Filmmaker as social commentator

Taiwan, over the years, has been making films of an exceptionally high order. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Tsai Ming Liang, in my judgment, can be regarded as the three most important film directors - three directors I have had the opportunity to meet. Edward Yang died of cancer at the age of 59 in 2007. Some weeks ago, in this column, I discussed the importance of Hou Hsiao-hsien's work and how we in Sri Lanka can draw important lessons from his cinematic creations. In today's column I wish to examine the work of Edward Yang; hopefully, on some future occasion, I would be able to explore the richness of Tsai Ming Liang’s cinema as well. All three of these filmmakers have had a profound imapct on the cinematic imagination of their time.

Edward Yang is the author of seven widely discussed films. I use the word author advisedly; his work bears the inescapable traits of his distinct sensibility, his thematic interests and visual style. Hence he represents the cohesiveness of a filmmaker as author. Themes such as the rapid modernization of Taiwan, the transition from an industrial to a consumer society, the changing structure of the family have held a deep fascination for him, and they find repeated articulation in his films.

Edward Yang (Yang Dechang) was born in Shanghai in 1947. Two years later, his family migrated to Taiwan. He has revealed that his initial artistic inspiration came from local and Japanese comics that were readily available; he began writing his own stories from a young age. At the age twenty three he went to the United States to study computer science. While in America he pursued filmmaking at the University of Southern California. However, he did not enter the world of cinema immediately; he worked in Seattle as a computer specialist for seen years. As a young man Edward Yang was deeply interested in European cinema – German new wave and film directors such as Antonioni. Although some critics have argued that Yang’s work bears traces of a filmmaker like Antonioni, Yang has disclaimed any direct influences from European cinema. He maintains that is initial influences were Japanese comics that he read as a child.

In 1982, Yang made his first feature film ‘Desires’ (Zhi wang) which formed a part of the series titled In Our Time. Yang not only directed the films but very often wrote the script. In 1983 he made That Day on the Beach (Haitan de yitian). in 1985 he directed Taipei Story ( Qingmei zhumai) which won for him great international acclaim. One year later he directed ‘Terrorizer’ which once again generated a great deal of international interest encouraging distinguished film theorists like Fredric Jameson to write at length on this film. Three years later he went on to make a film with postmodernist inclinations titled A Confucian Confusion (Duli shidai). It is a film which adopts a satirical perspective on modern Taiwanese society. In 1996 Yang directed his film Mahjong and four years later he made what I regard as his most important film A One and a Two (Yi yi). I will discuss the importance of this film towards the end of this column.

That Day on the Beach allows us to gain entry into the characteristic cultural-world of Edward and to examine his privileged themes. This film, with its complicated narrative structure, intricate nexus of flashbacks, non-theatrical style of acting, long takes, frequent voice-overs seeks to gain a sense of critical detachment; these traits offer a sharp contrast to the stylistic features of mainstream cinema.

‘That Day on the Beach’ configures the complex relationship between Jia-li, the protagonist and narrator of the film and her husband De-wei. There is a complementary story in the film, between Chiang-ching and De -wei’s brother.

Through the entanglements of Jia-li and De-wei, the director has sought to call attention to the rapid economic developments taking place in Taiwan and the way they inflect human relationships. The secondary love story serves to highlight the clashes between tradition and modernity and the ever increasing penetration of American cultural values into the social fabric of Taiwan. The story is told by Jia-li to Ching-ching, making use of chains of flashbacks.

It could legitimately be said that the fragmented and disjointed nature of the narrative reflects the fissured and disconnected nature of the society that is being depicted; it thrives on contradictions. The complexity of the visual style in That Day on the Beach, I submit, echoes the complexity of the social vision of Edward Yang.

Taipei Story also bears witness to the tensions that shadow and disturb contemporary Taiwanese urban life. The film foregrounds the anxiety-inducing dislocations spawned by the contemporary moment; it focuses on the life of a couple engaged since adolescence but never chose to get married. We are also presented with an array of diverse characters, representing a variety of attitudes and backgrounds, which impinge on the life of the couple. Ching, the protagonist of the film, is employed as a personal assistant by a woman executive.

An influential conglomerate decides to take over the company, and Ching and her boss leave. Suddenly she finds she has much time on her hands, and her rebellious spirit takes over; she moves away from her parents house where she was living and finds an apartment for herself. Lon, her fiancé is a business who experiences more failures than successes. Interestingly, while Ching harbours a resentment against her father for ill-treating her mother, Lon has a sympathy for him.

The film narrates the anguished relationship between Ching and Lon over a truncated time span of a few weeks. The actions and non-actions that take place shape the characters of the two of then in important ways. Kwok-kan Tam and I in our book titled New Chinese Cinema ( published by Oxford University Press), made the following observation on this film.

‘Taipei Story, like others of yang’s films, consists of multiple strands of narratives that intersect in a complex and, at times, self-subverting manner.

The result is a film that captures the flow of urban life, reflecting the director’s characteristic energy of perception and gift for precise imagery, producing a kind of poetry of urban banality. Taipei Story, with its de-theatricalization, accuracy of placement, sensitivity to logics of spatiality, and the reticent power of its images is redolent of the work of Antonioni, such as L’Eclisse.

It needs to be said, however, that Yang’s images and their visualities have an unmistakable Chinese flourish. They grow out of a distinctly indigenous sensibility.’

The terrorist made in 1986 served to garner great international acclaim for Edward Yang. The film deals with the intersecting lives of a girl trapped in her loneliness, a young couple and triangular relationship between a woman and two men. The girl is found to be on the wrong side of the law. The young couple – a photographer and his girl friend – is on the verge of separation.

The triangular relationship is between a writer of fiction, her husband who is a doctor and an editor of a magazine. The structure of the narrative, the orchestrated mood, the extractable meaning always seems to elude us in Yang’s films and this is no exception.

The woman’s novel becomes a comment on the film itself; it not only depicts the events tat led to the collapse of the marriage but also to its afterglow.

The eminent American cultural critic Fredric Jameson found The Terrorizer to be extremely interesting; he wrote extensively on it. As he remarked, ‘what we must admire….is the way in which the filmmaker has arranged for these two powerful interpretive temptations – the modern and postmodern, subjectivity and textuality – to neutralize each other, to hold each other in one long suspension in such a way that the film can exploit and draw on the benefits of both, without having to commit itself to either as some definitive reading or formal and stylistic category.’

His next film A Brighter Summer Day is marked by the complex narrative structure that we have now come to expect from Edward Yang. This is a longish film with a broad range of characters. It captures an uncertain Taiwan seeing through the optic of a postmodern sensibility.

The film deals the Zhang family – the father, mother, five children who have arrived in 1949 from shanghai. The narrator focuses principally on the fourth child, a boy nicknamed Xiao Sier.

The family occupies an important place in the narrative; however, as with Yang;s other films, one encounters multiple plot strands that give the film its recognizable texture. In this film the director foregrounds through the complicity of a many-sided cinematic form, the antagonisms and tensioned awareness in family relations as well as the meaning of being Taiwanese and the island’s complicated and fraught relations with mainland China. The film occupies an ambiguous space of hope and despair

Satira

The next film that he directed was called A Confucian Confusion. It is a satire that connects in an interesting way the current debate on human rights and their relevance to the functioning of Asian societies. This film was short listed in the competitive section of the 1994 Cannes film festival. The story takes place in Taipei, and among its characters are a group of young people with modernist leanings.

They are caught, much against their wishes, in the cross-fire of traditional and modernist values and practices. The clash between group affiliations and individual desires that assumes ever greater intensity as the film unfolds is reconfigured with a sardonic wit. Indeed, it cam be said that satire animates and leads the film as it shifts from one narrative lane to another. The film repeatedly brings up the issue individuality and its challenging ramifications; indeed it is not without significance that the Chinese title of the film means age of autonomy.

Such characters as K.K. Siu Fung, Siu Ming, Lap Yen, Yum, Larry, molly, and Birdy who flit in and out of the narrative path, carry the weight of self-alienation and confused atomism that appear to be the natural extension of super-modernism.

Jettisoning traditional pieties, Edward yang displays his desire to examine new constellations of values relevant to modern society as it moves forward rapidly. The confused world that takes shape through the flow of privileged images is not a world drained of values, but rather is one that is wrestling with them. The English title of the film A Confucian Confusion captures memorably this struggle.

In 1996 Edward Yang made his film Mahjong. It is in many ways of a piece with his earlier cinematic creations; it summons into existence a filmic world swollen with power and pathetic self-inflation. There is a greater narrative presence in this film than in his other works. It is the director’s conviction that beneath the glossy surface of life, seductive and glitzy, there lurks perilous fissures and dark impulses that can have unforeseen and adverse consequences. This film was prophetic in the sense that events and trends captured in the film text achieved a visible reality in actual social life in Taiwan. Yang’s diagnosis was accurate; he posited a modern Taiwanese society that octopus-like was simultaneously seeking to move in different directions.

Emotional struggle

Edward Yang’s last completed film was A One and a Two (yi yi) It deals with the emotional struggles of a businessman and his middle-class family. The story is projected through the eyes of three generations of characters. This film won for Edward Yang the Best Director’s prize at the Cannes film festival solidifying his growing international reputation. The film opens with a wedding and concludes with a funeral and there is a birth in the idle.

The normal processes of life are counterpointed with specificities associated with modernity in Taiwan. Nien Jen Wu is a businessman and head of the family. He has a young son and teenage daughter. The son is almost a younger alter ego of the director; he is given to philosophical ruminations. The daughter is disappointed in love. Nien Jen Wu’s wife, unable to cope with the challenges of mundane life, has retired into a Buddhist retreat. His mother-in-law is sick and in a coma. It is through the interplay of these characters that the story of A One and a Two moves forward.

Edward Young is a conscientious craftsman. This fact is evident in almost all his films. One area in which this inclination of his is most evident is in the way he uses space as a way of defining situations; this contributes to the meaning of his films. For example in The Terrorizer, as critics like Jameson have pointed out, Yang deploys different types of spaces effectively; traditional space 0the apartment of the police officer0, national space 9hospital0, multinational space 9he office of the publisher in a high rise building0and transnational space) the hotel and its corridors). The pluralization of space is a fact of life in the postmodern world.

Justification

Many critics, not without a certain measure of justification, have sought to characterize Edward Yang’s films as postmodern films. Clearly, films such as The Terrorizer, A Confucian Confusion and A One and a Two display certain identifiable postmodernist traits. However, it is important to recognize that, in Yang’s films, there are certain countervailing forces that rise up to challenge the supremacy of a postmodrnist agenda and vision. Critics like Fredric Jameson see in Yang ‘s work a de-centering of the subject, an undermining of agency and displacement of morality. He sees the Taipei depicted in yang’s films as synonymous with any ‘international urban society of late capitalism’ where ‘moral judgments are irrelevant.’

It is indeed true that Edward Yang in films like one and a two reconfigures the decline of both the extended and nuclear families and the inescapable diminution of the self-contained and self-present individual. However, to equate this with a global a morality that marks postmodernism or to perceive in his work an absence of artistic agency that postmodern critics talk about is too much of a stretch. What we find in yang’s work is a curious blending of modernist and postmodernist imperatives which does not totally obliterate issues of agency and morality. Indeed, the repossession of morality and agency, I submit, is a part of Edward Yang’s overall intention.

Certain critics, quite astutely in my view, have sought to apply the term reflexive modernity rather than postmodernity to Yang’s cinematic creations. Social thinkers such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich beck and Scott lash have succeeded in putting into circulation this term. Reflexive modernity and postmodernity share in the belief that the organised capitalism associated with industrial societies has come to an end. However, unlike postmodernists, reflexive modernists do not see a total surrender to amorality or obliteration of agency; they see the widespread disorganization associated with late capitalism as a moment of intense and productive reflection. And through that reflection arrive at modified version of truth, agency and morality.

Chaos

This is precisely what we observe in Edward Yang’s films. In a Confucian Confusion, Yang is not suggesting that the whole of Taipei has yielded to chaos and confusion and wastefulness; he is arguing that through this confusion, by force of reflection and imaginative action, Taipei should be able to repossess a more orderly polity. Similarly, in A One and a two, he is hoping for the possibility, and the need to, reconfigure a new set of moral and ethical values that would prove to be our allies in a rapidly changing postmodern world. A reflexive modernist framework will allow us to make great sense of the way yang is seeking to make sense of the world. What Yang is suggesting is that we need to re-examine and reflect on the dysfunctional rules and regulations that typify late modern societies and explore ways of activating new ones that respond better to newer challenges.

As one commentator discussing A One and a Two aptly observed, ‘the film reveals that Taiwan’s transition to satellite state in late capitalist universe and silicon island in the information age has heralded a fundamentally new experience of time and space, which in turn demands an appropriate ethical imperative.’ This desire to fashion a new ethical imperative gives Yang’s films their distinctive flavor and serves to remove them from the confining space of postmodernity.

Edward Yang, as I stated earlier, is a very conscientious craftsman; much thought has gone into his shots and frames. For example, let us consider the dominant trope of glass in A One and a Two.

Glass in window panes, high rise buildings, cars, reflect and refract the surrounding world.

The trope of glass high rises, a distinguishing feature of late modernist architecture,and draws attention to horizontal nature of social relations as well as the overlapping of inside and outside. Yang very skillfully weaves these connotations into the meaning-system of his filmic text. His visual imagination is vitally constitutive of the meanings he is seeking to uncover through his films.

Edward Yang is, of course, not without his detractors. Some maintain that his films are too westernized and that he does not pay sufficient attention to the question of entertainment. Some say that his films are vitiated by the absence of narrative cohesion; there are others who argue that his characters lack s depth and psychological complexity. Yang, in my judgment, is a highly gifted and innovative film director who is deeply interested in the possibilities of the medium of cinema as social critique. His films reconfigure the complex ways in which facts and fantasies of the contemporary mind operate in a world somewhat out of joint.

Fashion

It has been his declared attention to fashion a cinematic style, not always with total success, equal to the perplexities of our time. In his films, time and space are inscribed by a fragmentation that challenges coherence.

The startling montages, presented without apparent narrative connectives, are a consequence of this disposition.

Edward Yang, then, was an internationally acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker who died in 2007 at the relatively young age of fifty nine. Why is he important for those of us interested in Sri Lankan cinema and its future growth.

I wish to focus on what I think are five important points in this regard. First, he was a filmmaker who took his social responsibility very seriously.

As a film director he was answerable to the society at large. Hence, he focused on issues related to modernization and capitalist modernity in Taiwan with a critical eye. Second, He recognized the importance in situating the Taiwanese experiences with late capitalism in the larger context of globalization.

Many of his films highlight the complex interplay of globalism and localism with discernment. Third, he focused on the question of reflexive modernity, as opposed to postmodernity, in thought-provoking ways.

The eminent British sociologist who has done much to gain academic legitimacy from the concept of reflexive modernity said that modernity’s reflexivity refers to the susceptibility of most modern aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature, to the chronic revision in the light if new information or knowledge.

Such information or knowledge is not incidental to modern institutions, but constitutive of them .What Yang does in his films is to examine the contemporary chaotic situation in Taiwan and produce a body of insights that would promote a greater degree of reflexivity on the situation under consideration. This is indeed an area in which Sri Lankan filmmakers can learn a great deal from Edward Yang’s work.

Fourth, Edward Yang is a disciplined craftsman who pays close attention to his representational strategies. He makes use of long takes, long shots, voice- over imaginatively as a way of gaining a critical distance from the experience unfolding n the screen.

This interplay between attachment and detachment is central to Yang’s ambitions as a filmmaker and we in Sri Lanka would find it inspiring. Fifth, the way in which Yang constructs his cinematic discourse merits close attention.

Instead of the linear narratives preferred by many filmmakers, Yang opts for a convoluted narrative structure that has the advantage of putting into play a critical cinematic discourse along with the unfolding of the events. All these features, I maintain, can be enabling conditions of possibility for us as filmmakers and film connoisseurs in Sri Lanka.