Goodbye Edward

Wrenching violence follows in the clip after this still from "A Brighter Summer Day," but before writing off the ouvre of the recently deceased Edward Yang, one might see the alarming expressions on the young characters' faces: the desperate, pained incomprehension of the girl, who cannot quite believe that the shy young boy has produced this knife, and the pent-up cold fury of the boy, battling conflicted feelings that in another second will pour out bereft of self-control. Next, you should consider that these are not professional actors (though the boy, Chang Chen, would later become an internationally succesful actor in such films as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Happy Together"), that they have no real performance experience, and that Edward Yang somehow managed to bring about these complicated expressions and the emotions behind them through...gentle coaxing? Analytical perfectionism? Can we even know?


"Yi Yi" was the kind of "specialty" art film that most of my friends saw in one way or another, but very few of the people I have met outside of Asian film fan circles talk about it with any joy. I've shown the picture to people on my little 27" TV screen and they have been totally nonplussed. Others have fallen asleep before Issei Ogata even delivers his "first time" speech. Even some I know who have seen the films of Edward Yang contemporaries like Hou Hsiao Hsien seem to think Yang's film (hardly anybody seems to see more than "Yi Yi"--understandable, given the lack of availability of course). I've dutifully written letters to Criterion annually asking that "A Brighter Summer Day" be given serious DVD attention. No response. Nothing.




Most viewers I know who have seen this bright, humorous film seem to see it as a tragedy with a special sense of bleakness about it. People tend to respond negatively to the quiet pace of the film, the warm, forgiving way it treats NJ's wildly irresponsible brother-in-law (most of these critics don't reflect on the equally unsympathetic characters--Fatty, Da-Wei, Yun-Yun and her mother--whom Yang deals with far more harshly than Ah-Di), and the sadness that seizes them should they make it to the end of the 3-hour picture. And maybe my special realization as I write this might be that even though the late, great Robert Altman is on his way to being sanctified as we speak, the world at large might not be ready for Edward Yang.

He was the kind of filmmaker whose movie appears to be springing directly out of real life, and if you have ever written for screen with grand dreams and watched in agony as your dreams grossly devour themselves, then you probably know the challenge of trying to achieve anything close to the level of Yang's craft. Yang worked in a country with very little variety of drama education, where it was rare to find anyone willing to act, let alone able, and yet his films have a subtlety and a naturalism about them that belies their careful construction. Yang dealt with subject matter difficult to express in film. It is hard to capture the sense of random...luck?...that we feel when NJ meets Sherri at the wedding in "Yi Yi." It feels real, the kind of chance encounter many of us have had. Or have we only dreamed of having it, longed for a chance to right the wrongs in one's past, and recapture the love one might secretly feel was one's greatest? The meeting teeters on the edge of authorial, editorial presence. It is your meeting with your high school sweetheart, but nearly as close to Pip's seeing Estella in "Great Expectations." Yang waves away the feeling of any planning as Da Wei wonders quite surprisingly, "what did I come down her for?" Instantly the feeling of absolute naturalism is restored.

Several other times throughout "Yi Yi" we see this slight yet very conscious breaking of the 4th wall. In the multimedia classroom, when Yang Yang sees the girl standing in front of the electrical storm, we hear a very Altman-like narration of the attraction of bodies in nature. The most audacious Yang "editorial" occurs in the depiction of the video-game slaughter near the end of the film. The connection between the video games NJ's company might end up producing and the various characters real lives is manifest, and we see the abiding theme in Yang's work rear its head. For Yang was one of the great obsessive filmmakers and his most continuous interest is in how modern people float in the changing currents of their times. The boy in "A Brighter Summer Day" feels the deep sadness and confusion of his parents and their rootlessness becomes his desperation. He stumbles blindly towards a dead end. The nearly listless creatures of "A Confucian Confusion" drift through their lives oblivious to the way they have hermetically sealed themselves away in their own distractions. And in "Yi Yi," now Yang's final glory, we see people struggle to transform and renew themselves as they combat the very speed and isolation of the information age.

Yang delves into these dark waters with a gentleness that few obsessives can muster. If his film carries us along into tragedy, then it is a little careless not to notice that Yang generally carries us away from tragedy as well; his characters are mostly survivors, even if we leave them at a moment of profound loss. "Yi Yi" ends with a funeral, but we see Ah-Di wailing with characteristic flamboyance, and we reflect that he will be trundling on, irrepresably bounding ahead, and then we witness in the intimacy of that small immediate family that Yang Yang, reticent and perturbed by the world around him, has fashioned a beautiful eulogy for his grandmother. How can we step by, ignoring this deft roundabout, once we remember that Yang Yang couldn't find meaning in speaking to his grandmother before, when she was in a coma? If we step back and view the filmmaker's supreme, gentle design for his film, we have witnessed the transformation of a young boy from sensory observer of a factual world to spiritual observer of a deeper net of human emotion, need, and compassion? What Edward Yang leaves us with is a dazed people, stunned by the feedback of their own choices; lost, but moving forward, and moving on.

The Start of Something New!

Where to begin...

My name is Alan Lawrence. I'm a 29-year-old teacher and filmmaker. I am, to a very small degree, a published author, and a common and not necessarily very well-loved haunt of a number of online film and DVD blogs and message-boards.

At the advice of my friend Angie I'm going to start a blog posting my thoughts on the movies, mostly, and, perhaps as a secondary feature, life as I see it. Life, as I see it, is intertwined with my movie experience. I love teaching, but my first and most demanding love is the movies. I'm not always sure the reason the movies matter to me, so perhaps this blog will be a way in which I continue to discover new ways in which the movies inform and reflect life around us.

In the late, great Edward Yang's 2000 movie, "Yi Yi," the character "Fatty" suggests a piece of his grandfather's wisdom that offers perhaps an fresh perspective on the movies in general. The grandfather's theory is that since the advent of movies, we live twice as much as before, because the experiences we encounter vicariously on screen add to our daily intake of experience that continually informs our lives. A description of the Grotowskian acting style I once heard elucidated this point further. "None of us have ever killed anyone," the speaker said somewhat presumptuously; "but we all know what it's like when someone is killed because we've all seen it in the theater and on film." It strikes me that there is a lot of sense in this view of drama in general.

Is that suggestion too much? Perhaps readers out there who have experienced strong emotions via death of a loved one, etc., might be offended. To say that the movies we create can even come close to approximating the feelings of longing, loss, bereavement, suffering that we go through in our lives might be pretentious in the extreme. And certainly the older people that I know turn away from fiction as being useful or worthwhile for them.

Still, I think about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, still writing magical realism at 80, and Michaelangelo Antonioni soldiering away at "The Delicate Thread of Things." 82-year-old Seijun Suzuki at work on the musical "Princess Raccoon"--his best-loved film? Shuji Terayama at death's door, refusing to be hospitalized until finishing "Farewell to the Ark." Tatsumi Kumashiro, directing his final film in an iron lung. These are people who keep exploring, even as they advance on old age and infirmity. How relevant is fiction? Depends on what you use it for.

I use film to explore. I don't work in the film industry, precisely because the thing I want most out of film is to explore the depths of my imagination. I want authorship, because it gives me a control of process and ideas that allows me to explore that very way. Because I won't concede authorship (though I always share it with a co-director--probably more on that later), I look to my other interests and talents to find a way to make a living, and I make films that are meaningful and often relevatory to me. That, and I watch a huge volume of movies.

When I was about 20 my rental account at Blockbuster was transferred to a different video store. I wanted to rent a couple of movies--mostly Kinji Fukasaku's "Black Lizard"--which were only present at the San Marino location, and this made the transfer of my account necessary. The girl at the register did a double-take when the account came over the wire.

"Ohmigod," she said. "You've rented over 1200 movies with us!" I recall she had a very valley-girl, declamatory way of speaking.

A few months later, that figure still alive in my head, I began adding up the movie tickets I had saved in a coffee can in my room from all the movies I had seen in theaters since 1991's "The Rocketeer." That was another 350 films, give-or-take. I added to that the 500 or so Hong Kong films I had rented from a video store in Alhambra and I realized I'd spent a serious amount of my life sitting there watching movies. Since then I've thrown away the coffee can and information like the accounts they kept at Blockbuster appear to have become sort of moot in the information age. But the count rises above 6000. At this point I've watched a lot of movies, read a lot about movies, and I've made a number of short films. At the moment I'm working on my first feature-length movie. I've worked with organizations that screened movies, I've programmed a festival, and chaired a panel discussion on cinema. Who cares that it was not successful. I'm at the point that I can share, with confidence, some opinions about the movies. And I think I bring an interesting angle to these discussions.

The 2000 or so films I saw by the time I made it to Blockbuster were for the most part American movies. Discount the 500 from Hong Kong and say that at the beginning there were about 1500 American films. Primarily from Hollywood, although I started watching films seriously around the time when the American Independent film movement happened. I saw a lot of that, too. But at the end of the day I could say that I'd seen what there was to see. And then I saw a movie from Hong Kong where a baby falls two stories in an abandoned house. A sort of a costumed superwoman dives to rescue the infant, but the child perishes from a protruding rusty nail.

In one particularly ugly moment, my world changed. I could have sworn that there was no way that baby would die. In Hollywood, at that time, it never would have happened. I was well-versed in genre, and there just wasn't a genre, horror or otherwise, where they would kill a baby like that. Still, it happened, and not even at the climax of the film, either. Just somewhere in the middle. It wasn't even the most grotesque thing to happen in "The Heroic Trio"--all in all a very strange film. The curiosity that was picqued in me gave steam to a full-fledged investigation of film from all corners of the globe. I watched the gamut of Hong Kong cinema available at the time, and from there went to Japanese film, and then on to Korean cinema. From there I branched out to Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, Thailand, all I could see from Vietnam and Laos, and so on. I began to read subtitles with a fluency that few other people possess.

That is why this blog is about "reading" movies. It denotes the unique perspective I bring to cinema exploration. Many with language facility far in excess of my own will tell you that much is lost in the translation of a film into another language. Fine. But film is predominantly a visual medium. And what is gained by reading and seeing a movie made in another place, another time, with another radically different perspective is what Fatty's grandfather is talking about in "Yi Yi." We're adding to our knowledge and experience, taking in something far from our own ken. And just as the French New Wave critics of Cahiers Du Cinema read cultural and filmic resonance into the works of American B-movie cinema like that of Val Lewton and Edgar Ulmer, reading a movie in translation gives us a penetrating view--a discovery of our own, and one which I wonder if we might have made had we been processing the original language precisely?

So this is a blog about reading into movies, and exploring other cultures and reflections. I like to converse and argue. I'd love people to offer comments of their own, however abstract they might turn out (this is the world wide web, after all). Criticize! I'm Scottish. Criticism is in our bloodstream. Let swing! I'll be back with more posts and hopefully we can get some discussions going.

Ciao,

Alan