Cinevue

The AAIFF showed his first feature film, ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH, at the seventh AAIFF in 1984. (That film is now referred to as THAT DAY ON THE BEACH.) Two years later, at the ninth AAIFF, his second feature film, TAIPEI STORY, was shown. His third feature film, THE TERRORIZERS, was shown as part of the "Cinema and Society" series that Asian CineVision would create. And, of course, the fifteenth AAIFF showed A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY in 1994. (This proved problematic: the film, which is four hours long, was edited to three hours for international festival screenings. ACV had been assured that the full-length version would be sent, but when the print arrived a few days before the scheduled screening, it turned out to be the print that had shown in Europe, at three hours. It would take almost two years before the full-length A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY would screen in New York, but when it did, it would be under the auspices of another film organization.)

From 1984 until 1994, ACV would prove to be the only forum for Edward Yang's films. There is a reason this was strange: not to be rude about it, but Asian CineVision was never in the foreground of film organizations in New York City, let alone nationally. The reason was financial—there was never enough money to really rival organizations such as the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, or Japan Society. Yet, for a scrappy little neighborhood organization, ACV did pretty well with its programs, never more so than with the annual Asian American International Film Festival. The number of genuinely important artists, both nationally and internationally, whom the AAIFF helped premiere is impressive. But what often happened is that, soon after premiering at the AAIFF, these filmmakers would find their ways into the programs of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, the Toronto Film Festival, etc. (It is hard to remember now that the film festival circuit is so enormous, but two decades ago there weren't that many film festivals around, and the AAIFF was a significant player.)

From the moment ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH showed at the seventh AAIFF, it seemed apparent that here was a filmmaker with an unmistakable personal style dealing with themes of modernity. This style was amplified in the films which followed. Yet what was it that was holding back interest in Yang's work? Not that I should complain, but it seemed strange that other festivals (including Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Montreal, and San Francisco) just were not picking up his work.

It seemed to me that here was a major artist who was creating a significant body of work. It was true that his work might not have been the most “innovative,” but it felt new in the context of world cinema. And who was innovative, anyway? Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese had reputations as major film directors of the 1970s and 1980s, without ever doing anything that was even remotely innovative—and the same was true of Alexander Sokurov, Theodoros Angelopoulos, and Bela Tarr. "Innovation," which had been one of the critical terms used to define many of the film artists of the 1960s (Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais), had become less reliable as a critical signifier in the last two decades. But that still did not explain the decided lack of interest in the work of Edward Yang.

In the obituary that appeared in The New York Times on Monday, July 2, 2007, Manohla Dargis tried to account for the initial disinterest in Yang's work by quoting Pierre Rissient:

Pierre Rissient, a former consultant for the Cannes festival, explained that in the early days Mr. Yang and Mr. Hou (Hsaio-Hsien) served as something of a team. Their approach to cinema may not have been new, at least in the 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.

I hate to mention this, but the condescension inherent in those remarks is rather outrageous. It reminds me of a lecture I went to on the occasion of the "Primitive" exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art; an art historian from Italy was talking about how "crude" and "vulgar" African art was, but that it had to be acknowledged because African art had proven to be an inspiration to Picasso and Braque for their Cubist “innovations.” That was in the 1980s, and it is amazing to see that these same attitudes, which bespeak a Eurocentrism and imperialist mindset, have continued, informing the critical reception many artists from Asia have received.

The films coming from the People's Republic of China in the mid-1980s, such as Chen Kaige's YELLOW EARTH, Zhang Yimou's RED SORGHUM, or Wu Tian-Ming's OLD WELL were "period" films, with exotic settings and elemental stories. But the films coming from Taiwan were contemporary dramas that showed people living in a post-technological society. These directors—not just Yang and Hou, but Chang Yi, Ko I-Chen, Tao Te-chen, Jen Wan, Zeng Zhuang-Xiang,and Wu Nien-Jun—were dealing with the changes that a "traditional" society was undergoing when confronted with cellular phones, computers, and the Internet. It wasn't just that the means of communication had changed, it was that communication itself had changed. The society wasn't just post-technological: it was post-alienation.

And Yang was developing a modernist style to go along with these changes. He had a sense of composition that de-emphasized his characters, placing them in the landscapes and cityscapes, often at a distance, so that they were frequently swallowed up by the spaces surrounding them.

This was strikingly apparent in ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH. In that film, Yang took what seemed to be a simple anecdote of a love affair's demise, and stretched it out to what appeared to be inordinately attenuated lengths. There were scenes in which the landscape of the beach was held until the characters entered, and then their scene seemed to consist of minutely observed trivia, with little overt dramatic action. And then they would leave, and the camera would seem to linger on the emptied space. Yes, there were resemblances to Antonioni (ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH has many echoes of Antonioni's first feature, CRONACA DI UN AMORE, as well as L'AVVENTURA) but there was also a sense of something distinctly different, of some new mood—a new vision.

The early films directed by Hou Hsaio-Hsien were far more "traditional:" they fit into already-established popular genres (such as juvenile delinquent dramas, as was the case of THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI). Yang's films were obviously influenced by European filmmakers, and why not? Yang was educated in the west (actually, in the United States) and he had seen many of the European and American films which tried to establish modernist styles and themes. As the Taiwanese economy transformed itself in the 1980s, becoming a mecca for new technologies—cellphones were more widespread there than in the U.S. or Europe in the 1980s, with only Sweden as technologically adept—the problems which had faced post-industrial societies (communication, family disintegration, alienation) became prevalent in Taiwan, and Yang set out to chart this development in the trio of films which became known as his Urban Trilogy (ON THAT DAY ON THE BEACH, TAIPEI STORY, and THE TERRORIZERS). And his movies dramatized these changes with amazing acuity and precision. THE TERRORIZERS was a devastating portrait of disparate groups of people who become connected through a series of cruel prank calls made by a gang of teenagers. The ways in which our modes of techno-communication can be used against us have never been so viscerally dramatized. I thought THE TERRORIZERS was one of the creepiest, most insidiously threateningfilms I'd ever seen, yet it was passed over by almost all major film festivals and film organizations.

This was starting to get depressing—and if those of us working on the AAIFF felt depressed by this lack of recognition in Yang's career, it's hard to imagine how he must have felt. But the Locarno screening of A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (even at three hours) was a turning point: suddenly, Yang was getting some critical attention.

In his obituary on Yang that was published in The Village Voice, Godfrey Cheshire wrote:

…(W)hile mainland filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Hong Kong's Wong Kar-Wai found a ready path to American art houses, Yang, like his contemporary Hou Hsaio-Hsien, faced a host of business and cultural obstacles to U.S. distribution. The result was that one of modern cinema's most fascinating careers passed largely unseen by American cinephiles.

Godfrey Cheshire, in the 1980s when he was writing for New York Press, was one of the only critics who took an active interest in the Taiwanese cinema, as well as the Iranian cinema. At that time, the Taiwanese government was trying to promote Taiwan's arts and culture. The Taiwan government opened the Taiwan Cultural Center in the Rockefeller Center area, which featured a theater and a gallery. The Taiwan Cultural Center was only too happy to promote their filmmakers. The Taiwan Cultural Center helped ACV to get the prints of Edward Yang's films but there was never any money to help get him to fly in for the festival. ACV never had enough money to offer any sort of amenities, so, though we showed his films, Edward Yang never actually attended the festival in person. But Edward Yang did become friends with a number of the people who worked on the AAIFF, including Norman Wang.

After A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (which had taken five years to make—it was a true epic, in every sense), Yang's next two films, A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION and MAHJONG, were shown at the New York Film Festival. Of course, just to prove how contrary critical opinion was, many of the critics who had ignored Yang before were suddenly saying that his two latest films were not up to par with his earlier work.

Finally, YI YI, released in 2000, marked a turning point: it was shown at Cannes and at the New York Film Festival; it received a commercial release in the United States; and it was a critical hit, not just here but internationally. Yet during the period of press coverage, Edward Yang was saying how YI YI would most likely be his last film, because the conditions of financing and film production in Taiwan were changing. Yang mentioned how the success of Ang Lee's CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON had turned the Taiwan film industry into a chimerical chase to enter the international film market with action films, and he was convinced that his type of film was increasingly doomed.

And now, he has been proven correct: YI YI was his last film, though, earlier in the year, there were announcements about a collaboration with Jackie Chan on a film to be called THE WIND. Perhaps Yang would have been able to achieve the popular success he deserved. But, as it stands, he will have to be remembered for seven feature films, marking one of the most cohesive bodies of work in contemporary cinema.

Still, the reception of Yang's first four films still rankles: why weren't his films featured at Cannes or Venice or Berlin? What was wrong? Consider Yang's biography, and it becomes clear. During the 1970s, after doing his postgraduate work in engineering, Yang went to Seattle to work in the microcomputer industry. When he started making films in Taiwan in the 1980s, his Urban Trilogy was about the ways in which people were learning to live with the new communication/information technologies. If Taiwan was a country where, by the mid-1980s, about 80% of the population had a computer and a cell phone, then France, Italy, and Germany were technologically backward. And so Edward Yang's films must have seemed anathema to the people at the European festivals, because it showed a non-white society that was more technologically advanced than Europe.

And so the claim was that Edward Yang was not stylistically or formally “new” was obviously self-justification, allowing imperialist superiority. In fact his work, in dramatizing these developments, was very "new"—almost too much so. Yang's work was so new that it was a threat. (It is significant that the critical breakthrough happened with A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, which is a film set in the 1960s! The more "traditional" Taiwanese society depicted in that film was far less threatening to European festivals; it should also be remembered that many of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films, such as DUST IN THE WIND and CITY OF SADNESS were also set in the past, and Hou was embraced by the European festival circuit much earlier than Yang.)

For Asian CineVision, Yang's death is particularly poignant. In the last few years, we have been besieged by other organizations trying to promote Asian cinema. There is the constant denigration of ACV, as if our commitment to Asian American and Asian artists is suspect because we’re not a repository for every single type of commercial cinema coming out of Asia. The various horror films, kung-fu epics and Bollywood musicals that are finding some commercial distribution in the U.S. really don’t need our help. But artists like Edward Yang do need that help, and the fact that ACV was able to support the work of Edward Yang is one of the salutary triumphs in the AAIFF's 30-year history.

Daryl Chin co-founded the Asian American International Film Festival in 1977; he is a critic and writer whose blog, Documents on Art and Cinema, can be found at www.d-a-c.blogspot.com.