Edward Yang, 1947 - 2007.

For the last few years, I have been hoping and hoping for another film by Edward Yang, who directed what has become one of the greatest treasures in my film library: Yi-Yi (A One and a Two).

But tonight, Edward Yang passed away....

To watch Yang's work was to see the world through the eyes of a man who delighted in children, who sympathized deeply with the passions and burdens of teenagers, who wrestled with the demands of adulthood, and who was pained by the dehumanizing effects of progress and the big city. His movies focused on Taiwan, but they were not primarily about Taiwan. They were about humankind.

Jeffrey Overstreet.

See also: Saul Austerlitz's 2002 profile in Senses of Cinema and Duncan Campbell's 2001 interview for the Guardian.

Updated through 7/4.

Update: Paul Harrill recalls watching A Brighter Summer Day: "It's a stunning film, but when it was over - well before it was over, actually - the devastating impact the film had on me was buoyed by my thrill at discovering a filmmaker so in control of the medium."

Updates, 7/2: "I don't like to use the word 'humanist,' but that is one of the lesser things you could say of Edward Yang's Yi-Yi (A One And A Two), a tender masterpiece of the ways of the human heart." Ray Pride remembers and passes along a statement from his wife, a few images and a few clips.

"If Yi Yi left me with a slightest hope that I could make a film of that caliber, A Brighter Summer Day left such aspirations in the dust," writes Kevin Lee:

As other films of his came my way, something of the personality of Yang began to materialize. When I saw The Terrorizers (1986), it was clear to me that he had seen Bresson's L'Argent (1983), one of my own favorite films, given how similar the films were in rhythm, structure and feeling. There was so much rage and despair evident, feelings that I could relate to in feeling that I was getting nowhere with my own films. Why would someone as accomplished as Yang feel that way? It was true of Taipei Story (1985) as well, when I saw it at Anthology Film Archives' 2005 retrospective, in which a third of the films on the program never showed up. The reason being that Yang himself was the primary source for many of these prints, and already back then he was battling for his life against the cancer that would eventually claim him.

"[H]e is probably less well known (either in Taiwan or internationally) than his colleagues Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang; but to my mind he was the greatest of the three," writes Steven Shaviro, going on to note that his two most well-known films, A Brighter Summer Day and Yi-Yi "don't stick in my mind quite as intensely as The Terrorizer does." Then:

The other Yang film that really blew me away on first viewing was A Confucian Confusion (1994).... Where The Terrorizer was slow and contemplative, even when it brushed against violence, A Confucian Confusion is thoroughly dynamic, and thrusts us into the lives of characters who don't have the time to contemplate anything.

Or, to restate the point in a slightly different way: Yang's earlier style, in The Terrorizer, is as different from the styles of Hou and Tsai as these filmmakers' styles are from one another; but Yang's earlier style, like Hou's and Tsai's, is demandingly abstract, oblique, and minimalist. And I love it. But the style that Yang develops in A Confucian Confusion, and also in Mah Jong (1996), to the contrary, is maximalist, highly concrete, and dizzying in its numerous shifts and reversals. And, I think, I love it even more.

"It's small solace that, though we won't get new films, there are still so many Yang films for most of us to discover beyond Yi Yi," writes Reverse Shot's cnw.

"Pierre Rissient, a former consultant for the Cannes festival, explained that in the early days Mr Yang and Mr Hou served as something of a team," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times:

Their approach to cinema may not have been new, at least in an international context, Mr Rissient said. But in Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia, he continued, it "was extremely fresh and extremely intimate and, at the same time, had a distance." This much-remarked-upon critical distance - evident in Mr. Yang's beautiful long shots and leisurely takes - allowed characters and viewers the space and time to breathe and think. The influence of European modernists like Michelangelo Antonioni on this work is undeniable, as is its cultural specificity.

In the Voice, Godfrey Cheshire explains how "one of modern cinema's most fascinating careers passed largely unseen by American cinephiles." After summarizing Yang's background and the two phases Steven Shaviro has outlined, he concludes:

Though surely not intended as a summing-up, Yi Yi managed to combine the critical acuity of the Urban Trilogy and the affecting expansiveness of A Brighter Summer Day with the philosophical whimsy of his previous two films. A vision of family (and city) life as a mesh of precarious privacies, the three-hour bittersweet comedy won Yang a Best Director nod at Cannes as well as the Best Picture award from the National Society of Film Critics. It also earned Yang something he'd long deserved: a hearing with American filmgoers.

"An ambitious attempt to distill fifty years of life experience into a single scenario, A One And A Two is, to my mind, the greatest, wisest exploration of modern urban existence in contemporary cinema," writes Robert Williamson for Firecracker. "Yang credited British critics and the London Film Festival as the first to recognise the Taiwanese new wave, and the ICA has shown sustained interest in Yang (with further screenings of A One And A Two scheduled this month). Yet here, as just about everywhere, most of his work is simply unavailable. Perhaps Yang's death will provide sufficient incentive for someone to finally make his films widely available as a kind of belated tribute."

"Reflecting on why so many of his films should remain out of reach, I'm reminded of the little-known fact that a surprisingly large amount of the art cinema of both Taiwan and Hong Kong is financed by gangsters - or so it would appear, according to some of my more knowledgeable friends - which may or may not help to explain such anomalies as his films remaining inaccessible," blogs Jonathan Rosenbaum. "It's also worth noting that with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Hou's City of Sadness), most Taiwanese art films, including those of Tsai Ming-liang, barely have commercial runs of any kind in Taiwan. If I'm not mistaken, Tsai's What Time Is It There? ran in Taipei for less than a week."

Update, 7/3: "[L]ike many of the immortal artists we come to love in our lives, Yang's work and the unique palette of emotions it introduces to us have a talismanic quality," writes Andrew Chan. "Because they are extraordinary works rooted in the everyday, they have the ability to echo through our lives and make magical each experience of the ordinary. It has gotten to a point where I can't help but think (quite frequently) of my past and my dreams and my relationships in the humanist terms laid out in Yi Yi."

Updates, 7/4: "Surely few filmmakers have ever made films that approach Yang's in terms both of their formal richness and in their depth of insight," writes Michael J Anderson. "Though film lovers everywhere should mourn the fact that we will never get the chance to see a new masterpiece by Yang... the corpus he has left is one one of greatest we have ever been blessed with. Edward Yang will be greatly missed."

"My friend Garth asked me a few weeks ago how often I watch dvds, and I said hardly ever but that I sometimes enjoy choosing a favorite and then watching select scenes. Yi Yi is one of those favorite films for me. I can watch the opening 20 minutes over and over and over again, and then I find myself watching the whole thing through if I have the time." J Robert Parks then posts his original review.

Posted by dwhudson at July 1, 2007 5:28 AM