Loss of a Rational Mind

Portrait of the artist as a young man: Jonathan Chang as the boy photographer Yang-Yang in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (The Criterion Collection)

Yang: Unknown master (Photo by Kaili Peng)

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More About

• Edward Yang
• Yi Yi
• Taipei
• Shanghai
• Yi Yiis

“Life is a mixture of happy and sad things. Movies are so lifelike — that’s why we love them.”

“Then who needs movies? Just stay home and live life.”

“My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies.”

“How can that be?”

“It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.”

—Dialogue from Edward Yang’s Yi Yi

In the year 2000, which turned out to be the most momentous of his too-brief life, Edward Yang won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival (for the film Yi Yi), became a father for the first time, and learned of the cancer that would ultimately claim him, seven years later and three months shy of his 60th birthday. And that, I dare say, is a predicament worthy of an Edward Yang film, whose characters strive to reclaim the past and explore roads not taken, only to be reminded — sometimes gently, sometimes rudely — of the randomness of destiny.

Born in Shanghai in 1947, Yang was still a toddler when his family (like some 2 million other Chinese citizens) emigrated from mainland China to Taiwan after the end of the Chinese Civil War. Not surprisingly, one of the richest themes in Yang’s work, as in that of his friend and contemporary Hou Hsiao-Hsien (who produced and gave a very fine performance in Yang’s 1985 Taipei Story), would become the search for identity — personal, social and political — in the small island nation. In sharp contrast to Hou’s diffuse, increasingly impressionistic movies, with their focus on quotidian small-town life or the doings of prostitutes, gangsters and other desperate characters, Yang’s films were (with exceptions) classically structured dramas and melodramas, at once urban and urbane, centered on professionals, artists and intellectuals.

The British critic Tony Rayns has noted that Taiwanese cinema’s “new wave” of the 1980s and ’90s (of which Yang and Hou were the two towering figures) differed from similar national film movements because, instead of addressing the lives of contemporary young people, its primary concerns were historical — specifically, the reclaiming of modern Taiwanese history from several decades of ersatz, government-sponsored propaganda films. That was certainly true of Yang’s greatest work, A Brighter Summer Day(1991), an epic memory film set during the early 1960s (Yang’s own teenage years) and based on the true story of Taiwan’s first juvenile homicide case. Stretched tautly over four hours of screen time and with more than 100 speaking parts played by mostly nonprofessional actors, the film’s ambition was startling, its achievement enormous — few movies have more readily called to mind the great, sprawling novels of the 19th century and their astute juxtapositions of ordinary individuals against the maelstrom of a changing society.

Later, in films like A Confucian Confusion(1994) and Mahjong(1996), Yang proved no less adept at charting unmoored lives in a present-day Taipei choked by neon, foreign investment and an inner emptiness that all the Happy Meals in the world could not abate.

But like most great filmmakers, Yang was timeless, and transcendent of linguistic or geographic barriers. Wherever or whenever in the world they took place, his films — seven features and one short directed between 1982 and 2000 — constantly circled back to the allure of missed opportunities and the age-old conflicts between parents and children. It was territory Yang knew well, for before he ever picked up a movie camera, he had lived another life, several thousand miles away from Taiwan and the movie business. Though the boy Edward had shown stirrings of an artistic temperament, drawing his own accomplished comic books after becoming a fan of Japanese manga, his parents had pressured him to pursue a more traditional career, and he had acquiesced. So he came to America, first as a graduate student in computer sciences at the University of Florida, and, following a semester-long flirtation with USC Film School, as a researcher in the applied physics lab at the University of Washington.

In Yang’s brilliant 1986 film The Terrorizer, a young novelist nearly gives up writing and returns to the 9-to-5 work force when a prestigious literary prize restores her faith in her abilities. For Yang, a similar epiphany came right there in Seattle, where one of his regular trips to a local art-house cinema brought him face to face with Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God. He returned to Taipei, where he earned work as a screenwriter on director Yu Weiching’s The Winter of 1905(1981), before making his directorial debut the following year with “Expectation” (a.k.a. “Desires”), a plangent study of a teenage girl’s sexual ripening featured as the second (and best) segment of the omnibus film In Our Time.

The scientist in Yang is hardly absent from the films that follow, which feel like the product of a devoutly logical, rational mind striving to impose order — a system, a periodic table — on the irrational world of human experience. Like ?the boy photographer Yang-Yang in Yi Yi, who takes pictures of the backs of people’s heads so as to show them that which they cannot see themselves, Yang was forever contemplating his (and our) inability to see in more than one direction at a time — a feeling subtly amplified by his habit of filming his characters reflected in mirrors and windows. That quandary reaches its most eloquent expression late in Yi Yi, when the husband and father NJ (Nien-Jen Wu) travels on business to Tokyo, where he is reunited with Sherry, the high-school sweetheart he loved and lost 30 years earlier. As they traverse the boulevards of what might have been, back in Taipei NJ’s daughter Ting-Ting is experiencing her own first blushes of romance with a slightly older boy nicknamed “Fatty” — scenes that double as surrogate flashbacks to NJ and Sherry’s own youthful courtship.