Over the weekend news services reported the death of Taiwanese director Edward Yang. He was 59 and had been suffering from colon cancer for several years. Best known for the lengthy masterworks A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and A One And A Two (2000), Yang spent the last few years working on an animated feature film in collaboration with Jackie Chan. Self-described as having been the initial leader of the Taiwanese new wave in the early/mid 1980s, along with actor-director Hou Hsiao-Hsien and writer Wu Nien-Jen, Yang rarely matched Hou's rate of output, which may explain why his name now commands less recognition. While Hou's films - and those of Tsai Ming-Liang - attract regular retrospectives, little of Yang's work is in any kind of wide circulation.Like Hou, Yang was consistently concerned with the big picture of Taiwanese history and society. His themes included the question of Taiwan's potential reunion with China in A Brighter Summer Day, the suitability of traditional cultural values in late twentieth century Asia in A Confucian Confusion (1994), and a general sense of the implications of westernisation (Yang studied and worked as a computer programmer in the US in the 1970s, and was living in Los Angeles at the time of his death). But his last film, A One And A Two, differed from his earlier work in its straightforward, contemplative portrayal of the emotional conflicts within a single extended family. An ambitious attempt to distill fifty years of life experience into a single scenario, A One And A Two is, to my mind, the greatest, wisest exploration of modern urban existence in contemporary cinema. Other mooted films in recent years included an expensive drama set in Taiwan during the Second World War and one about a boy travelling the world with just a credit card and a cellphone.
Yang credited British critics and the London Film Festival as the first to recognise the Taiwanese new wave, and the ICA has shown sustained interest in Yang (with further screenings of A One And A Two scheduled this month). Yet here, as just about everywhere, most of his work is simply unavailable. Perhaps Yang's death will provide sufficient incentive for someone to finally make his films widely available as a kind of belated tribute.
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