Edward Yang

 A Brighter Summer Day

Taipei Story

The complete Edward Yang retrospective at the Walter Reade Theatre, coupled with the week-long premiere run of A Brighter Summer Day at the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, gives me something to truly be thankful for this long Thanksgiving weekend. Last night Yang's widow, Kaili Peng, kicked off the series with a brief, moving introduction before a screening of Yang's third film, The Terrorizers (1986). It's a complex, tragic and masterfully composed meditation on narrative structure in the context of various troubled relationships. Volumes could be written on how Yang frames characters and events in relation to apartment walls and windows, mirrors, city streets and other elements of Taipei's (or in the case of Yi Yi, also Japan's) modern architecture. In the midst of this striking visual design, emotional and physical violence is constantly threatening to erupt.

Yang's Antonioniesque urban modernism is transposed to the 60s in his 4-hour masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day, which focuses on a group of alienated young people. As Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the film, "It has a novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu unmatched by any other ‘90s film...What Yang does with objects—a flashlight, a radio, a tape recorder, a Japanese sword—resonates more deeply than what most directors do with characters, because along with an uncommon understanding of and sympathy for teenagers Yang has an exquisite eye for the troubled universe they inhabit. This is a film about alienated identities in a country undergoing a profound existential crisis—a Rebel Without a Cause with much of the same nocturnal lyricism and cosmic despair."

A Confucian Confusion

Mahjong