This month brings us an Edward Yang retrospective at the
Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, and with much excitement I attended the first screening this past weekend:
That Day, on the Beach.
Yang actually attended USC film school, briefly, before dropping out (I think after only one semester), citing USC as being too much of a Hollywood-centric film school. He went to work in computers, then went back to Taiwan, met up with Hou Hsiao Hsien, and began changing the world.
Structurally
That Day, on the Beach moves like the cycles of the tide, the narrative skillfully folding back on itself over and over again, pulling and pushing us at its whim -- it's a great feeling. And yet, overall, the movie is actually pretty rough -- like a sketch, almost. It is long, meandering, imperfect, and lacks the restraint that I've come to expect from the Taiwanese New Wavers -- little about this movie is subtle.
But the fact that it's so rough makes it all the more inspiring to see.
Watching this film is like watching a future master's humble beginnings, struggling with the language to communicate what it is he wants to express. He is overly ambitious, and too conscious of his art. And yet, all of Yang's thematic, stylistic, and formal elements are in place, albeit in very rough form. It is incredible to think that over the next twenty years he would refine and strengthen his craft to eventually make a film that so many people have told me has changed their lives:
Yi Yi
"If you want to make films, don't watch films, watch life" - Edward YangChris
Labels: Edward Yang, That Day on the Beach, Yi Yi
