I used to watch movies a fair bit in college. And as you know, the sort of movies they tend to show in college cinemas tend to be the more arty farty kinds. You could say that my college days were the high watermark of my relationship with cinema. Back home, either it was the dearth of good films (I could always rent films from the Ass-planade but opted not to) or probably that as with music, there is this golden period where you first encounter cinema, and it's all new and fresh and beautiful, and there are so many
Well during my days at the college cinema, I got introduced to 3 great directors, and all of them died last year, all within a month of each other.
I wouldn't have known that Edward Yang was dead. If it was announced in the papers, I would have missed it. I only knew because there was this article on Cai Qin and it announced that her former husband Edward Yang died recently. Goddamn.
My favourite of the 3 is Edward Yang. He is, together with Hou Hsiao Hsien, the 2 great directors at the forefront of the Taiwanese New Wave movement. I've only seen his 2 most famous films, but they are among my favourite movies, ever. One is "A Brighter Summer Day", and the other is "Yi Yi".
One thing that Edward Yang is famous for, and this is also true of HHH: whereas western film tends to put the camera very close to the subjects, and places the viewer right in the heat of action, they put the camera very far away, to capture the surrounding landscape as well. The takes are long, and there are a few cuts. It is very unusual in cinema to focus on the background as much as the action but I suppose there's this theory that Asians have a different way of seeing the world - in terms of relationships, rather than in terms of an actor divorced from its surroundings. So when you can see the background, it is more like theatre, you are reminded that the actors are forever under the influence of the workings of the cosmos, this mysterious thing called fate that rules all of us.
I remember watching "Yi Yi". I went in not expecting anything much more than the run of the mill arthouse film. I was fairly astonished when I came out: I thought it was one of the greatest 2 hour films I had ever watched, until I checked my watch and discovered that the film was 3 hours long. I might put up a review of the film somewhere, but maybe not here. The subject matter is hardly inspiring, it is a portrait of a family, all struggling and going through difficult phases - the father trying to get a project off the ground, and at the same time an old flame appears at the wedding, and tempts him into an affair. The mother is sick and tired of life, and retreats to a monastery for a few weeks. The eldest daughter is going out with a guy she finds interesting, and also racked with guilt at possibly having caused her grandmother's stroke. The cute but curious young son goes around with a camera, just like the director himself, shooting things that other people can't see. Also, in having a crush on a female classmate, he experiences the earliest stirrings of adolescence.
One thing I picked up upon, and this was confirmed when I read an interview with Edward Yang: all the members of the family could the same person, going through different stages of life. By putting these episodes together and attributing them to different members of a family, he condenses the whole experience of a life into a single film, and that's one of the things which makes the film such a stirring experience. In one of my favourite scenes, when the father and his old flame were reminiscing about their younger days, his daughter was acting it out with her boyfriend, and the director juxtaposed both scenes together to underline that his daughter was replaying events that happened in his youth.
One cannot discount a tinge of homesickness at play when I saw this. I live in Singapore not Taiwan of course but you can't deny that Singapore is a hell lot more like Taiwan than the US.
"A Brighter Summer Day" is one of the most ambitious movies I have ever seen, and it succeeds brilliantly. I think one reason why I rated it highly is because when you grow up in Singapore, you are not very conscious of history, that you are carrying a torch that has been passed down to you from generations back. I think there is something in us that yearns for some semblance of a history, and that is why Royston Tan's "881", as well as Jack Neo's "Homerun" have been such hits. So whenever I see a history film about our part of the world, particularly if it concerns the 20th century, I'm interested. I didn't like it at all that our Ministry of Education is so coy about letting Singaporeans learn about their post independence history. There is nothing in the history textbooks. All you see are ang mohs in their colonial outfits and their wigs. I liked "brighter Summer Day" because it showed the real stuff, the gang fights, the strict schools (eerily similar to many of our SAP schools), even the forced confessions obtained through the good ol' air conditioners. (Back then they didn't have air conditioning, so they used ice blocks.) Now you know why that film made me feel so homesick. Good old ISD!
I am frequently surprised that while Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema are very well regarded internationally, Singapore has comparatively little to offer. Tsai Ming-Liang is actually a Malaysian who moved to Taiwan. I think, when watching Edward Yang's films, I got this briefest notion that Singapore does have what it takes to have a great film industry, and probably did so in the 60s, before the motherfuckers shut them down.
Well during my days at the college cinema, I got introduced to 3 great directors, and all of them died last year, all within a month of each other.
I wouldn't have known that Edward Yang was dead. If it was announced in the papers, I would have missed it. I only knew because there was this article on Cai Qin and it announced that her former husband Edward Yang died recently. Goddamn.
My favourite of the 3 is Edward Yang. He is, together with Hou Hsiao Hsien, the 2 great directors at the forefront of the Taiwanese New Wave movement. I've only seen his 2 most famous films, but they are among my favourite movies, ever. One is "A Brighter Summer Day", and the other is "Yi Yi".
One thing that Edward Yang is famous for, and this is also true of HHH: whereas western film tends to put the camera very close to the subjects, and places the viewer right in the heat of action, they put the camera very far away, to capture the surrounding landscape as well. The takes are long, and there are a few cuts. It is very unusual in cinema to focus on the background as much as the action but I suppose there's this theory that Asians have a different way of seeing the world - in terms of relationships, rather than in terms of an actor divorced from its surroundings. So when you can see the background, it is more like theatre, you are reminded that the actors are forever under the influence of the workings of the cosmos, this mysterious thing called fate that rules all of us.
I remember watching "Yi Yi". I went in not expecting anything much more than the run of the mill arthouse film. I was fairly astonished when I came out: I thought it was one of the greatest 2 hour films I had ever watched, until I checked my watch and discovered that the film was 3 hours long. I might put up a review of the film somewhere, but maybe not here. The subject matter is hardly inspiring, it is a portrait of a family, all struggling and going through difficult phases - the father trying to get a project off the ground, and at the same time an old flame appears at the wedding, and tempts him into an affair. The mother is sick and tired of life, and retreats to a monastery for a few weeks. The eldest daughter is going out with a guy she finds interesting, and also racked with guilt at possibly having caused her grandmother's stroke. The cute but curious young son goes around with a camera, just like the director himself, shooting things that other people can't see. Also, in having a crush on a female classmate, he experiences the earliest stirrings of adolescence.
One thing I picked up upon, and this was confirmed when I read an interview with Edward Yang: all the members of the family could the same person, going through different stages of life. By putting these episodes together and attributing them to different members of a family, he condenses the whole experience of a life into a single film, and that's one of the things which makes the film such a stirring experience. In one of my favourite scenes, when the father and his old flame were reminiscing about their younger days, his daughter was acting it out with her boyfriend, and the director juxtaposed both scenes together to underline that his daughter was replaying events that happened in his youth.
One cannot discount a tinge of homesickness at play when I saw this. I live in Singapore not Taiwan of course but you can't deny that Singapore is a hell lot more like Taiwan than the US.
"A Brighter Summer Day" is one of the most ambitious movies I have ever seen, and it succeeds brilliantly. I think one reason why I rated it highly is because when you grow up in Singapore, you are not very conscious of history, that you are carrying a torch that has been passed down to you from generations back. I think there is something in us that yearns for some semblance of a history, and that is why Royston Tan's "881", as well as Jack Neo's "Homerun" have been such hits. So whenever I see a history film about our part of the world, particularly if it concerns the 20th century, I'm interested. I didn't like it at all that our Ministry of Education is so coy about letting Singaporeans learn about their post independence history. There is nothing in the history textbooks. All you see are ang mohs in their colonial outfits and their wigs. I liked "brighter Summer Day" because it showed the real stuff, the gang fights, the strict schools (eerily similar to many of our SAP schools), even the forced confessions obtained through the good ol' air conditioners. (Back then they didn't have air conditioning, so they used ice blocks.) Now you know why that film made me feel so homesick. Good old ISD!
I am frequently surprised that while Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema are very well regarded internationally, Singapore has comparatively little to offer. Tsai Ming-Liang is actually a Malaysian who moved to Taiwan. I think, when watching Edward Yang's films, I got this briefest notion that Singapore does have what it takes to have a great film industry, and probably did so in the 60s, before the motherfuckers shut them down.
Then again, I think a little about how a small cinema scene can suddenly produce a few geniuses, before the scene fades away. How small footballing countries like Holland, Hungary, Austria and Uruguay have produced a short generation of geniuses against the odds.
Oh by the way the other 2 cinema geniuses who died last year were Antonioni and Bergman. I liked the films by them that I have watched ("l'Avventura", "la Notte", "l'Eclisse", "Seventh Seal", "Wild Strawberries") and they are among my favourite films but I have less to say about them.
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