an apparently undistinguished career, so his casting smacks of eleventh-hour desperation. The character is pompous and vain, but the performance he gives adds stilted and unconvincing to the mix. Jonathan Rosenbaum offers a spirited and ingenious defence of the awkwardness (on the grounds that it offers us a view of how non-Asians are viewed in Asia that complements the American depictions of Asians to which we have become inured), but I don't buy it. The actress playing Ginger, the film's American character, is also somewhat problematic, but she's nowhere near as bad and her role is nowhere near as big. Erickson's performance does mean that the film, which is all about smooth gear changes from comedy to tragedy to irony and back, grinds and clunks when he's on screen, and you really need to focus past him to get the most out of the film.

In part, this flaw is one of the hazards of undertaking a multi-lingual, multi-character, densely plotted, mood-shifting satire. American, English and French characters mingle with Chinese folk embodying several shades of westernization. At least on the French front Yang lucked out with Virginie Ledoyen, fresh from his pal Olivier Assayas' L'Eau froide and superb as the heart of the film. Ko Yue-lin (Airplane in A Brighter Summer Day and occasional actor for Hou) is a terrific match as Luen-Luen, and Chang Chen is also brought back from A Brighter Summer Day. (You can almost imagine Yang's disbelief that nobody else picked up on the actor after that phenomenal performance and his desire to give his career a further jumpstart. It seemed to work: his next two films were Happy Together and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) The multi-cultural nature of the cast is thematically and dramatically crucial. A key scene hinges on French Marthe and Chinese Luen-Luen being able to communicate in English in the presence of a monolingual Chinese thug, for instance.

The density of the plotting and the thematic depth of the film is as impressive as ever (the busy, fluid opening scene at the Hard Rock Cafe, which introduces almost every major character and sets half a dozen plot threads in motion over the course of about ten minutes is dazzling), but what really astounds me about this film are its emotional moodswings. It takes the experimental comedy of A Confucian Confusion into even more fraught and contradictory areas. The pace and tone of the film is breezy even when the subject matter is at its most bitter or bleak. Yang's films had always been heroically unsentimental, but Mahjong is almost nihilistic. Its view of human nature is so dim, or grim, that even the film's most sympathetic character, Ledoyen's vulnerable Marthe, has ignoble motives. It's a film with a personality disorder and identity issues, but then, it's a film about a society with a personality disorder and identity issues.

Yang's diabolical mixing and switching of registers delivers some of the film's most powerful moments. Early in the film, Hong Kong's cynical seduction of Alison (latest, strategic girlfriend of Markus) starts as a set-up for slightly risque comedy and swiftly degenerates into horror and threat (as it's revealed that she's expected to be 'passed around' the other members of his gang), even though the delivery and pacing of the scene retains its increasingly queasy Lubitschian swing. There's an immediate repercussion for the audience because Marthe, our nearest thing to a surrogate, seems to be next in line (and, looking deeper into the narrative, there's an odd re-repercussion when you realise just how natural Red Fish's assumptions about Marthe are and how innocently she herself has engendered them - the actions of Yang's characters are as meticulously motivated as ever). Near the end of the film, this troubling early scene gets an unexpected replay when Hong Kong finds himself on the receiving end of identical treatment, at the hands of Angela (who, to add to the hall-of-mirrors effect, is very much a grown-up version of Alison), who has invited two friends around to 'join in the fun'.

So far, so tidy. But it's fascinating that, with an audience, the first scene plays out as nauseatingly predatory and the second as laugh-out-loud farce. Why does a simple gender reversal turn potential gang rape from ghastly horror to ribald jape? There is the added structural irony at play, of course, but there's more to it than that, and Yang's similar tone and pace in both scenes makes the gulf between the two scenes all the more pointed. Indeed, the same applies to their similarities, in the way the paired scenes point to the situational power dynamics (a matrix of gender / wealth / class / number / location) that underpin modern society. Then he performs a masterful bait and switch in that second scene by having Hong Kong break down completely, the camera observing his emotional collapse at length in long shot. It's a left turn, like so many in the film, that instantly changes the mood and casts a scene into a new light. (In almost every case, these are turns for the worse.) In Mahjong, Yang's established technique of viewing events and characters from multiple perpectives is at its most compressed and extreme, so we often get a kind of cubist approach where an action or situation becomes something else before our eyes, or uneasily exists as two things simultaneously.

The narrative template follows on from the headlong comedy of A Confucian Confusion, but it's punctuated by vertiginous plunges into despair and horror. One of the main storylines involves young hood Red Fish's elaborate and ridiculous revenge on Angela, whom he blames for seducing and abandoning his father many years ago. His plan basically amounts to fucking with her feng shui, through the persuasions of bogus mystic Little Buddha (fellow hood Toothpaste). The punchline to this particular storyline is a comic one:

Spoiler

This is not the same Angela he thinks it is. Yang, typically, has been telling us this for some time if we'd only stop and listen to Mr Chiu.

Nevertheless, that punchline precipitates the film's descent into irrevocable horror. It's one of the most powerful scenes Yang ever shot, one which Rosenbaum singled out for special comment: "Mahjong offers a demonic tour of modern life that culminates in one of the most shocking, dramatically powerful murders I've ever witnessed in a film. This scene of forces spinning out of control virtually defines Yang's dark sense of the present historical moment. . " And again, it's a case of Yang executing a hairpin moodswing on a dime. For all of the gangster bluster of the previous action (including kidnappings at gunpoint), things have tended to have a positive, even comic, resolution, as when Marthe and Luen-Luen get the better of their particularly dumb thug, and the only permanent damage done has been dignified and self-inflicted. For all the film's bitterness and cynicism, you never expect it to get quite this dark.

Maybe even more extraordinary is how Yang pulls us back from the brink at the end. Unfortunately, it entails another big scene from Erickson, who has to contend with a major speech illuminating the film's themes of mutual exploitation, cultural clash and the contradictions of tradition and modernity. The scene also involves more Yangian nameplay. At the beginning of the film, Red Fish and Luen-Luen had reschristened Marthe "Matra", after the foreign company bungling the development of Taipei's subway. This joke works on several levels: it's thematically relevant, linking Marthe's visit to post-colonial economic imperialism on a grand scale; it's a marker of cultural and linguistic difference and thus plausibly motivated; and it's psychologically revealing, as the boys, at this point, really don't care about Marthe as an individual. In the closing scenes, Marthe reveals her new name to an amused Markus, who has just professed his love for her (a point where Erickson's general lack of conviction as a performer somewhat undercuts the specific lack of conviction required of the line - or maybe it serves as a useful mask for it). As he gets carried away with his rhetoric and himself, looking forward to their profitable future of exploitation together, he starts to unconsciously address Marthe as "Matra", bringing the name's multiple ironies and significances nicely full circle, and letting Marthe knows exactly where he stands. From here it's but a short couple of steps in the night to the tentatively optimistic ending that provides this rollercoaster film's final, fitting swerve.

YI YI

Yi Yi, Edward Yang's best known and final movie, is the one about which the most has been written and about which I probably have the least to say, if only because it's better to see it for yourself and, unlike all his other films, it's actually available.

It's also hard to explain just what's so magnificent about the film if people can't see it for themselves. Yang, as I've said before, doesn't hit you over the head with his formal and emotional intelligence: his films are much more about the viewer working on and extracting the value from the film, not about sitting back and being wowed by fireworks.

In terms of narrative, this is Yang's least complicated film since Taipei Story (the feature with which it probably has the most in common). Its domestic scope is clear and immediately communicated to the viewer, its development linear and relatively classical. But a lack of complication is not the same thing as a lack of complexity, and this film continually surprises me, every time I come back to it, with how much it contains, and how many different takes on the material I can come away with. It's a film that has a very dynamic relationship with my own life experience: the more I've been through, the more I can recognise and appreciate in the film.

One of the factors in the film's broad-ranging evocativeness is its internal range. Even though the film focusses on a single family in a specific time and place, most of its concerns (family, mortality, love, death, school, work, friendship, marriage, spirituality, communication) are universal. All of those are fully developed and orchestrated themes, not just glancing tangents, and there are plenty of other carefully developed themes to the film, including culturally specific ones. There's also a similar range of tones within the film. After the tense experimental comedies of the nineties, Yang shows just how effortlessly he can blend humour into his drama here. Yi Yi always surprises me by just how funny it is, and like Yang's use of comedy elsewhere it comes in unexpected places, in unexpected forms and strikes different viewers in different ways (so it's ideal to see this with a decent-sized audience).

One of Yang's specific strategies for encapsulating a lifetime of experience into the film is what I think of is the 'seven ages of man' approach. Refracted through the cast of characters is a whole lifetime of experience: childbirth; the awakening of consciousness (somewhat buried, but a common thread to Yang-Yang's explorations); school; bullying; a child's relationship with parents; first awareness of the opposite sex; adolescent friendship; first love; first relationship; the break-up of a serious relationship (just look at how elegantly those last few ideas concerning romance are shared around and multifariously explored through nine different characters); employment; marriage; pregnancy; parenthood; adult friendship; religion; infidelity; mid-life crisis (romantic, spiritual and professional); marital breakdown; relationship with aging parents; disappointment in adult children; dealing with the death of parents; illness; death. And there's even a flutter from behind that final curtain.

These thematic threads, and the connections between them, are presented with great subtlety, rarely troubling the surface of what might appear to be a simple family chronicle, and the narrative cause-and-effect that delivers them is as intelligently and meticulously crafted as you'd expect of Yang at his best.

Yi Yi brilliantly illuminates the interpersonal equivalent of chaos theory. Not only are tiny, casual acts shown to have potentially enormous consequences - tracing the patterns of cause and effect that run deep below the film's restrained surface is one of its delights (for starters, take a look at the various potential 'culprits' for the grandmother's collapse at the start of the film) - but the film is highly sensitive to symmetries of scale, the familial sphere reproducing in miniature the issues and emotions that shape Taiwanese and international society. As in all of Yang's best work, the universality of the issues explored is grounded in an exquisite specificity of character and context. Although formally the directors are wildly different, in this film Yang proves himself a spiritual brother to another great chronicler of families, Yasujiro Ozu.

The storylines involving each family member all radiate from the collapse, early in the film, of the grandmother. This crisis precipitates a radical fragmenting of their nuclear family. The mother, Min-Min, leaves home to seek consolation with her spiritual master; the father, N.J., is distracted by disappointments at work and the return of his old flame Sherry; the daughter, Ting-Ting, strives to reconcile friendship and infatuation; and young Yang-Yang embarks on an unexpected, quasi-metaphysical artistic project (which is so striking and apposite that I tend to forget it occurs only very late in the film as a semi-comic throwaway). The grandmother continues to haunt the film and the family, providing the focal point they still have in common: lying in a coma, she's been moved back into the family apartment and the doctors have encouraged the family to carry on one-sided conversations with her. It's sort of an anti-Teorema, in which it's not a stranger aggressively acting on the family members that effects a disastrous change, but a family member become strange, become a sort of negative presence, perhaps, that effects a more complex and ambiguous change in the family.

The film builds up an amazing emotional power while never raising its voice, and the closing scenes of resignation and resilience precipitate a complex catharsis few works of art ever achieve. For me, it's the best film of the century to date, and I look forward to growing old with it.

zedz on Mahjong wrote:The scene also involves more Yangian nameplay. At the beginning of the film, Red Fish and Luen-Luen had reschristened Marthe "Matra", after the foreign company bungling the development of Taipei's subway. This joke works on several levels: it's thematically relevant, linking Marthe's visit to post-colonial economic imperialism on a grand scale; it's a marker of cultural and linguistic difference and thus plausibly motivated; and it's psychologically revealing, as the boys, at this point, really don't care about Marthe as an individual.

Interestingly Matra also gets namechecked during Yi Yi as well. Is that meant as a connection back to Mahjong or just intended as another mention of an important news story in the later film?

zedz wrote:One of Yang's specific strategies for encapsulating a lifetime of experience into the film is what I think of is the "seven ages of man" approach. Refracted through the cast of characters is a whole lifetime of experience: childbirth; the awakening of consciousness (somewhat buried, but a common thread to Yang-Yang's explorations); school; bullying; a child's relationship with parents; first awareness of the opposite sex; adolescent friendship; first love; first relationship; the break-up of a serious relationship (just look at how elegantly those last few ideas concerning romance are shared around and multifariously explored through nine different characters); employment; marriage; pregnancy; parenthood; adult friendship; religion; infidelity; mid-life crisis (romantic, spiritual and professional); marital breakdown; relationship with aging parents; disappointment in adult children; dealing with the death of parents; illness; death. And there's even a flutter from behind that final curtain.

It is impossible to adequately follow your wonderful comments on Yi Yi and the rest of Edward Yang's films - I just hope this inspires some distributor to release more of his work - but I'd like to add some notes on his final film. I remember on first watching Yi Yi feeling a little let down by the seemingly conventional material of family conflicts and worried that the film had taken the route of easy heartstring tugging with the final scene of Yang Yang finally speaking to his now dead grandmother at her funeral in front of the major players in the saga. On watching it again (and again - and again!) though I saw the structure described above - that instead of specific plots following characters who grow and develop individually and have their own stand alone narrative arcs within a larger structure (such as in Altman), Yang's film takes individual elements of a group of characters that gain resonance through the way the audience relates them to each other. The characters don't necessarily go through revelatory journeys that are important in themselves but instead are illustrating various elements of life experience. The characters do have 'journeys' in Yi Yi but that is less important to the themes of the film than the elements they represent that only the structure of the film brings together into a kind of 'statement' on life, rather than making the characters themselves aware of it and pontificating about it. The nearest the film comes is Yang Yang's final speech which itself is less a summing up of the action than a simple wish to know the unknowable before his time.

It is quite a beautiful technique, deceptively simplistic in structure, that suggests that we are all in possession of parts of the 'bigger picture' of life but that we are in flux, losing the innocence of a child that can quickly cut to the heart of a situation but gaining the self awareness and knowledge (and sometimes integrity) of an adult in our dealings with others, until we move beyond the impulse to fight for status and place blame on others but then cannot communicate effectively with those we've left behind.

It seems that the hardest part comes in the transitions from one state to another (child to adolescent, adolescent to adult, adult to elderly, elderly to the beyond and the various intermediary changes of job, marriage, business trips and so on), with some people becoming casualties along the way in the constant move forward as transition becomes personally impossible to achieve smoothly, and it is the way people respond to difficulties that seems to truly define them as a person, whether it is taking on guilt for not taking out the rubbish, to abandoning your family due to a spiritual crisis (I love the way that the mother's 'journey' is mostly shown in the bookending speeches before she leaves and after she returns that compares to the way we follow NJ all the way to Japan for his crisis/opportunity to relive the past), to simply not being able to act with a callous, business-like manner in your job.

I particularly like the sequence where N.J. and Sherry's reliving of their younger relationship in Japan is briefly equated through imagery with Ting-Ting and Fatty's courtship. It felt strongly reminiscent of Three Colours: Red, in which the older man and younger man are suggested to be the same soul co-existing at the same point in time - not exactly to suggest that they literally are the same people in some sort of sci-fi time-space paradox but perhaps to show the universality of certain modes of behaviour, of children following in the footsteps of their parents, of the way that opportunities for love re-present themselves constantly with the possibility for different outcomes. It suggests that instead of thinking about parallel universes where all the alternate consequences of our actions are played out we actually live all the time in a world where every possible variation of a human life and relationship can occur. Some people may die as children in a swimming pool accident, some may live to become grandmothers and any span of life and type of relationship is possible in between for us to choose from - some may even decide, for whatever reason, that they feel strongly enough to kill another.

colinr0380 wrote:I particularly like the sequence where N.J. and Sherry’s reliving of their younger relationship in Japan is briefly equated through imagery with Ting-Ting and Fatty’s courtship. It felt strongly reminiscent of Three Colours: Red, in which the older man and younger man are suggested to be the same soul co-existing at the same point in time – not exactly to suggest that they literally are the same people in some sort of sci-fi time-space paradox but perhaps to show the universality of certain modes of behaviour, of children following in the footsteps of their parents, of the way that opportunities for love re-present themselves constantly with the possibility for different outcomes.

I think that's one of the key moments in the film, and it's where Yang's overall strategy is most clear, particularly when the narration from one scene overlaps the other. It's possible for viewers to perform similar 'overlapping' activities with so much of the film's content, fitting the experiences of one set of characters onto those of another set to exponentially increase resonance and understanding. Yang provides further cues by overlapping sound and images elsewhere, often very subtly (as when the heated row in one apartment is heard over images of more subdued dysfunction in another; or when nighttime reflections superimpose the macro- world on the micro- one). And Yang-Yang's artistic projects provide further useful metaphors. The back-of-the-heads one speaks to the idea of showing us ourselves from a new, counter-intuitive perspective, but the other one is also beautifully conceived and presented, with Yang-Yang, trying to capture the almost invisible, himself becomes simultaneously absent yet present, the camera tracking through 'empty' space while we can still hear the sound and see the reflected flash of his camera.

It suggests that instead of thinking about parallel universes where all the alternate consequences of our actions are played out we actually live all the time in a world where every possible variation of a human life and relationship can occur. Some people may die as children in a swimming pool accident, some may live to become grandmothers and any span of life and type of relationship is possible in between for us to choose from – some may even decide, for whatever reason, that they feel strongly enough to kill another.

I have a similar experience with the film. I don't know if this was a conscious expectation of Yang's, or if it's simply the (rare) side-effect of presenting such detailed and well-rounded characters and narratives: you really can imagine them taking entirely different yet equally valid directions and the film unfolding with equivalent richness in a different way. For all its inexorability, I get the same sense from A Brighter Summer Day: any number of small actions could have taken the story in a different direction.

In Yi Yi the coexistence of all these multiple possibilities is one of the things that gives the film its emotional and tonal richness. That swimming pool incident is a great example: what looks to be a tragedy (and a plausible, dramatically satisfying one, given Yang-Yang's experimentation with water) resolves itself into a neat, Keatonian sight gag, which in turn strikes one as even more appropriate and 'true'.

Seriously, when is Yang going to be properly represented on DVD?

chaddoli wrote:Seriously, when is Yang going to be properly represented on DVD?

I have been asking myself this question for a long, long time, and it seems to me that unless one of the majors steps up to the plate, his pre-Yi Yi films are just going to go unreleased on DVD. Most of the films need new subtitles and a decent amount of restoration work, at least based on the 35mm prints I saw at a retrospective earlier this year, so I think it's just a matter of someone getting the balls to release them (as the rights to the films seem to be pretty wide-open, though that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be easy to work out). One would think that Yi Yi's success and Yang's way-too-soon death would spur someone to release his earlier work, but until I hear something definitive, I'm (sadly) not holding my breath.

I was wondering whether Ota in Yi Yi would bear comparison to Honey from A Brighter Summer Day. Both seem to exist outside of the frame of the film and are characters that the film almost looks up to in their worldly wise/weary personas, yet both end up either destroyed or manipulated and abandoned by some of the secondary characters in the film as if to act as both a shining example of a truly decent person and a cautionary tale about how you'll be treated if you act as such to our lead characters.

Does anyone know why A Brighter Summer Day was not accepted at Cannes and NYFF? Even though it doesn't really matter, I'm a bit baffled by this, seeing how I think there's no way around the film being a total masterpiece.

PimpPanda wrote:Does anyone know why A Brighter Summer Day was not accepted at Cannes and NYFF? Even though it doesn't really matter, I'm a bit baffled by this, seeing how I think there's no way around the film being a total masterpiece.

If this is the case, rank stupidity seems to be the only explanation. To be extremely, even unreasonably, charitable, it might be that - for Cannes at least - the selectors had to make their decision without the opportunity to see the film.

colinr0380 wrote:I was wondering whether Ota in Yi Yi would bear comparison to Honey from A Brighter Summer Day. Both seem to exist outside of the frame of the film and are characters that the film almost looks up to in their worldly wise/weary personas, yet both end up either destroyed or manipulated and abandoned by some of the secondary characters in the film as if to act as both a shining example of a truly decent person and a cautionary tale about how you'll be treated if you act as such to our lead characters.

I think both characters share that sense of being external and romanticised, and it's interesting that one of the characteristics of being an 'outsider' in both films seems to be having a moral code. I'm a little more optimistic about Ota's fate. He seems to be philosophical enough to rebound from (yet another) disappointment. In some scenes (as when he's reassuring NJ that he knows he's a 'good man') he even seems to expect it. This also gives me a chance to raise a glass to Ogata's fabulous performance, so warm and intelligent, and so different from his equally impressive turns in Tony Takitani and The Sun.

The Harvard Film Archive is hosting a retrospective of Yang's films that will include an excerpt from the unfinished, The Wind.

LACMA in Los Angeles will also show some Oct. 4, 11, 18, 25
(Scroll down past the Rohmer and Happy Go Lucky.)

Four Masterpieces by Edward Yang

October 4 - October 25

The film world lost writer/director Edward Yang far too soon. He passed away at the age of fifty-nine in 2007, seven years after receiving his first-ever full U.S. release for what has tragically become his final film: the roundly praised and awarded Yi Yi. A leading member of the Taiwanese New Wave alongside Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Yang set his seven features amid the bustle of Taipei's ever-changing landscapes, both physical and psychological. The doubt evident in Yang's statement that "Every citizen in Taiwan has to face a question: what are we going to do in the future-reunification or independence?" reverberates throughout his human-scale epics.

Presented with support from the Taipei Economic & Cultural Office in Los Angeles.
October 4 7:30 PM That Day, On the Beach (Haitan De Yitian)
October 11 7:30 PM Taipei Story (Qingmei Zhuma)
October 18 7:30 PM A Brighter Summer Day (Gulingjie Shaonian Sharen Shijian)
October 25 7:30 PM Yi Yi

Woo hoo! "Restaurados y recuperados" can't be a bad thing.

Any word on New York ever getting the full retrospective that Toronto and Boston got?

Tom Amolad wrote:Woo hoo! "Restaurados y recuperados" can't be a bad thing.

This is utterly fantastic news - thanks for digging it up. I'm almost as excited by the prospect that the even more underappreciated Al-momia (Night of Counting the Years) might finally get some attention.

That is truly great news about A Brighter Summer Day.

That article seems fairly straightforward (just listing the familiar names of films that will be showing) but if anyone needs help translating part of it, let me know.

Great news re: A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY. Will it make a R1 DVD release any easier?

Stefan Andersson wrote:Great news re: A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY. Will it make a R1 DVD release any easier?

It'll make any DVD release easier. One of the big problems with this film was the lack of materials. Even the best print available for screening was an original one which had already done the rounds. I'm sure there's already a DVD release or several lined up as part of the whole restoration project.

OK, time to agitate for The Terrorizer and Taipei Story.

Wow, this really, really makes my day!

Is A Brighter Summer Day being restroed or only playing as part of the Cannes Classics? In the Cannes thread, it's not listed under "New Prints" and doesn't appear to be one of the restored films in the linked article either, but I'm only guessing on the Spanish. Would someone who is fluent be so kind as to translate? SWO?

The relevant portion from the article:

Además, la Fundación World Cinema, impulsada por Scorsese en 2007 para ayudar a los países en desarrollo para proteger su patrimonio cinematográfico, presentará tres películas restauradas.

In addition, the World Cinema Foundation, launched by Scorsese in 2007 to help developing countries protect their cinematic heritage, will present three restored films.

(I'll add that calling Taiwan a "developing country" is a real stretch in this day and age, but I won't complain if they bend the rules now and again)

I think you're right to ask, though, since the Cannes Classics webpage doesn't specifically describe the WCF presentations as "restored," unlike Senso and some of the other offerings. But everything else the WCF has presented at Cannes was either restored or a restoration-in-progress, so hopefully this year will be no different.

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:(I'll add that calling Taiwan a "developing country" is a real stretch in this day and age, but I won't complain if they bend the rules now and again)

I think it is a comment that is far off, Taiwan is still under Chinese influence, and their newly elected president doesn't seem interested in seeking independence.

I meant the "developing" part, not the "country" part -- Taiwan is a developed economy by just about any rubric you care to apply. (So is South Korea, which didn't stop the WCF from restoring The Housemaid.) Again it doesn't bother me if it means saving important films from a bad fate, regardless of where they come from. Unfortunately, being a developed economy doesn't entail any great commitment to "cinematic heritage," and much of Yang's filmography clearly needs rescuing.

Mulvaney confirmed (via email to board member -- see "forthcoming" thread) that Brighter Summer Day is indeed coming as a Criterion title.

Rejoice!

My day is made.