Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang ("Yi Yi") dies at 59

a retro will be traveling around USA but mostly via HD video; taiwanese couldn't pony up for 35mm prints. boo.

aw
i wonder what'll happen with the films now, re: 'home video'. like i think after the cinema foundation restored ABSD people figured it'd be criterion, but i think a few of the others now exist in reasonable quality, too, in asia.

Ws just thinking about seeing Yi Yi. Really need to make time for this.

i wimped out of a brighter summer's day again, because of $$ & time &c. so just oughtta wait for it to come out.

Had no idea he was dead.

So yeah Yi Yi was a great 3 hours. Really pissed I missed a couple of other ones in this season that will be much harder to see in future, as that film is an acknowledged masterpiece, which should guarantee a bunch of screenings (in London) every now and then.

Liked that it had its own pacing - at nearly 3 hrs I thought it wd be quie slow but it wasn't at all. Complex plotting but it never felt like it. Expectations of behaviour and where it might be go were shot down a few times.

Remy's description of the swimming pool scene was wonderful - it never ramps up the kid's cuteness (which is a trope I hate in a lot of cinema) until the end, but his speech is brilliant writing.

terrorizers was fucking great, really intricate construction, don't sleep on that one people

am seeing a bright summers day this week. am praying the 4 hour length doesnt seem tedious. (did really like the terrorizer though, found it quite bewildering, but in a really likeable, rather than irritating way).

lol I didn't realize it was four hours!

http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Go-Hi/Guling-Jie-Shaonian-Sha-Ren-Shijian.html#ixzz3BOlMLrvQ

A Brighter Summer Day shares the breadth of ambition and distanced, objective point of view of Hou Xiaoxian's 1989 allusive social panorama A City of Sadness (Beiqing Chengshi)

this does not bode well.

wish the BFI were just showing yi yi lol

Firstly I just think it's a funny coincidence that (as of opening this thread) the Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien threads are right next to each other.

Second, A Brighter Summer's Day is totally not tedious! I found it a lot more engaging than Yi Yi, but that's just me.

Thanks Ed, will try and see it on Friday..

On Saturday, September 5th at 11:30pm (Pacific), Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is scheduled to play on TCM!

http://blog.criterioncast.com/post/122394779356/on-saturday-september-5th-at-11-30pm-pacific

i saw taipei story yesterday. was a bit tired so perhaps not the best state to see it, but i liked it much more than brighter summers day, which i liked but i think didnt quite add up to what a film of that magnitude and sprawl should do. the measuredness is less dominant. it was a bit like an understated hong kong movie, with interesting themes about migration, nationality, work, careers, existential concerns. cool to see HHH in there too. i find his and HHHs work a bit too delicate at times, a bit too precious, or just a little too interested in making everything just so, but its as good as terrorizers. now i just need to finally see yi yi.

obv, its about modernisation too, though for all the antonioni comparisons, which do fit, i think taipei story is a warmer work, less cold and detached, though about some of the same themes. watching it also made me think that yeah if ABSD gets a criterion release, great, but just because a film is an epic event, it doesnt necessarily mean its the directors best film, and it woudl be a shame if taipei story remained unseen, while harder to watch films like summer can be seen

comin out

party at my house

in March

https://www.criterion.com/films/28596-a-brighter-summer-day

woo!

a brighter summer day - pretty fantastic

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3960-10-things-i-learned-a-brighter-summer-day

Got it at home. Anyone wanna offer their experience?

David Bordwell breaks it down

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2016/06/16/a-brighter-summer-day-yang-and-his-gangs/

caught taipei story during a retro a few years ago and loved it. man, really wish criterion would put that one out as well... only copies I've been able to find online have been mega compressed and sourced from a poor copy to being with. unwatchable T__T

Taipei Story on Filmstuck.

London folks, Close Up is showing Yi-Yi, A Brighter Summer Day and Taipei Story (!) over the next couple of weeks.

https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2018/edward-yang/

loved Taipei Story, captures the sense of overwhelming urban ennui with so much tact, empathy and humour. honestly the goat.

I watched and loved Taipei Story[ on Filmstruck in March

holy shit thank you devvvine

you're welcome, understand posting it at 20 to midnight maybe not the best way to get uk'ers attention but was hoping it would be great news for someone else as well!

Yeah I got it in the second World Cinema Foundation box. The scene where the architect muses on how he doesn't even care anymore whether any of the buildings around him were designed by him, because everything has to look the same - that felt very much like what my friends who're architects say now.

passed by Close-up yesterday and Taipei story was sold out but I'll try and see it next Monday.

This would've been tremendously exciting if they were 35mm prints

saw A Brighter Summer Day, it was really something. wonder if Taipei Story is going to become available on the Criterion Channel

taipei story is depressing as fuck, with one disturbingly ebullient sequence that makes the rest all the bleaker. i loved it.

I saw Taipei Story on MUBI two years ago.

saw Yi Yi again recently after almost 20 years. I liked everything about it except the instrumental music that opened the film (fortunately featured only in the first 5 minutes). I remember in 2000 liking its sentimentality, but viewing it again there are also a lot more scenes of strife and general unhappiness than I had remembered

pretty incredible season at close up in london next month feat yang, hou and tsai

https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2019/taipei-stories/

holy shit!

Would happily spend all of June watching that.

Just watched Stray Dogs, it really does away with any kind of continuity in the story, doesn't it? I was confused by one of the main characters being played by three different women

I loved it

sorry, would have been better to post this in the Tsai thread

Every thread can do with a bit of raving over Stray Dogs. Such a great film.

Awesome season I will definitely get round to a couple of these

gonna try and be at as much as i can afford

So jealous of that London exhibition. Watched Goodbye Dragon Inn last night; gorgeous. Still haunted by the TML Stray Dogs exhibition/installation I saw in Guangzhou that I posted about in the Tsai thread:

http://en.cafa.com.cn/tsai-ming-liangs-stray-dogs-to-be-presented-at-times-museum-in-guangzhou.html

Will book "A Brighter Summer Day" tonight

that day, on the beach - summed up in the line "time is overwhelming", layer upon layer of recollection, only made denser by an astonishing use of sound. maybe his angriest film? second half especially defined by seething contempt for the amorality of the rising capitalist class and the generation that created them.

greatest to ever do it

Watched A Brighter Summer Day on Criterion Channel — spread out my viewing over a few days, which I almost think is better because it let the story and characters sink in a little more. I thought it was great. Beautifully made, first of all, it completely immerses you in that particular time and place. The length gives him time to limn details and settings, I started to feel like I could form a map of the neighborhoods in my head. Like Amarcord or My Life as a Dog, it lays some universal coming-of-age themes over a very particular context. But it's less sentimental or forgiving than either of those, these are characters unmoored from their home, in perpetual states of grievance of one kind or another, and living under an inflexible authoritarianism that makes itself felt in small ways and then large ones. I've seen it compared to Rebel Without a Cause, but West Side Story was the first obvious reference that sprang to mind for me. And then by extension obv Romeo and Juliet, there's definitely a Shakespearean arc to the whole thing. Terrific performances. Quite a film.

Yi Yi is the only other one of his I've seen, definitely want to see Taipei Story.

I've seen all but his first two features, and Mahjong is the only one which was disappointing.

Yi Yi is the only other one of his I've seen, definitely want to see Taipei Story.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra),

I suspect you'll have the same response. Taipei Story boasts an even better sense of geography.

this guy's getting a retro at my local next month. very excited! haven't seen any of his films.

sorry, this month.

nice. i just watched Taipei Story, which was a shade below Yi Yi and A Brighter Summers Day but still pretty great

I was saying in the Sight and Sound thread that his masterpiece is A Confucian Confusion. Wouldn't recommend Mahjong.

I saw Brighter Summer Day at a showing where a (no doubt neurodivergent) man kept laughing uproariously at all the most inappropriate, saddest parts. Bit of a difficult situation, I obviously didn't say anything, guy should be allowed to see a movie w/o getting hassled, but I won't say it didn't affect my enjoyment.

My screening of Brighter Summer Day at that Close-up season (talked about upthread) was as perfect an afternoon at a cinema as you could get.

caught the mahjong restoration at the lincoln center retrospective, it's good if minor, dunno why all the hate.

Love hearing the reports of the Yang screenings selling out

Bfi retro. Got to see mahjong.

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=edward-yang

Has anyone seen the new Criterion Yi Yi 4k? Wondering how it compares. As is always the case, the two reviews I could find were totally at odds. One said the improvement over the Criterion Blu-ray was minimal, the other one said the new transfer makes the Blu-ray look like shit, or some such hyperbole.

If the Blu-ray looks like this trailer Janus uploaded, it should be a big improvement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxgrzNFwyqY

(However....I'm told the French 4K from Carlotta has a better encode. But you need to add English subtitles.)

Also Morbs is crazy, Yang's pre-Yi Yi work is epochal, as great if not better. I hope he came around to them later on.

Is the trailer itself in 4k? Anyway, it's hard to tell from that. It never looked *bad* on blu, but I think they have given it a new color correction or something, too. So even if doesn't look better it supposedly looks a little different, which makes it hard to do an A/B comparison. It's relatively infrequent to have a 4K restoration look worse than the blu, but there are more than a few that don't look much better. Supposedly the new transfer is what is streaming on Criterion now, but again, it never looked bad, so it's hard to know from memory if it looks better.

1080 but it's the same 4K restoration. The grain texture alone is visibly better even when crushed down to 1080.

spotted a korean vhs copy in the wild once. that’s the best version.

Really want to catch the restored Yi Yi

this thread had me eyeing up the 4K disc this morning tho i'm not usually a "slight improvements in tech" nerd

Hence my query. Is the improvement "slight" or more noticeable than that? Sometimes the 4k restoration is enough, sometimes the actual 4k release is what you want. "Yi Yi" never struck me as a film in need of "restoration" in the first place, which is why I'm curious.